Yesterday was perhaps one of the most challenging days of my life so far. As many of you know, my life has been wracked by a series of quite devastating challenges the last few months, which I have documented on this blog. The motivations and reasons for these events still largely remain unclear to me […]
Very happy that our article, Ten Hot Topics around Scholarly Publishing, was by FAR the most popular article published in Publications in 2019. Congratulations, and thanks, to all co-authors for helping to produce such a useful piece of work! The screenshot below is from the annual report from the journal. I hope it continues to […]
For the last decade or so, I have dedicated virtually all of my life to a number of different individuals, causes, or organisations. I always placed the needs of others before my own, even when I knew it was bad for me. I was in almost back-to-back long-term relationships, forming strong emotional attachments with people […]
Just finished a first-draft on a new paper, “Standardising Peer Review in Paleontology journals.” Full project guidelines are available here. Feedback at this stage very much welcomed, as I have undoubtedly missed quite a bit! Here’s the introduction: “However ill-defined it may be, the peer-review process is still the gold standard that will continue to […]
Sci-Hub is a website that currently hosts around 80 million research articles. While many of these have been gained and are hosted illicitly, there is no doubt that it serves a public good by equalising access to scholarly knowledge that was often inaccessible to the majority of people on this planet. Most people will generally […]
A nice start to the week, my first self-published book is now available on Amazon – The [R]evolution of Open Science! Epic cover design courtesy of Elena Frigerio. Kindle version and paperback version. This book is an evolutionary anthology all of the texts I have written or contributed to in a significant way over the […]
Tl,dr: OpenCon have partially responded to my GDPR request. They still refuse to answer questions regarding the timing and motivations for their public statement, which continues to cause damage today. On January 17, OpenCon made a preliminary response to my GDPR request. The full text of this response is provided below, as I continue to […]
Researchers today are caught like fish in a net of slow, overpriced, unethical and dysfunctional publishing practices. Trapped by academic employment rules, funding arrangements and copyright laws, we have long tried unsuccessfully to wrest control of scholarship from corporate publishers. The fight dates back to at least the 1980s, when physicists started circulating their findings […]
Indeed, when we as researchers first look at a paper, we look at where it was published, who are the authors and where are they from, and some metrics like downloads, reads, and of course, citations. Most of this information is superficial, contributing no real useful information to understanding the research. Even citations, as used […]
The logic that animates both cancel culture and broken windows is fundamentally shallow and also fundamentally fear-based. It acts on the assumption that something that’s not necessarily harmful in and of itself but that somehow has the flavor of harmfulness — be it an edgy tweet or some tipsy neighbors hanging out on the stoop […]