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 […]
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 […]
This article represents the outcome of a series of correspondence between myself and OpenCon. I am posting the full and original letter here sent to them on November 28th for the sake of transparency and honesty. I’ve provided a summary timeline here first for clarity about the series of events: Nov 03, 2018: OpenCon notifies […]
In November 2018, I was formally notified that I was banned from the OpenCon community and events, on the basis of the OpenCon anti-harassment policy as written in the OpenCon Code of Conduct. Since then, I have accepted and respected this decision. The last OpenCon I formally attended as a participant was in November 2016, […]
If you go to an average Thai island today, you find a very different “predator” to what existed 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. Instead of your average-IQ’d Australian male ‘gap yah’ backpacker, back in the age of dinosaurs there existed a group of ferocious carnivores called megaraptorans. Source: Mega-raptors were top predators […]
The topic of scholarly communication has received short shrift here for the last few years. There has been too much to say about other topics, and developments such as Plan S have been exhaustively discussed elsewhere. But I do want to call attention to an extremely valuable review by Jon Tennant and a host of […]
Source: How to forge statements about your organization’s open science culture
Source: Talking Principles, Values, Norms, Virtues, and Freedoms: A Primer on the use of terms