Publishing
revere | December 10, 2009The other day the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a clutch of articles about whether Tamiflu was as useful a drug as some have touted. I read the main article, another one of the Cochrane Collaborative meta-analyses of the studies they deem useful about any particular subject, and it didn't seem to make much news. It confirmed what their previous review had said about the neuriminidase inhibitor antivirals for influenza (Tamiflu and Relenza): these drugs work but their effect is modest. We've been saying the same thing for years here, not because we did a fancy meta-analysis, but…
cpikas | December 9, 2009SUMMARY: With this notice, the Office of Science and Technology Policy
(OSTP) within the Executive Office of the President, requests input from the community regarding enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from research funded by Federal science and technology agencies. This RFI will be active from December 10, 2009 to January 7, 2010. Respondents are invited to respond online via the Public Access Policy Forum at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open, or may submit responses via electronic mail. Responses will be re-posted on the online forum. Instructions and a timetable for…
ddobbs | December 7, 2009
I'm happy to announce that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publisher of many a fine book over the decades, will be publishing "The Orchid and the Dandelion" (working title), in which I'll explore further the emerging "orchid-dandelion hypothesis" I wrote about in my recent Atlantic story. (In brief, that hypothesis -- a simple but deeply transformative amendment of current views -- hoids that many 'risk genes' for behavior and mental problems magnify not just maladaptive responses to bad environments but advantageous responses to good environments. That is, these "risk genes" confer not just…
cpikas | December 3, 2009ASME- the American Society of Mechanical Engineers - has a series of journals that are heavily used by mechanical, aerospace, and even civil engineers. Most engineering schools have these all the way back. So in the past couple of weeks libraries all over the country have realized that, all of a sudden they don't have access to a decade of the journal 1990-1999. I have no direct experience with this but have been following the discussion and dismay on ASEE's ELD list.
What actually happened is that ASME sold a digital backfile that ended at 1989, they sold current access to the digital…
cpikas | November 18, 2009It seems like there was nothing new from the established publishers for a while - nothing with their core business. Some experimented with ways to communicate and most updated content management systems, but it seemed like most weren't touching their standard models. PLOS' experiments met with raised eyebrows and skepticism, but now, looks like others are taking notice and finally starting to experiment in their core business.
I already commented on Nature starting up a quick turnaround journal - ok, new product offerings aren't that exciting except for this is new for Nature.
What seems…
rskloot | November 14, 2009
Big week here at Culture Dish! The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and its author (yours truly) were on the cover of Publishers Weekly (please note: THRILLED!). Inside that issue was a profile of me with some of book's backstory, a short excerpt from the book (longer excerpt coming soon in O, the Oprah Magazine), also a story I wrote about the crazy book tour I'm organizing (posted about previously here). But that was just the beginning of this week's HeLa developments. More about that after the jump, but first, a warning: given the fact that my book is about to be released and I'll be on…
mikethemadbiologist | November 8, 2009One of the things I can't stand about non-open access publishers is that federally-funded scientific results (federally subsidized in multiple ways) are locked behind a publisher's for-profit firewall. Given the high prices of journals and universities' need to cut expenditures, library budgets are getting slashed.
So what's a scientist to do? Have a colleague whose institution has a subscription send her the pdf of the article.
Needless to say, this upsets the non-open access publishers greatly. UR STEALIN TEH SCIENTISMZ!! Over at Ars Technica, John Timmer makes a good analogy to…
revere | October 29, 2009One of the by-products of the brouhaha (here, here) over The Atlantic article on vaccines was some interesting issues raised by the way the Knight Science Journalism Tracker handled it (here, here). If you aren't familiar with KSJ Tracker, it's a site that does "peer review" of science journalism. It's goal "is to provide a broad sampling of the past day’s science news and, where possible, of news releases or other news tips related to publication of science news in the general circulation news media, mainly of the U.S." I don't get a chance to read it as often as I'd like, but when I do I…
mikethemadbiologist | October 13, 2009Regular readers will know that I'm not an intertubez triumphalist. But I read that the Harvard Book Store has bought itself a fancy gizmo to print any book in about four minutes:
Battered booksellers, especially independent ones, have so far withstood the punishing shock-and-awe offensive of Internet Age marauders like Amazon. Now, they have a secret weapon that they hope will continue to lure customers into their stores: would you believe it's a machine that can print up a fresh new paperback copy from a menu of 3.6 million books?
Harvard Book Store cleared out space behind its History,…
cpikas | October 2, 2009As I've mentioned, science libraries are very much in financial trouble just as their parent institutions and other organizations are right now. There have been many calls for publishers to hold the line on price increases and some have done so. Some, like SPIE, have decreased prices -yay them! Others, like a chemistry database that was recently purchased by a large publisher, have given my parent institution a quote that raises our subscription price over 40% over the period of the contract. Nature Publishing Group has raised institutional subscriptions for Scientific American from about $…
ddobbs | September 22, 2009
Eric Michael Johnson contemplates the hearts, minds, teeth, and claws of bonobos and other primates.
