Only when the bulk of research comes with funds to pay author-side fees will publishers feel comfortable moving to new open business models. But who should be responsible for paying these new author-side fees? Stuart Shieber argues that those that fund research should be held responsible for funding its dissemination. As funders of research, universities themselves should be looking to organise […]
Category: Academic Publishing
Impact Round-Up 7th June: Prometheus gagged, Einstein’s peer review, and turning repositories into journals.
Managing Editor Sierra Williams presents a round-up of popular stories from around the web on higher education, academic impact, and trends in scholarly communication. This week the Times Higher Education reported on a stand-off between academic editorial board and commercial publisher. The journal Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation appears to have faced delays and unexplained edits from its publisher Taylor and Francis on content […]
Five Minutes with Anne Barron and Mary Evans: “Academics seldom have the opportunity to discuss issues about their profession”
To mark the thirtieth anniversary of the death of social theorist Michel Foucault, Anne Barron and Mary Evans have organised a conference in late June for academics to reflect on his legacy in relation to higher education. Governing Academic Life will create an interdisciplinary space to discuss the public university, neoliberalism, academic publishing, and assessment measurement. Managing Editor Sierra Williams asked […]
The right to read is the right to mine: Text and data mining copyright exceptions introduced in the UK.
New copyright exceptions to text and data mining for non-commercial research have recently come into effect and this is welcome news for UK researchers and research, argues Ross Mounce. Here he provides a brief overview of the past issues discouraging text and data mining and the what the future holds now that these exceptions have been introduced. But despite legal […]
Data sharing may lead to some embarrassment but will ultimately improve scientific transparency and accuracy.
Open Data is important for science but in practice can be difficult for scientists afraid of the potential embarrassment of someone finding a mistake. Dorothy Bishop shares her own experience sharing her own data. When you share data you are forced to ensure it is accurate and properly documented. But she finds that error is inevitable and unavoidable in science, however […]
Academic citation practices need to be modernized so that all references are digital and lead to full texts.
Researchers and academics spend a lot of time documenting the sources of the ideas, methods and evidence they have drawn on in their own writings. But Patrick Dunleavy writes that our existing citation and referencing practices are now woefully out of date and no longer fit for purpose. The whole scholarly purpose of citing sources has changed around us, but […]
Publishers respond to growing need for collaboration by offering an open access home for interdisciplinary research.
The new journal Palgrave Communications aims to support interdisciplinary development by offering a high-quality outlet for research in the humanities, the social sciences and business, hoping to foster interaction, creativity and reflection within and between disciplines. Sam Burridge provides an initial overview of the new outlet. But developing truly collaborative research takes time, a feature with little appreciation in funding and policy demands, […]
What can be done to prevent the proliferation of errors in academic publications?
Every now and again a paper is published on the number of errors made in academic articles. These papers document the frequency of conceptual errors, factual errors, errors in abstracts, errors in quotations, and errors in reference lists. James Hartley reports that the data are alarming, but suggests a possible way of reducing them. Perhaps in future there might be a […]
A study with erroneous claims about the impacts of global warming has finally been corrected
A journal article claiming that moderate amounts of global warming have overall positive benefits has been quietly corrected after Bob Ward pointed out a number of errors. The updated analysis now claims “impacts are always negative”, but the erroneous findings have been used to inform a recent report by the IPCC which still needs to be corrected. This episode underlines the need […]
Global-level data sets may be more highly cited than most journal articles.
Scientists can be reluctant to share data because of the need to publish journal articles and receive recognition. But what if the data sets were actually a better way of getting credit for your work? Chris Belter measured the impact of a few openly accessible data sets and compared to journal articles in his field. His results provide hard evidence that the […]