There is no consolidation on the journal front in sight. Rather, new (open access) journals are popping up all over the place. While I’d be happy to dismiss them all on the grounds of adding to the paper flood, it seems that we need these new players to get some changes going in the complacent…
Nature Publishing Group is launching a new data journal called “Scientific Data”. The editorial announcement in nature invites submissions of “data descriptors” to the journal, which are described as: Data Descriptor articles are fully fledged, peer-reviewed scientific publications, and will be listed in major indexing services, thereby giving authors the credit they deserve for sharing…
Yesterday, a PhD student asked me for advice on how to chose the title of his paper. He works on cicadas, but he noted that many papers that deal with a specific family / group don’t use the name of this group in the title, but rather phrase the problem more broadly. To give a…
The inadvertent? image-duplication in the human clone paper still creates some unrest, maybe less so with regard to what this means for the core results of the study (it seems most people think that those will hold) than with regard to the thoroughness of the peer-review and the ability to detect irregularities in high-profile publications…
Tomorrow’s issue of Nature has a special section devoted to the future of academic publishing. The topics covered are not particularly surprising (see also my older posts on this subject), but I found the articles really informative and enjoyable to read, in particular “Open access: The true cost of science publishing”, a News Feature by…
Staying with the topic of publishing: when PeerJ was announced last year (see e.g. a Nature News feature), I was a bit skeptical about how this would go, but I have to admit that my impression about the first articles that have been put online this week is quite positive. Not only are there catchy…
A news article in the upcoming edition of Nature highlights a new kid on the block in the battle for the publishing system of the future – it’s called Rubriq, a company that wants to “outsource” the review process from the normal publication process. Very similar to what Peerage of Science provides, but as a…
Nature conservation, a new open access journal, published its first issue these days. In their inaugural editorial , Editor-in-Chief Klaus Henle (who happens to be an institute colleague of mine) and his editorial team describe the scope of this journal as […] all aspects of nature conservation and aims particularly at facilitating better interaction between…
The Economist used a series of blog posts (see here and the following posts) by Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers as a reason to ask once more about future of academic publishing. The article titled “The price of information” makes the usual case: publicly payed researchers provide a large part of the production chain of an…
theoretical ecology 