Due to unequal funding streams and leadership structures, dominant frameworks emerge within interdisciplinary departments. Elizabeth Dzeng shares her experience in the field of medical social science where the drive to publish in high impact journals pushes researchers to conform to predominantly objectivist … Continue reading →
Category: Academic Publishing
Impact Round-Up 15th February: In gratitude to Stuart Hall, #publishperish14 and the fallacy of web objectivity.
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. In gratitude to Stuart Hall, a socialist intellectual who taught us to confront the political with a smile by … Continue reading →
Circulation patterns show books in STEM and social sciences are accessed just as much as humanities books.
Drawing from comprehensive circulation data showing how monographs are accessed across disciplines at the University of Notre Dame library, Parker Ladwig and Thurston Miller challenge the assumption that STEM and social science books are accessed less frequently over time than monographs … Continue reading →
Improving on “Access to Research”: Restrictive access and licensing fail to meet the needs of the 21st century.
Major academic publishers have supported an initiative equipping public libraries with free access to a number of subscription journal articles. Cameron Neylon argues this Access to Research scheme is an empty political gesture that fails to meet the needs of the … Continue reading →
Why do academics choose useless titles for articles and chapters? Four steps to getting a better title.
An informative title for an article or chapter maximizes the likelihood that your audience correctly remembers enough about your arguments to re-discover what they are looking for. Without embedded cues, your work will sit undisturbed on other scholars’ PDF libraries, … Continue reading →
The case for greater transparency in experimental and social science research
Proving public value can be an especially difficult task when high-profile cases of fraud in social science disciplines emerge. Rose McDermott makes the case for greater transparency in both the production and review of social science to restore the legitimacy … Continue reading →
Paying twice or paying thrice? Open access publishing in a global system of scholarly knowledge production and consumption
UK open access policy does not exist in a vacuum. Casey Brienza argues that UK researchers represent too small a proportion of global scholarly knowledge production and consumption to rebalance scholarly expenditure. UK open access initiatives as currently formulated will instead lead to … Continue reading →
It’s the Neoliberalism, Stupid: Why instrumentalist arguments for Open Access, Open Data, and Open Science are not enough.
The Open Movement has made impressive strides in the past year, but do these strides stand for reform or are they just symptomatic of the further expansion and entrenchment of neoliberalism? Eric Kansa argues that it is time for the movement to broaden … Continue reading →
Improving peer review: Allowing more subjective and objective reviewer insights may help to curb ‘herding’ mentality
As the landscape of scientific publishing looks to change dramatically over the next few years, a key concern will be on the future of peer review. Mike Peacey provides an overview of his team’s recent study that examined how demonstrations of objectivity and … Continue reading →
The Impact of the Social Sciences research book is out this week! Browse the living bibliography, data visualisations and other resources.
The Impact of the Social Sciences: How Academics and Their Research Make a Difference by Simon Bastow, Patrick Dunleavy, and Jane Tinkler. The three-year Impact of Social Sciences Project has culminated in a monograph published by SAGE. The book presents thorough … Continue reading →