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Not to be outdone, Nature Magazine rejects data, publishes opinion
Barely a fortnight has passed since Science Magazine published the outcomes of a hoax perpetrated by one of their reporters, John Bohannon. Not surprisingly, the news article was widely criticized, not...
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The Achilles’ heel of open access mandates
Luckily, there are many roads to open access to publicly funded research. Currently, none of them are really sustainable by themselves, but in cooperation, they keep pushing for more open access and...
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Citation inflation and incompetent scientists
The other day I was alerted to an interesting evaluation of international citation data. The author, Curt Rice, mentions a particular aspect of the data: In 2000, 25% of Norwegian articles remained...
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In support of subscripton cancellations
The recent call for a GlamMag boycott by Nobel laureate Randy Shekman made a lot of headlines, but will likely have no effect whatsoever. For one, the call for boycott isn’t even close in scale to “the...
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How scientific are scientists, really?
In what area of scholarship are repeated replications of always the same experiment every time published and then received with surprise, only to immediately be completely ignored until the next study?...
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What is the difference between text, data and code?
tl;dr: So far, I can’t see any principal difference between our three kinds of intellectual output: software, data and texts. I admit I’m somewhat surprised that there appears to be a need to write...
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Even the most thorough peer-review at the ‘best’ journals not up to snuff?
Talk about egg on face! Nature “the world’s best science” Magazine sets out to publish back-to-back papers on – of all topics – stem cell science. The same field that brought Science Magazine Who-Suk...
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FIRST: the Research Works Act all over again
Do you remember the RWA? It was a no-brainer already back then that the 40k that Elsevier spent was well-invested: for months, Open Access activists were busy derailing this legislation, leading a...
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Conflicts of interest even for ‘good’ scholarly publishers
Thinking more generally about the “Recursive Fury” debacle, something struck me as somewhat of an eye opener: the lack of support for the authors by Frontiers and the demonstrative support by their...
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Your university is definitely paying too much for journals
There is an interesting study out in the journal PNAS: “Evaluating big deal journal bundles“. The study details the disparity in negotiation skills between different US institutions when haggling with...
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Are we paying US$3000 per article just for paywalls?
This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35%...
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How Nature Magazine consistently prefers anecdote over data
Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as Nature or Science. After all, in this...
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How important is the Impact Factor?
I recently was sent a report from a university-wide working group on the publishing habits within the Freie Universität Berlin. I don’t think this document is available online, but I think I’m not...
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In which scientists behave like rats in a Skinner box
Skinner used the term “schedules of reinforcement” to describe broad categories of reward patterns which come to reliably control the behavior of his experimental animals. For instance, when he...
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Booming university administrations
This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let...
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Publishers, stop torturing your reviewers!
UPDATE, 10-02-2015: After a hint from a user at twitter, I now know that I can easily open a PDF document in several windows, one for text, one for legends and one for figures. Figures and legends...
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Nature reviewers endorse hype
In a paper published in Nature Neuroscience now over a year ago, the authors claimed to have found a very surprising feature, which was long thought to be a bug. In my blog post covering the hype in...
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What should a modern scientific infrastructure look like?
For ages I have been planning to collect some of the main aspects I would like to see improved in an upgrade to the disaster we so euphemistically call an academic publishing system. In this post I’ll...
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A study justifying waste of tax-funds?
Open Access (OA) pioneer and OA journal eLife founding member and sponsor, the Max Planck Society just released a white paper (PDF) analyzing open access costs in various countries and institutions and...
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Is this supposed to be the best Elsevier can muster?
Until today, I was quite proud of myself for not caving in to SIWOTI syndrome like Mike Taylor did. And then I read his post and caved in as well. What gets us so riled up is Elsevier’s latest in a...
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