So, 2020 has been off to an interesting start. The “OpenCon saga” pretty much crippled me professionally. I have spent the last 5 months in isolation mode to recover physically and emotionally from that. Thankfully, while this rather vicious and intentional attempt to harm me was quite successful, it also provided me with a brilliant […]
Finally, a project that has been in the works for around 2 years is now online! What started just from a simple idea exploded into this project, and I am grateful to have worked with some beautiful minds on crafting this together. Here it is, “A tale of two ‘opens’: intersections between Free and Open […]
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 […]
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 […]
Today, Tony Ross-Hellauer and I have a new preprint shared on SocArXiv. It’s about the limits to our understanding of peer review. Rather than simply being another meta-analysis of all of the things we do have evidence for about peer review, we tried to think of it a different way: what are all the things […]
A new article in the Washington Post is out now, co-written by Paul Thacker and I. It is based off one of the ‘myths’ from our latest research paper. Here’s a snippet, enjoy! In July, India’s government dismissed a research paper finding that the country’s economic growth had been overestimated, saying the paper had not […]
SOURCE Our present publishing system is not working well. The growth of Open Access (OA) has been slow, resisted by many publishers at the expense of the public purse. Researchers have outsourced our evaluation system to this dysfunctional industry, which continuously infringes basic academic freedoms and human rights. Plan S is the latest attempt to […]
Whenever a journalist emails me asking for quotes on a piece, usually only a few of them make it into the final article. This is perfectly normal. However, for the sake of full context and transparency, I feel it is good practice to share the complete comments I made. Others may find them useful, and […]
Welcome to your usual weekly roundup of vaguely interesting stuff that happened in the last week! Enjoy, and let me know if I’ve missed anything out. Previous week. Palaeontology news Campbell et al: New insights into chasmosaurine (Dinosauria: Ceratopsidae) skulls from the Upper Cretaceous (Campanian) of Alberta, and an update on the distribution of accessory frill fenestrae […]