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 […]
It’s not news that minorities are severely underrepresented in both science and science education. Efforts to increase diversity typically fall into two broad classes: some motivated by a concern for equity and social justice, and others motivated by a concern for increasing the pool of scientists that are prepared to address contemporary needs in science […]
On January 11, 2020, OpenCon responded to parts of my blog post that I posted on January 4. Here, I provide the full, unedited correspondence, including my responses to all comments. Dear all, Please see my inline responses in bold to each of your comments (plain format) below. [OpenCon]: It is regrettable that you have […]