This article was originally posted here. While artistic reconstructions of dinosaurs preying on each other are a fantastic way of illustrating the real-life behaviours of these fantastic creatures, direct evidence of dinosaur-food interactions in the fossil record are surprisingly rare. In modern ecosystems, it’s quite easy to establish ecological interactions between predators, prey, and plants […]
ResearchGate is a platform where its users, primarily researchers, routinely engage in massive-scale copyright infringement of published works. It was announced this week and covered in a series of high profile venues, including the New York Times, Business Insider, TechCrunch, and Research Information, that the platform had acquired $52.6 million in funding from a range […]
Fervent devotees of this blog might recall the time when I got mildly frustrated with Wiley in how they handled one of the major research papers from my PhD (this beast). The tl,dr is this: Wiley messed up the proofing stage repeatedly, adding several months of delays at this stage. Wiley incorrectly delayed the publication by three […]
The Gates Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have reached a new deal regarding how Gates-funded researchers can publish Open Access with the Science series of journals. Yippeeee! Progress from both publishers and funders in implementing OA for “high quality” research (their words, not mine), can only be a good thing, right? […]
If we were to have to invent the scholarly publishing system again from scratch today, what would it look like? Our current system of publishing is basically identical to that of what it was in the 1990s, before the emergence of a vast array of internet-based technologies, loosely termed Web 2.0. A research paper is […]
Is PLOS ONE falling out of favour with Palaeontologists? By looking at a simple plot of publications through time, it would seem that the zenith of PLOS ONE has been reached after a surge in increase as it dominated the market, but is now in sharp decline. There have been a couple of such blips, […]
Open Access needs to be used more effectively to tear down barriers to research accessibility. The ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ access debate probably doesn’t make that much sense to many people. Including myself, actually. It’s not immediately clear what either term means in different contexts (e.g., data, review, research, science), or what we actually even mean […]
Yippee! Imperial College London have signed DORA, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment! This basically means that the impact factor will no longer be used for research assessment. This follows the widespread documentation of its inherent flaws its but perplexing and continued mis-use. This is HUGE. Impact factors will no longer be promoted, either directly […]
Alright, let’s do this. Research is getting a global makeover, in part thanks to the power of the internet and the tools it provides for us and in part due to a growing call for accountability (e.g. reproducibility and data provenance) in science. Global policies are popping up all over that include some aspect of […]
So Discover Mag just published an article of mine, a sort of response to a piece in Forbes calling for academics to delete their ResearchGate and Academia.edu accounts. I thought the original piece was awesome and informative, but didn’t go far enough for me, and in fact many of the problems it pointed out where […]