A year ago, the discussions at the Science Online conference inspired me to explore the question “what is the scientific paper?” — and specifically, what is wrong with the scientific paper and what its future might be. In time for this year’s conference, I’ve been reposting the the blogs on […]
Over at Journalology I discuss the issue of academic fraud in China, again. Academic fraud is an issue that few take seriously enough anywhere, and while China has a particularly big fraud problem, I worry that people allow that to distract them from the fraud problem at home. Read it […]
Every time I blog about the future of science publishing and the opportunities for radical changes to the way science is conducted and disseminated, somebody comes along and leaves a comment telling me that the state of science publishing is perfect but one thing: the lack of “green” open access. […]
One really shouldn’t have to explain the advantages of RSS over email as a system for keeping up with new things to read. But you know how academics are. So the latest Journalology Literature Hack does just that — introducing RSS PubMed searches as an alternative to the increasingly inappropriate […]
I am not a lawyer, but I do have six years experience of Wikipedia, was once a very prolific Wikipedian, and, despite my lack of activity there in more recent years, am apparently still an “admin” on the English language Wikipedia. This, coupled with working for an open-access publisher, means […]
Academic publishing, and peer review in particular, was headline news in February — from stem cell researchers claiming that their work was being sabotaged by reviewers with conflicts of interest, to mainstream news noticing the absurdity of the impact factor situation. BBC Radio 4 must have decided that now was […]
One of the great recent developments in science publishing is the first hints of article-level metrics: for the first time researchers can get a good idea of how many people are reading and talking about their work. But there is a history of abuse of metrics in academia, with a […]
Over at Journalology I’ve started a series on “literature hacks” — life hacks for improving the efficiency of searching and managing the scientific literature. The first post gives you a Firefox add-on for quick and easy searching of any search engine for terms you stumble upon in your reading. Read […]
Over at Journalology I dive into the free archive of biomedical literature — PubMed Central — and stumble upon a piece of publishing archaeology: an early example of open-peer review. Read on to find out what it’s all about.
In a hit-fishing exercise on Journalology, I make contrarian suggestions and gross allegations on the subject of scientific misconduct in China. You can bite here.
I have just started blogging at Journalology, a group blog about science publishing, where I will contribute occassionality on the subjects of publishing technology, open data, the future of the scientific paper, and bad publishing. My first post is in the latter category, revisiting the Medical Hypotheses aids denialism incident. […]
Gulliver has a beer. This is an archival repost of something written on the old blog in august 2009. As always, it was great to see everybody at Science Online, and great shame not to have more time to talk to everybody. A Sunday afternoon informal in the park next […]
This is an archival repost of something I wrote on the old blog in october 2008. This week, I am mostly clearing my Google Docs of old half-written blog posts which I never got around to publishing… From the discussions in the publishing/OA blogosphere, one would get the impression that […]
This is another archival repost, originally written in september 2008. It was great to meet everybody at the London Science Blogging Conference. Before my dissection of what I thought were the important themes, I should just apologise for the accident with my facial hair — it was only this morning […]
From the cult of the amateur to the triumph of miscellanea, a revolution in how we interact with information is in its early stages. I don’t use the term “revolution” lightly. You could be forgiven for thinking it hyperbolic, because traditional publishers have been slow on the uptake. If you […]