“Some clever and thoughtful people at the American Society for Cell Biology have done us all a favor by putting in writing something that is so good and so true that I’m delighted by it. The Journal Impact Factor has gone from being a rough measure of relative journal significance to being the measure of researchers, something it was never designed for …” (more)
[Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed, 21 May]
“Just thought I would highlight the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. It’s been a long day and I’m quite tired, so I don’t want to say too much …” (more)
[To the left of centre, 18 May]
“Having first documented the large-scale demise of the impact factor as a predictor of quality research, George Lozano and team examined whether this pattern also applies to the handful of elite journals …” (more)
[Impact of Social Sciences, 16 May]
“Here’s an interesting question to ask any scientist: If you were to receive no more research funding, and just focus on writing up the data you have, how long would it take? The answer tends to go up with seniority, but a typical answer is 3 to 5 years …” (more)
[BishopBlog, 9 May]
“I declare that the serials crisis, the event that gave birth to the open-access movement, is over. I base my declaration on my observations as an academic librarian and on the scholarly literature …” (more)
[Scholarly Open Access, 7 May]
“Two recent retractions on Retraction Watch merit more than a passing mention, because they demonstrate, yet again, the wildly different and completely contradictory reactions of individuals and journals to data that turn out to be problematic …” (more)
[Ferniglab's Blog, 4 May]
“On April, 8, I was quoted in a New York Times article about questionable open-access publishers and questionable conferences. Since that day I’ve been happy to receive many emails, some with suggestions about possible publishers and standalone journals to add to my lists …” (more)
[Scholarly Open Access, 30 April]
“Scientists beware: There is a new scholarly publishing-related scheme that aims to separate you from your money. I recently blogged about several emerging, web-based companies that promise to promote individual scholarly articles for a fee …” (more)
[Scholarly Open Access, 19 April]
“The traditional peer-review process is not a 100% reliable filter, argues journal editor Rolf Zwaan. It is foolish to view the published result as the only thing that counts simply because it was published …” (more)
[Impact of Social Sciences, 19 April]
“The rapid change in science communication is leading to multithreaded discussions on peer review (just one example of many, Philip Moriarty’s recent posting at the IOP) and models for journals …” (more)
[Ferniglab's Blog, 14 April]
“Scholars continue to get more comfortable with e-only journals, and they increasingly get access to the material they want via digital channels, including Internet search engines as well as more specific discovery tools provided by academic libraries …” (more)
[Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 April]
“Well, I had not planned a blogpost this morning, but I am goaded to do so by growing frustration as I attempted to read a review that was published in Trends in Neurosciences …” (more)
[BishopBlog, 5 April]
“Scientific publishing, meet cybercrime. Two reputable European science journals have fallen prey to identity theft by criminals who have created counterfeit journal websites …” (more)
[Declan Butler, Nature News & Comment, 27 March]
“Criticism continues to mount against high impact factor journals with a new study suggesting a preference for publishing front-page, ‘sexy’ science has been at the expense of methodological rigour …” (more)
[Dorothy Bishop, Impact of Social Sciences, 15 March]
“Here’s a paradox: Most scientists would give their eye teeth to get a paper in a high impact journal, such as Nature, Science, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Yet these journals have had a bad press lately …” (more)
[BishopBlog, 10 March]
“Universities are research and teaching institutions, and at the core of research lies the ability of the researcher to discover what is and what is not known about an area. This in effect involves as comprehensive review of the literature as possible …” (more)
[Brian M Lucey, 7 March]
“Deputy Peter Mathews asked the Minister for Education and Skills if he will provide in tabular form information regarding (details supplied); and if he will make a statement on the matter …” (more)
[Dáil Éireann Written Answers, 5 March]
“A recent editorial in Journal of Chemical Education appeared to be a pre-emptive strike at those in favour of maintaining a print edition of the Journal, and one assumes that web-only will be encouraged in future years …” (more)
[Michael Seery, Is this going to be on the exam?, 20 February]
“‘Publish or perish’ has been the rule in academic economics since forever, but there is a widespread perception that publishing in the best journals has become harder and much slower. This column presents new evidence confirming the perception …” (more)
[David Card and Stefano DellaVigna, vox, 21 January]
“What if the only measurement of energy costs you followed was the price of oil, while everyone was shifting to cheaper and more efficient alternatives? …” (more)
[Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 8 January]
