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Open Access and the incentives for embezzlement
Wikipedia defines ‘embezzlement‘ as “the act of withholding assets for the purpose of conversion of such assets”. Google defines it as “misappropriation of funds placed in one’s trust”: If one takes...
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What if Greta Thunberg took a Shell-sponsored professorship?
Or let’s think a a few sizes smaller and imagine a renowned pulmonologist taking the, say, “Marlboro Endowed Chair” in the Mayo Clinic’s Pulmonary Medicine Division, sponsored by Philip Morris. What...
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How about paying extra for peer-review?
There are those who demand journal peer-review be paid extra on top of academic salaries. Let’s have a look at the financials of that proposal. The article linked above confirms common rates of...
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Should you trust Elsevier?
Data broker RELX is represented on Twitter by their Chief Communications Officer Paul Abrahams. Due to RELX subsidiary Elsevier being one of the largest publishers of academic journals, Dr. Abrahams...
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The beginning of the end for academic publishers?
On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On...
View ArticleIs this Smits’ tripleC moment?
Jeffrey “predatory journals” Beall famously catapulted himself out of any serious debate with an article in the journal TripleC, entitled “The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access“. In...
View ArticleNo Evilsevier DEAL!
No matter how well-intended (and we all know to which place the road leads that is paved with good intentions!), transformative agreements (such as DEAL in Germany) are generally the wrong tool at the...
View ArticleGerman funder DFG: Why the sudden inconsistency?
The DFG is a very progressive and modern funding agency. More than two years ago, the main German science funding agency signed the “Declaration on Research Assessment” DORA. The first point of this...
View ArticleScholarly societies: like a cat chasing the laser dot
You may have seen a neutered version of this post over at the LSE blog. This post below, however, puts the tiger in the tank, as it was enhanced by CatGPT: Maybe scholarly societies have taken “the...
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How reliable is the scholarly literature?
A few years ago, I came across a cartoon that seemed to capture a particular aspect of scholarly journal publishing quite well: The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit...
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