Publishing
emjohnson | July 19, 2009Jorge Cham has just posted his latest PhD Comic, this one taking on the rivalry between Nature and Science. Look behind the scenes at how the science publishing industry REALLY works. It's enough to make you want to publish only in PLoS ONE!
emjohnson | July 19, 2009Monty Python: The scientists of silliness?
I'm currently working on a book (scheduled for release sometime in the 2010s) that intends to be an extension of my research in evolutionary anthropology and the history/philosophy of science. In the coming months I may be tempted to write more about it -- and could be persuaded to publish short excerpts like Brian at Laelaps has been doing with his current opus -- but I'm not quite ready for a grand unveiling.
However, I'm often amazed at the kinds of science related books that are commonly published ("related" being the word to emphasize). These…
cpikas | June 23, 2009It's that time again: the 2008 Journal Citation Reports are out from Thomson Reuters. It's started already, too, the e-mails to listservs and press releases. So I'm re-posting one of my posts from my old blog for those of you who might not have seen it.
Like prices and hemlines, why do impact factors always go up?
Ever notice that certain time of year when every journal publisher announces how the impact factors of their journals is up? When the Journal Citation Report (JCR) comes out... the press releases follow. The impact factor is a measure of how important the journal is - if it is…
mikethemadbiologist | June 15, 2009Recently, Newsweek published an article by Sharon Begley that claimed that the conflict between high-profile publication and quick release of medically-important data has led to delays in medical advancements (ScienceBlogling Orac takes down her particular example). But Begley is confusing a symptom, publication practices, with a much larger problem: incentives.
What do I mean by incentives?
Last week, I described how the data release policies of large and small sequencing centers differ due to distinct funding incentives: the larger centers are paid to rapidly produce lots of high…
cpikas | June 4, 2009From via Caveat Lector.
Position Statement From University Press Directors on Free Access to Scholarly Journal Articles:
1. The undersigned university press directors support the dissemination of scholarly research as broadly as possible.
2. We support the free access to scientific, technical, and medical journal articles no later than 12 months after publication. We understand that the length of time before free release of journal articles will by necessity vary for other disciplines.
3. We support the principle that scholarly research fully funded by governmental entities is a public good…
cpikas | May 29, 2009Seems like I was at the wrong session at the wrong time - I missed
Bilder's comments and others that have traveled widely on twitter.
Search for #ssp09.
The opening keynote today was by the current head of
href="http://www.arl.org">ARL, the Association of
Research Libraries, Dr Charles B. Lowry. ARL includes123
major research libraries from the US and Canada - members are the
libraries, not individual librarians. Note, too that I think he said
that 113 of these were universities. There are research
libraries that are not in universities, btw. You can read
about their mission on their…
cpikas | May 28, 2009I wasn't complete sure what to expect with this conference. There were some old acquaintances from the society publishers who spend a lot of time with the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division at the Special Libraries Association (Hi Tony! Hi Terry!). I also spoke with a representative of IMLS, some other librarians, and Victor from Mendeley.
Some sessions had some people spouting marketing BS about impressions and conversions and librarians as checkbooks, but the majority were friendly and looking to better scholarly communication.
In the morning after the keynote, I went to We Have…
rskloot | April 2, 2009
After seven happy years serving as a vice president, I have just finished my second term on the National Book Critics Circle board of directors. While I was on the board, I put together a document of tips for breaking into book reviewing called, Strategies for Breaking in and Staying in: Getting started as a critic, building your reviewing portfolio, going national, and keeping editors happy. It's no longer available on the NBCC's website, and I've gotten quite a few requests for it recently, so I've posted it here for those interested.
I put these tips together a few years ago --…
revere | March 24, 2009When the Wall Street Journal called attention to a claim that the Journal of the American Medical Association called a whistle-blower a "nobody" and a "nothing," a claim JAMA denied, I didn't know what to think. I was inclined to give JAMA the benefit of the doubt. Whatever dealings I've had (and they are few) with JAMA's editor in chief, Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, she's been pleasant and has a reputation for being a tough and intelligent editor. It sounded as if someone had gotten a little irritated and maybe said things in a way that wasn't quite appropriate, but these things happen. But…
rskloot | January 17, 2009I'm giving a talk today with Tom Levenson at 4:30 today at ScienceOnline 09 titled "How to Become a (Paid) Science Journalist: Advice for Bloggers." Below the jump I've posted links to two handouts I've written offering tips for breaking into publication -- folks not able to make the talk might find them useful as well.
You can download my tips for writing query letters that sell and generally breaking into publication here (PDF).
And here are my Tips for Successful Book Reviewing ("Strategies for Breaking in and Staying in: Getting started as a critic,
building your reviewing portfolio,…
sb admin | January 16, 2009
As some sharp-eyed reader may have already spotted, the SciencePunk blog has relocated to the Seed Media Group's ScienceBlogs. Let's take a moment to absorb these new surroundings.