Tara Smith explains why she'll be getting her kids their (seasonal) flu vaccines. Revere does likewise
Daniel Menaker, former honcho at Random House, defends the midlist. (Where was he when my book was getting so much push?)
Just in case you missed it, lack of insurance is killing 45,000 people a year (Times) in the U.S. This doesn't include preventable deaths among the underinsured (like yours truly, who is sitting on some surgery that he'd rather put behind him). You can download the…
cpikas | September 19, 2009It just hit me this morning that new communications journals are sort of less expected right now. In this post I'll briefly discuss the traditional place of letters or communications publications in scholarly communications (in science) and then weave in some thoughts about pressures on the system to change and where we're going.*
First, this piece out of the standard Garvey and Griffith model of scholarly communication (also very similar to part of the UNISIST model)(drawn on Gliffy, which rocks):
Technical reports and pre-prints also might happen between regional conferences and journal…
cpikas | September 16, 2009quality? popularity? utility? I'm pretty sure I've blogged about MESUR (a research project that studied how usage statistics - as we call them in the industry - can be a metric like citations are). I've also blogged a discussion by MJ Kurtz in which he discusses how usage is very much like citations, if offset. Some researchers including some bibliometricians have issues with using usage for some pretty good reasons:
if citations can be gamed then click fraud anyone?
if we don't know what citations mean, then what can we say about downloads at all?
what is actually counted? pdf downloads?…
mikethemadbiologist | September 10, 2009The staff of PLoS Medicine does not like ghostwritten articles:
If you are an editor, author, reviewer, or reader of medical journals, or if you depend on your doctor or health care provider getting unbiased information from medical journals, then the 1,500 documents now hosted on the PLoS Medicine Web site [2] that gives an idea of the topsy-turvy world invented by the pharmaceutical and medical writing companies involved. While readers expect and assume that the named academic authors on a paper carried out the piece of work and then wrote up their article or review informed by their…
cpikas | September 2, 2009Sometimes so many things come up at the same time it becomes difficult if impossible to ignore. Here's just a brief list:
An oceanographer came to me and asked to see a print copy of an AGU journal article. If you've followed me here from elsewhere, then you'll know my place of work was mandated to discard all print materials (we did actually make the case for maybe 4 journals that are both not available online and are not widely held - there was a 5th but it got discarded by accident). Turns out that the entire point of the article was to show two color graphics on the second page. Well this…
cpikas | August 28, 2009I love the DOI. It's the best thing since sliced bread. Actually, it's better than sliced bread - I can slice my own bread - but I can't do what DOIs do so easily.
If you've been living under a rock for a while, you might not know that a DOI is a document object identifier - it's a unique identifier at the article or chapter level (or really at any level - like each image, each paragraph, or the whole book). Like you have ISBNs for books and ISSNs for journal (titles). What's really cool is that you can just put http://dx.doi.org/ in front of one, and get directed to the publisher's page…
cpikas | August 24, 2009 In case you can't read this screenshot of an e-mail (source, via), I'll quote it for you:
"Are you on a first name basis with the librarian? If so, chances are, you're spending too much time at the library. What you need is fast, reliable research you can access right in your office. An all it takes is West(tr)."
This is so much B.S. glasses and all. West, is of course, part of Thomson Reuters (the real evil empire is revealed) and they and Reed Elsevier's Lexis-Nexis divide up most of the legal information money.
Chemistry vendors are known for trying an end-run around the librarian, but…
emjohnson | August 24, 2009"They say rather than cursing the darkness, one should light a candle. They don't mention anything about cursing a lack of candles."
- George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Porkchops?
In Unscientific America, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (the latter of whom I consider a friend) are deeply concerned that the American system is unsustainable so long as scientific results and recommendations are not appreciated by the general public or by the politicians that represent us. And there is good reason to be concerned. In their book they cite the results of a 2008 report from the Keystone…
cpikas | August 23, 2009On one side, there are some who say the future of scholarly communication in science is databases - or, rather, more or less shared and curated data sets. Some of the folks in this crowd go farther to say that science is a continuous stream and people should be able to comment on and point to this stream.
There are those who see the disaggregation of the journal with the papers remaining more or less the same. So databases of discrete pieces that can then be re-aggregated (I've mentioned this before)
And there are those who basically think we'll sort of go on as we have been, but perhaps with…
emjohnson | August 18, 2009As I've been preparing my formal review of Unscientific America I've been struck by the question: who was this book intended for? Clearly it was a critique of science communicators to be sure (more on that later) but as I realized in going through my notes, Mooney and Kirshenbaum's strongest sections are those discussing the intersection between science and politics. This should have been perfectly obvious before even reading the book as it is just that intersection which is the focus of their long running blog (first here at ScienceBlogs and now at Discover).
Chapters 5 and 6 of their…