Recently, Matt Shawkey*, an Associate Professor at the University of Gent, tweeted his opinions about citing preprints in formal research publications, stating that they should not be cited as equivalents to papers that had been peer reviewed. This led to a great deal of interesting discussion around the topic, but scattered all over various Twitter […]
A journalist approached me yesterday, and asked the question: “I’d like to know what you think about [journal/publisher] blacklists and whether you would pay for one?” I can’t reveal too much about the context just yet (see here), but it was regarding the release of a new ‘blacklist’ this month by a company called Cabell’s […]
tl,dr: We’re launching a preprint server for Paleontology, paleorXiv. Email me for submissions. Open Access is the future of publishing, one way or another. One way that different research communities are doing this is through preprints. These are research articles that are published online prior to the peer review process. The main rationale behind them […]
Oh god, not another post about Open Access. Yep, sorry, we’re going to keep talking about this stuff, because it’s something worth talking about. Recently, a new tool has come out, from the makers of OADOI and ImpactStory, that allows users to ‘jump the paywall’ and access research articles for free. It’s called Unpaywall, and […]
The other day, I wrote a post about how to make your past, present, and future research all Open Access for free in a way that is legal and compliant with publisher policies. After a quick chat with some colleagues, I’ve tried to update the infographic to make it a bit more user friendly and […]
Publishing Open Access can cost a lot of money. Some journals charge up to $6000 for a single article, called an APC or article-processing charge. While researchers themselves rarely actually have to foot these bills, as their institutes of funders pay on their behalf, this sort of ‘pay to publish’ model for Open Access creates […]
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? […]
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, […]