What should we want from publishers?
Rene Bekkers,
Last week I attended a conference organized by the university libraries in the Netherlands with the straightforward title: “What…
Last week I attended a conference organized by the university libraries in the Netherlands with the straightforward title: “What…
Note: PLOS is delighted to once again partner with the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. The awards…
tl;dr: Evidence suggests that the prestige signal in our current journals is noisy, expensive and flags unreliable science. As…
A recent OASPA guest post reminded me of something I have been wondering about for several years now. What sinister time travel…
I’m late to this party, but I want to say a few things about the recently announced €9,500 article-processing charge (APC) that…
This Monday and Tuesday, I was at the R2R (Researcher to Reader) conference at BMA House in London. It’s the first time I’ve…
A recent article describes a practice unknown to me. Some authors submit papers for review, get positive reviews, then withdraw…
Door Marc van…
The New England journal of Medicine has come out strongly against Open Access. Apparently, this journal does not seem to value…
Photo credit: ‘Unlock’, Thomas Ulrich, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 ScienceOpen…
Photo credit: ‘Unlock’, Thomas Ulrich, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 ScienceOpen…
A perenial source of controversy. The post Research Metrics: Journal Impact Factor appeared first on Advanced Science News.
What exactly is Open Science? Its lack of an appropriate common definition has meant Open Science can be a variety of things; a…
The Society for Neuroscience recently posted a short guide for publishing papers for early career researchers. It makes me…
Open Science is a strange concept. Depending on who you speak to, it can be a set of scientific practices, a social justice…
Jalees Rehman, University of Illinois at…
It may take time for a tiny step forward to show its worth.ellissharp/Shutterstock.comJalees Rehman, University of Illinois at…
In a recent survey of over 1,500 scientists, more than 70 percent of them reported having been unable to reproduce other…
By: Jalees Rehman, University of Illinois at…
There has been an explosion in innovation and experimentation in peer review in the last five years. While the ideal of peer…
Por Jon Tennant, Daniel Graziotin e Sarah…
Today marks the beginning of Peer Review Week 2017. Here on the Impact Blog, we’ll be featuring posts covering a variety of…
Below, I’ve taken the liberty to “peer-review” recent proposals to ‘flip’ subscription journals to open…
Marcus Munafo, Professor of Biological Psychology, University of…
Starting this year, I will stop traveling to any speaking engagements on open science (or, more generally, infrastructure reform…
Note: This is the third post in a mini-series of blog posts…
One of Bradley Voytek’s 99 problems is strange journal demands:Major journal said we can’t cite biorxiv papers; instead must…
A recurrent topic among faculty and librarians interested in infrastructure reform is the question of whose turn it is to make…
According to a recent survey, 74% of academic librarians in the US have regular collection development responsibilities.
So Reddit is pretty awesome for science communication, in my experience. It’s an enormous network of potential audiences to…
Impact Factors, Peer Review, and Elitism in Science and What We Can Do About It By: Andrew Vigotsky Introduction There are a…
This was originally posted here. This interview presents the perspectives of an early-career researcher who conducts research…
“an academic career, in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts, creates a danger of…
In her recent editorial on Sci-Hub (an initiative I support), editor-in-chief of Science Magazine Marcia McNutt wrote: For…
Around 2005, German politicians decided on a plan to circumvent a newly created amendment to the German constitution that…
Due to ongoing discussions on various (social) media, this is a mash-up of several previous posts on the strategy of ‘flipping…
Source: http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science NeurobonkersMeet the Robin Hood of…
How one researcher created a pirate bay for science more powerful than even libraries at top universities.Read More
What do these two memes have in common? While they may have more than one thing in common, the point important for now is that…
Like Stephen Curry, we at SV-POW! are sick of impact factors. That’s not news. Everyone now knows what a total disaster they are…
tl;dr: Data from thousands of non-retracted articles indicate that experiments published in higher-ranking journals are less…
tl;dr: It is a waste to spend more than the equivalent of US$100 in tax funds on a scholarly article. Collectively, the world’s…
In Germany, the constitution guarantees academic freedom in article 5 as a basic civil right. The main German funder, the…
Over the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about so-called “predatory publishers”, i.e., those corporations which…
Image credit: Web analytics framework by James Royal-Lawson<,/a> (CC BY-SA 2.0) In recent years, it has become popular to bash bi…
Rather than expecting people to stop utilizing metrics altogether, we would be better off focusing on making sure the metrics…
Science has infected itself (voluntarily!) with a life-threatening parasite. It has given away its crown jewels, the…
OK, bear with me on this one. It’s a bit of a thought dump, but it would be interesting to see what people think. You can’t go…
Here we go again.I like to work hard and be productive. But I’m stunned by this article by Eleftherios Diamandis in a careers…
I spent much of yesterday morning at the launch meeting of HEFCE’s new report on the use of metrics, The Metric Tide: Report of…
Mike LaCour, author of a paper on canvassing that was later retractedAbout two weeks ago, news broke that Michael LaCour, the…
I’ve been working on a series of timelines for the PASTEUR4OA Project – these will form part of a collection of advocacy papers.
As in many departments, our graduate students and post-docs here in the Penn State Anthropology Department hold weekly 'journal…
Research must be reliable and publication is part of our quality control system. Scientific articles get reviewed by peers and…
A little step sideways from small-angle scattering for this week’s post. As you are probably aware by now, I sometimes use the…
Last night, I did a Twitter interview with Open Access Nigeria (@OpenAccessNG). To make it easy to follow in real time, I…
A Nature News piece is out today featuring comments from me, about how high retraction rates correlate with impact factors in…
Another prominent opinion piece is crying again that there is too much low-quality research.This annoys me so much. It presumes …
So this scattering of numbers really represents how good a researcher I am?In order to improve something, we need to be able to…
Randy Schekman prangert an, dass Wissenschaftler darauf achten, wo sie ihre Ergebnisse publizieren. Ein Kommentar.
Contraception? Evil. Kids getting their hands on Daddy’s guns and blowing holes in each other? The price of Freedom. U.S.A.!
Nature: Elsevier opens its papers to text-mining. “Academics: prepare your computers for text-mining. Publishing giant Elsevier…
La semaine passée avait lieu la cérémonie de remise des prix Nobel 2013. Mais, l’évènement qui aura le plus été discuté par les…
N.B. This post contains updates between [] Over the past few months I have come across many articles and posts highlighting the…
One of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), the Q
From Meg: This info-comic on why, really, you weren’t bitten by a brown recluse spider is entertaining. This reminded me of…
From Meg: This info-comic on why, really, you weren’t bitten by a brown recluse spider is entertaining. This reminded me of…
(Image: North Carolina State University) Editor’s Note: A new report from the journal Science indicates that there are serious…
After a series of tweets and a couple of Facebook posts about the problems of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), I was approached…
One of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), the Q
| Nicolai Foss | Here is an interesting popular piece from The Atlantic about, among other things, a Brazilian citation cartel.
Confession 1: No, I do not have publications in Cell, Science, or Nature. In fact, I’ve never submitted to any of those journals.
A couple of years ago we ran a freelancer’s piece in which a non-scientist collected years of data on a natural phenomenon and…
The broken incentive structure in science can be blamed for much of the alarming trends of the past decades, such as the…
I got into a bit of an argument with Björn Brembs on twitter last week because of a statement I made in support of professional…
Björn Brembs talks about the problems with impact factors, and the problems with getting a paper published that discusses…
Can anybody explain (without falling into ridicule) why, simultaneously: (Publishers/ opportunistic careerists) have good…
“We need to change incentives!”Ah, how many times I have heard some variation of that phrase in describing scientific…