Given the far-reaching attention of their paper on the nature of academic blogging, Inger Mewburn and Pat Thomson find blogging is now part of a complex online ‘attention economy’ where social media can help your work travel further. But in this … Continue reading →
Category: Academic Publishing
“Nudging” researchers toward Gold Open Access will delay the shift to wider access of research.
UK research is being conceived by the UK Government as if it were primarily an investment in the journal publishing industry rather than in research productivity and impact, argues Stevan Harnad. Since the new UK open access policy was announced, … Continue reading →
A Bayesian approach to the REF: finding the right data on journal articles and citations to inform decision-making.
Now that the REF submission window has closed, a small panel of academics are tasked with rating thousands of academic submissions, which will result in university departments being ranked and public money being distributed. Given the enormity of the task … Continue reading →
How to find an appropriate research data repository.
As more and more funders and journals adopt data policies that require researchers to deposit underlying research data in a data repository, the question over where to store this data and how to choose a repository becomes more and more … Continue reading →
As the REF submission period ends, mismatched publishing incentives signal challenging times ahead in academia.
Academics are frequently subject to new types of evaluations. November marks the end of the submission process for the UK funding council’s evaluation, the Research Excellence Framework (REF). John Hudson discusses some of the shortcomings of the REF and the methods … Continue reading →
Researchers, publishers, libraries and data centres all have a role in promoting and encouraging data citation.
The key to verifying and validating research is the identification and access of datasets. But cultural and behavioural barriers to sharing data are still widespread. Rachael Kotarski, the Content Expert for scientific datasets at the British Library, explains why citing data, … Continue reading →
Should academics adopt an ethic of slowness or ninja-like productivity? In search of scholarly time
When viewed in the broader context of late modernity, responses to the increasingly frenetic academic workload can be more clearly understood, argues Filip Vostal. Rather than choosing between the regressive ethic of slow scholarship on the one hand, or the time management … Continue reading →
Finch Group reviews progress in implementing open access transition amid ongoing criticisms.
The working group which first released the Finch Report on expanding access to published research in June 2012 has issued a new progress update. Following the UK government’s unilateral acceptance of these recommendations, criticisms have mounted against this so-called ‘push for … Continue reading →
The Wellcome Trust funds its first open access monograph, helping medical humanities reach wider audiences.
The Wellcome Trust requires that research outputs which arise from their funding are made available in open access formats. This policy notably includes scholarly monographs. Today marks the first day where that policy has been put into practice with an open … Continue reading →
How a little bit of technology can fix the editing and production processes for the social sciences.
Academic text production faces many challenges. Some of them are of a technical nature. Johannes Wilm, initiator behind Fidus Writer, argues that by adapting the text editing environment for scientific articles in the social sciences, the amount of manual labour … Continue reading →