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…
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…
It’s funny who reads your posts, one cannot be careful enough 😉 – Science contacted me regarding my recent note on Jennifer Couzin-Frankel’s piece “Shaking up Science”, asking to spread the information that there will be a live web chat on that topic: At 3pm EST Thursday, February 7, Science magazine will be running a…
Last week’s Science issue had an interesting News Focus about “Two journal editors [that] take a hard look at honesty in science and question the ethos of their profession” With a bit too much pathos for my taste, but informative nevertheless, the article gives background on Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall, two microbiologists, and their…
After the UK and the EU announced their plans to purchase a flat-rate open access agreement for parts of their research programs, it became public recently that also the particle physics community has negotiated a deal that will switch nearly all publications in the field to OA. As Nature reports: After six years of negotiation,…
It is a common place that knowledge is power, but it should be added that this power resides in the possibility of excluding others from gaining it. Restricting access to information used to be easy: copying a book required investments in terms of resources and labor, and it got cheaper per unit when many books…
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…
In theoretical physics, I was used to the fact that, at the point of submitting a manuscript to a journal, most authors would make this manuscript available to the community by uploading it on a public preprint server (in physics, this server is practically always the arXiv). These preprints also act as a database that…
theoretical ecology 