Guest Author • Jan 15, 2021 •
Grigori Guitchounts In November, Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific journals, made an attention-grabbing announcement: More than 30 of its most prestigious journals, including the flagship Nature, will now allow authors to pay a fee of US$11,390 to make their papers freely available for anyone to read online. This move, by a company that … Read More
Ken Perrott • Sep 18, 2017 •
We often tout peer review as the reason for accepting the veracity of published scientific studies? But how good is it really? Does it ever match the ideal picture people have of it? And what about peer review before and after publication – are we neglecting these important stages? Pre-publication peer review Here I mean the collective process of evaluating … Read More
John Pickering • Jun 27, 2017 •
“We just got a paper in an Impact Factor 10 journal … and hope to go higher soon.” That’s a statement made to me last week. It is wrong on so many levels, but does it matter? Nobel Prize winners think so. The video below from nobelprize.org appeared in my twitter feed on Friday. Before you watch … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Mar 19, 2015 •
Five years ago I wrote a piece titled Retrospective: Credits, Dis-credits and mis-credits, recycling an article I wrote for my consulting website in 2002 triggered by an article written earlier that year by Peter Lawrence about credits for research work, Rank Injustice. Yesterday the Wellcome Trust and Digital Science announced an updated “Contributor Role … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Sep 27, 2013 •
Aside from being of interest to other researchers, answers to this might illustrate to non-scientists the effort peer review takes. Peer review is part of what keeps standards high in science. Scientific papers are sent out from the journals to peer-reviewers - other scientists who volunteer their time to critique the paper and offer … Read More
Siouxsie Wiles • Aug 19, 2012 •
‘Statistically illiterate’ is how scientist and blogger Stephen Curry describes those who support impact factors, used to rank scientific journals. The impact factor, calculated annually, reflects the mean number of citations to articles published in a journal in the two preceding years. He has a point. As Stephen describes: ….typically only 15% of … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Aug 16, 2012 •
writes Prof. Christopher Shaw, currently under fire by blogger ‘Orac’ at Respectful Insolence. (See comment at August 15, 11:50 pm.) Leaving aside the backstory, which is a separate issue that I don’t wish to debate here, why should science not be reviewed on blogs? We’ve heard this one before - the NASA … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Jun 11, 2010 •
A rambling look at notebooks, with unexpected sidelines. Scientist and novelist Jennifer Rohn, who writes the Mind the Gap blog at Nature Network, recently presented a photo-essay chronicling the life and death of a research project, In which I fail. As usually happens Jennifer’s post started a lively discussion that wound it’s way past swear words, a … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Jan 21, 2010 •
Access to some popular science journals may get worse, according to librarians. News is out that EBSCO has acquired the exclusive rights to on-line full text content distribution many popular magazines, including: Science (Science is not part of this deal; see comment by Science/AAAS director Tom Ryan.) New Scientist Discover … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Oct 24, 2009 •
Are the electronic literature databases making us forget about the older literature? A short blog by Isis, a self-proclaimed domestic and laboratory goddess (and who are we to disagree?), reminded me that I have been meaning to write a blog about this issue for some time and that I should get on with it. Read More