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 […]
Christina Odone reviewed Bill Maher’s film Religulous on Radio 4’s Front Row (start: 9m). “He gets some very good replies from some terribly soft targets.” She’s thinking particularly of creationist-sympathising US Senator Mark Pryor (D-AK). She goes on, “… but the most revealing moment is when Maher faces down a […]
It is reassuring to know that a City can not sue me for libel, even under English law, because I said some not very nice things about the nasty, brutish and racist city of Cincinnati today. It’s OK though — I have the pictures to back those words up. Read […]
A short early-morning photo-walk around Bristol’s Floating Harbour — an account of how I first came to be spending my time taking photographs — is available to read at cotch dot net.
I want to take a short diversion from normal service to add to the occasional series “arguments so bad my jaw literally drops.” I have forgotten exactly what radio programme I heard it on, but it was probably one of those vacuous pseudo-intellectual radio four programmes staffed by Daily Mail […]
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 […]
This time not about elections but about geology: the great shifting slopes of Mam Tor in the Derbyshire Peak District; a desolate scene of man’s abandoned attempt to tame the difficult landscape. Read it at cotch dot net.
In an historic and decisive election, David Cameron has won an astonishing slightly more seats than the other parties, catapulting him to the possibility of forming a government. Despite all of the stumbling blocks standing in his way, including vastly superior funding, the support of major newspapers, an innate sense […]
May Day is a day of traditions, a day of marching with banners and dancing around the May Pole, dressing up as trees and casting adrift flower boats. It’s a day of looking silly and causing a disturbance. A day of village fêtes, called off when it rains. Continue reading […]
A pair of weekend mini-photo essays on spring walks around the skyscrapers and scruffy pubs of south and east London. Part 1, here, part 2, here.
Continuing the weekly weekend mini photo essay strand, here is the latest, on Portland Bill.
Prompted by a PR puff piece about a publicity stunt petition by parochial nimbys, I compiled a photo-essay on the desolate ruins of Battersea Power Station. Read it here.
In the house where I grew up, on the side of a kitchen cupboard above the kitchen sink, is a small wide yellowed print on a bent and battered cobweb covered card, faded with the light of five thousand sunrises and dappled from the condensation of countless boiled kettles. Continue […]
The paper that initiated the great MMR hoax has been thoroughly discredited and retracted by the journal that published it, but the anti-vaxxers still claim — and hoodwink some parents — that more research is required to establish whether or not vaccines cause autism. I thought therefore that it was […]
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.
I just spent ten minutes adding flickr video support to cotch dot net so that I could post this short item on the philosophy of moving photographs.
Babylon in all its desolation is a sight not so awful as that of a surgeon with lawyer envy.
Skepticism is about critical thinking and knowing how to avoid being fooled by charlatans and the honest but mistaken. Over at Lay Science I explain one way that you can get fooled: by people citing the activities of cells in a dish as scientific proof for anything and everything. Read […]
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.
Originally posted at cotch dot net. Spam mail. I don’t mean your regular crap. Professional spam mail from the professional spammers: PR. Somebody put me on a list and now all kinds of companies and individuals are paying all kinds of PR agencies lots of money so that the PR […]
The first post on the new photography-oriented cotch dot net is up. It’s a quick review of the police stop-and-search policy, in place across London as a counter-terrorism measure, and in particular the decision to consider photography to be a suspicious activity worth stopping. Of course, it takes the skeptical […]