OK, done? Those of you who have already run back to check sciencepunk.com will find it too has changed substantially. Drama abounds!
From today, the whole SciencePunk caboodle is getting cranked up a notch. Wave goodbye to the version 5 we all knew and loved, and say hello to version 6. (Ah, you always wondered what that stray /v5 signified, didn't you? Why not check out v4? Web 1.0-tastic!) The site has…
mikethemadbiologist | January 1, 2009And do we want to? Maybe it could help formally include non-publishing activities in a scientist's evaluation?
When I first read this PLoS Computational Biology article, "I Am Not a Scientist, I Am a Number", I was ready to beat down on its ass. After all, how seriously can you take something like this which describes a "Scholar Factor":
I'm surprised there's no arcsine transformation in there (I said I wouldn't beat the crap out of it, not give it hugs and kisses). By way of further explanation (if you really want it):
H Factor is as it is now--the number of papers cited more than H…
mikethemadbiologist | December 11, 2008This couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of assholes:
The collapse of the sale of publisher Reed Elsevier's business information unit was inevitable. It's what happens next that's crucial.
Reed was planning to use the sale proceeds to pay down debt from its $4.1 billion acquisition of U.S. personal data firm Choicepoint earlier this year. If it doesn't find another solution, it risks losing its A- credit rating.
So now it faces a choice. Most likely, it will launch a $2 billion bond issue in January ahead of the first tranche of Choicepoint debt falling due in March - a move likely to…
mikethemadbiologist | December 8, 2008Now, I realize with this title, lots of people are thinking that I'm trying to do away with scientific articles. Far from it. But the use of published articles as 'scientific currency' can retard the adoption of new breakthroughs. A recent personal experience is in order.
I recently heard an invited speaker give a talk about a new way of handling DNA sequence data*. After the talk, in a private meeting, I asked the speaker if this software was available for implementation, and said speaker looked horrified. "We haven't submitted for publication yet." It turns out that no one will have…
mikethemadbiologist | October 26, 2008I came across this Science letter to the editor about a "gradual peer review process" by the associate editor for Plant Signalling and Behavior, Communicative and Integrative Biology; it's pretty interesting:
...Many scientists--particularly those who are well established and thus in demand--are less willing to review because of the time required to evaluate the many manuscripts they receive.
In standard reviewing practice, editors send manuscripts simultaneously to several reviewers, whose comments are considered by the editor and then sent back to the author. A basic drawback to this…
mikethemadbiologist | October 15, 2008I've written about journal impact factors before, largely to argue that there are better statistics than the traditional impact factor. But an excellent editorial in the Oct. 10 issue of Science by Kai Simons points out a very obvious problem with how impact factors are used (italics mine):
Research papers from all over the world are published in thousands of Science journals every year. The quality of these papers clearly has to be evaluated, not only to determine their accuracy and contribution to fields of research, but also to help make informed decisions about rewarding scientists with…
revere | September 19, 2008John Conyers (D., Michigan) is a liberal Democrat. As head of the Judiciary Committee he has always carried water for the IP crowd. He's at it again. And he isn't alone. When it comes to paying off campaign contributers this is a non-partisant issue:
These sort of copyright issues cut across the partisan divide, typically aligning members of Congress from both parties from areas of the country with strong content generation industries (TV, movies, music, print). In other words, members of Congress from California, New York, and Florida (Disney) or committee chairs who get a lot of money from…
mikethemadbiologist | August 19, 2008...and it's symptomatic of a larger problem too. First, here's what Eisen says about articles published in Science (and presumably Nature too; italics mine):
In addition, by choosing to publish the paper there [in Science] but not elsewhere, the field of deep sea symbionts may have been hurt rather than helped.
How could a Science paper hurt the field? Well, for one, Science with its page length obsession forced Irene to turn her enormous body of work on this genome into a single page paper with most of the detail cut out. I do not think a one page paper does justice to the interesting…
mikethemadbiologist | August 13, 2008
This displeases us greatly.
I received an email from ScienceBlogling Mike Dunford that Reed Elsevier had excerpted one of my posts. No problem there--I like it when people read my stuff....except for one thing:
The fuckers copyrighted my words.
MINES!!!
Lookee:
(click to embiggen)
Mike Dunford lays out why this is such a fucking shitty thing to do:
This blog, like almost all blogs, is an open-access publication. There's no charge to read this blog. If you've got an internet connection and time to waste, you can scroll through the things I've written to your heart's content. The thing is,…
mikethemadbiologist | July 7, 2008As usual, if you want to know the back story, Bora has the links. What has always steamed me about the for-profit publishers is that they charge so much for something they have very little part in manufacturing.
They don't pay the salaries of the those who provide the product--the research and accompanying article. They don't pay the reviewers. They often don't pay most of the editors. To top it all off, they take publicly funded research and makes the results inaccessible to many citizens who, often, have supported that research.
Oh yeah, researchers in the developing world often can't…