Recurring Dream — Organizations with Subscriptions Are More Valuable
Even Silicon Valley is finding that recurring revenues (aka, subscriptions) lead to more valuable businesses, while helping smaller companies thrive.
Book Review: “Technically Wrong,” by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
A new book explores how biases and broken systems get built into technology products and platforms.
Guest Post: When Authors Get Caught in the Predatory (Illegitimate Publishing) Net
Are we losing good articles to predatory journals, with little recourse for unsuspecting authors? Or are authors becoming increasingly complicit and symbiotic in their relationships with illegitimate publishing entities with disregard for the greater good? Maybe it’s both. Today’s guest post explores what can happen when an author accidentally falls into the predatory journal rabbit hole.
Trust Falls — Are We In a New Phase of Corporate Research?
Conflicts of interest and corporate-funded research have expanded, with journals increasingly used by mega-corporations to advance their initiatives. What will this mean for scholarly publishing?
Guest Post: Charles Oppenheim Asks How Big a Problem Are Articles that Should Be OA but End Up Behind Paywalls
In recent years, observers have noticed that articles for which an APC has been paid are not always made freely available. How pervasive is this problem? A Scholarly Kitchen reader investigates.
Journals and Politicians — A Marriage for Mutual Benefit? Or a Temporary Alignment of Interests?
President Obama has published three articles in six months in three of the world’s most prestigious scholarly journals. Is it appropriate? With these precedents, what happens when the politics of the President conflicts with the politics of science?
Book Review — The Traps of Big Data Revealed in "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O’Neil
The new book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” calls out many worrying trends in the application of big data, with particularly salient entries on higher education rankings, for-profit universities, the justice system, insurance, and employment.
Wellcome Money — Involvement with F1000 Opens Door on Sketchy Peer Review, COIs, and Spending Decisions
With a new partnership with F1000, Wellcome embraces sketchy peer review standards, deep conflicts of interest, and financial support of a private, commercial enterprise. Worse, the entire thing seems redundant, avoidable, and unnecessary.
Vitamins, Painkillers, and the Entrepreneurial Library
What does it mean for libraries to be competitive and “entrepreneurial”? And is the very concept a Trojan horse for neoliberalism? Does it matter?
Loaded Dice — The New Research Conundrums Posed by Mechanical Turk
The use of Mechanical Turk in research may generate misleading data and false information. Do we need to guard against such mechanical methodologies?
Seeing Beyond Transparency — Do Disclosure Rules Blunt the Need for Actual Ethics?
The pursuit of transparency and use of disclosures in place of actual ethics may be creating a culture of accommodation rather than one fostering independence. Where does transparency belong?
One Down, One to Go: Edwin Mellen Press Blinks One Eye
Edwin Mellen Press drops one of its suits, but does so in a bizarre way, raising more questions.
The (Post) Dating Game — Assembling the Evidence
Testing the hypothesis that editors are manipulating publication dates to increase their journal’s Impact Factor.
Does Post-Dating Publication Help Journal Impact Factors?
Publishing an article online and then post-dating its “official” publication several months later may be used to game a journal’s impact factor, a scientist claims.
Branding, Plausible Deniability, and the New York Times
Publishing materials under a trusted brand, then attempting to disavow that content when complaints arise about bias and professionalism doesn’t reflect well on the New York Times, paper or corporation. Having a portfolio of products requires responsible management of the brand constellation. Hiding out in the thicket of brands is craven.