“… Yet closer examination showed that the trouble ran deeper. Science’s internal controls on bias were failing, and bias and error were trending in the same direction — towards the pervasive over-selection and over-reporting of false positive results …” (more)
[Daniel Sarewitz, Nature News & Comment, 9 May]
“News reached me today on Twitter that Peter Binfield, Publisher of PLoS ONE, is leaving PLoS to found a new company, Peerj.com. Peerj will be an open access publishing company with a radical new premise: publishing in a scholarly journal can cost a heck of a lot less than the extortionate fees charged by PLoS …” (more)
[Joseph Esposito, Scholarly Kitchen, 8 May]
“Logistics and institutional issues: how do you find time for it, where (if anywhere) should it go on your c.v., and how should tenure and promotion committees evaluate it? At least, this is what the audience questions were almost exclusively about when I spoke about blogging at my faculty’s ‘research retreat’ on Friday …” (more)
[Rohan Maitzen, Novel Readings, 5 May]
“I find myself in a dilemma about David Willetts’s latest pronouncement about free access on-line to publicly funded research – not unlike my dilemma about podcasts, I guess. There is certainly something in what he says: the public purse funds pricey research which then ends up being published in journals that even the richest of UK universities can barely afford to buy …” (more)
[Mary Beard, A Don's Life, 7 May]
“The motto for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is simple, elegant, and symmetrical: ‘Advancing science. Serving society’. What I love about these four words is that they convey a dual role of the association …” (more)
[Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, 7 May]
“A group of leading scholars has presented a petition to Oxford University Press calling on the renowned publisher to uphold what it describes as ‘basic scholarly standards’. The petition arose out of a letter sent to Niko Pfund, president of OUP USA, about the book Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Robert Paarlberg, professor of political science at Wellesley College, Massachusetts …” (more)
[Matthew Reisz, Times Higher Education, 7 May]
“Following the Wellcome Trust’s announcement regarding their forthcoming open-access journal, eLife and proposed policy that the results of the research they fund will need to be freely available within 6 months of first publication, there has been quite an increase in coverage of the so-called ‘Academic Spring’, in recent weeks, mainly in The Guardian …” (more)
[The Dreaded Nat, 5 May]
“New stats from the Association of American Publishers show that kids’ and young adult e-book sales grew by triple digits in February, while adult e-book sales appeared to flatten. But the AAP notes that’s partly due to the fact that so many adults are reading YA e-books like the Hunger Games trilogy …” (more)
[Laura Hazard Owen, paidContent, 4 May]
“What has been the impact of the invention of the telescope? What has been the impact of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, or the splitting of the atom? Yes, that’s right: the idea of measuring the ‘impact’ of research is back in a big way …” (more)
[Will J Grant and Paul Harris, The Conversation, 4 May]
“David Willetts, Britain’s minister for science and universities, trailed the announcements made in his speech on open access to the UK Publishers’ Association yesterday as a ‘seismic shift’. One learns to be wary of the more hyperbolic statements of government ministers but I was at least left wondering whether the earth had moved for the publishers in the room …” (more)
[Stephen Curry, Reciprocal Space, 3 May]
“Soon, we’ll all be reading UK public-funded research free of charge. That momentous change has been in the works since last March, and in December the British government explained why and how it would happen (yes, though you might not guess it from recent media reports, the UK open access shift was underway well before what the Guardian has called this year’s ‘Academic Spring’) …” (more)
[Richard Van Noorden, Nature News, 3 May]
“The British government has enlisted the help of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to figure out how to make research information more easily accessible …” (more)
[Jop de Vrieze, ScienceInsider, 2 May]
“A new study at Northwestern University shows that left-handedness is the product of cooperation and competition in evolution …” (more)
[Brandon G Withrow, Huffington Post, 2 May]
“Throwing its weight behind open access, the British government has declared it wants to make all research paid for with public money freely available online. If it succeeds, the move is likely to have significant consequences for publishers …” (more)
[Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 May]
“On April 27th, after much toing and froing, the Dutch government gave Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam permission to submit his paper on bird flu to Science. Dr Fouchier is the head of one of two groups studying how bird flu might become transmissible between people …” (more)
[Economist, 2 May]
“Ass Professor Laura Czerniewicz of the University of Cape Town recently asked about the percentage of scholarly peer-reviewed journals that are now open access. In brief, my response is ‘about 30%’ (apparently Heather Joseph from SPARC gave almost exactly the same response). This figure needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt, though …” (more)
[The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, 2 May]
“I’ve been a minor author on a few papers recently. They’re good papers (I think) and I’m glad to be associated with them. In one of them, we solved a problem that I’d always wanted to solve but my own mathematical skills weren’t up to the task …” (more)
[educationandstuff, 2 May]
“Scientists in the United Kingdom are hoping that a direct, impassioned appeal to protesters who have threatened to destroy a field trial of genetically modified wheat later this month might save their research project …” (more)
[Gretchen Vogel, ScienceInsider, 2 May]
“The spreading drone curriculum is a sign of the coming normalization of drones in American life. For all the attention given to US law enforcement’s interest in adopting drones, the biggest users turn out to be not police departments, but universities …” (more)
[Jefferson Morley, AlterNet, 2 May]
“Discussions of the peer review system generally agree that it is imperfect, even significantly flawed, but that there are no viable alternatives. Recently, the debate has shifted to the ‘racket’ that is academic publishing: how commercial publishers are getting fat on the unpaid labour of researchers only to sell, at exorbitant cost, the product back to the author – not to mention reserving all copyright …” (more)
[Srila Roy, Times Higher Education, 26 April]
