Why should people trust the published scientific record? Imagine this hypothetical, but potentially very real, conversation with a non-academic: 1: “This research paper has been published, and therefore is scientifically valid.” 2: “But it’s paywalled, I can’t access it. How do I know it’s valid?” 1: “Because it has been peer reviewed.” 2. “Can you […]
The last iteration of this post made the assumption that ‘gold’ Open Access meant you had to pay for it. I of all people should know that this is what us English scientists call ‘pish-posh’. It turns out that in reality, around 70% of journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have […]
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 […]
So a while back, I got in a scrap with Wiley over their breach of my rights as peer reviewer for one of their journals. Essentially, what it boiled down to was a failure to communicate what referees were agreeing to upon acceptance of a peer review, and as a result breaching their personal rights […]
Staying on top of the research literature is really hard. It’s even harder because most of the time, we don’t actually know what’s in a published paper until we’ve spent the time paying to access it, and reading it. That’s right – you have to pay for access to articles to even figure out if […]
“Today, along with Stuart Lawson and Jon Tennant, I have submitted the below as a complaint to the Competition and Markets Authority, making good on the advice of Ann McKechin, MP at the BIS Inquiry into Open Access in 2013. The document is also available as a PDF.“ Yeah we did. Original post via Martin […]
For the 3-4 regular readers of this blog, you’re probably aware that a while back we published a paper with F1000Research reviewing the evidence behind the societal, economic, and academic impacts of Open Access. Today, we submitted what I like to think of as the ‘final’ version of that paper. We have taken on an […]
Metrics, metrics, everywhere. Not a day goes by in academia without some new metric being designed to measure research assessment, or a complaint about how crap another metric is. There are soooo many studies out there that look at things like how open access influences citation rates or altmetrics, or what the relationship between altmetrics and […]
Embargo periods on scientific research are now fairly commonplace. They are sanctions imposed by publishers on different versions of a research manuscript, often termed the author-accepted manuscript (AAM) or post-print, in order to delay public release of those versions. Typically at this stage, the publishers themselves have had little or no input to the process besides […]