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 […]
This is adapted from our “recent” paper in F1000 Research, entitled “A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review.” Due to its rather monstrous length, I’ll be posting chunks of the text here in sequence over the next few weeks/months/years now apparently, to help disseminate it in more easily digestible bites. Enjoy! This […]
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? […]
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 […]
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 […]
This was originally posted here. This interview presents the perspectives of an early-career researcher who conducts research, publishes papers, attends academic conferences as part of his PhD, travels to different parts of the world to help educate researchers about open research and science policy, blogs actively, serves as a peer reviewer, and makes time for […]
This was originally posted at: http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/earthbound/plotting_for_the_earth_sciences So a cool paper came out a while back about using plots when attempting to construct stories as a mode of communicating in Earth Science. I cannot, as always, emphasise my frustration when someone writes an article that’s supposed to be broadly educational, and sticks it behind a paywall. In […]
This was initially posted at: http://www.nature.com/spoton/2013/04/social-media-for-science-outreach-a-case-study-that-social-media-thang/ as part of a series of case studies exploring how academics use social media. Jon began university life as a geologist, following this with a treacherous leap into the life sciences with a course in biodiversity and taxonomy. Now undertaking a PhD in tetrapod biodiversity and extinction at Imperial College London, […]
This is an updated post from one I published a while back on my old blog at: http://wp.me/p22pR3-2F – as I’ve developed as a scientist, I thought it would be good to share these thoughts in the emergence of new information and experiences. The comments on the older post are worth a quick read. This was originally […]
This was originally posted at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/?p=549 Welcome to Day 3 of the EGU Annual Meeting. Do check the Geology for Global Development page too for some cracking updates on the sessions, particularly on the more ‘applied’ side of the geosciences, by Rosalie Testovin. This post is a quick break-down of some cool science from the morning […]