In this post I dissect the response by the editors of Cognition to a mass appeal for open access by the researcher community. I hope that my rather critical comments will improve understanding of the issues and help the community achieve better outcomes in the future. Cognition is a scientific journal published by Elsevier that was traditionally available only by subscription.
When #AcademicNoir trended on Twitter, I had fun making a few memes about science publishing and the Registered Replication Reports that we started at Perspectives on Psychological Science . “Who’s shaking you down?” I asked. “Elsevier,” whispered the librarian. I showed her the door. I still have to work in this town.
While our retinas process the world around us continuously with little to no interruption, certain mental processes are very limited. One way to show this it to present someone with a rapid stream of letters, one at a time in the center of the screen, at a rate of perhaps 10 letters per second.
It’s not a great term, the “reproducibility crisis”. Most don’t think we are actually in a crisis , but I thought that by now practically everyone in various scientific fields had heard of it. In the last few years the reproducibility issue has been covered several times by Nature News, by major newspapers such as the New York Times, and by countless websites, often with
https://twitter.com/quietlibrarian5/status/693980526269476865 289 applications came in before the #ResBazSyd deadline! Will work out how many we can accommodate, email attendees.
In science, we frequently see a comparison between two groups of people that differ on multiple demographic variables, say age, IQ, and income, investigating some dependent measures, say body mass index (BMI). Results are often reported as “the groups had substantially different BMIs, after controlling for X and Y” using ANCOVA or multiple regression.
It’s the end of the year, and I’m indulging myself by posting these Bayesian jokes. The first three were inspired by the #AcademicNoir hashtag. Round up the usual suspects, sergeant. But sir, we haven’t a clue! Indeed we don’t. But we do have a prior. # Bayes # noir
A study suggesting that “Sadness impairs color perception” reporting two experiments was recently retracted from Psychological Science. But some colleagues and I don’t think the retraction goes far enough.
Vision researchers recently received an email from ARVO, the publisher of Journal of Vision, that begins: But in the view of most, JoV has been open access since its inception! It’s always been an author-pays, free access journal: all articles are published on its website and can be downloaded by anyone.
The headline screams “You’re 45% more likely to be murdered in de Blasio’s Manhattan”. The evidence? Sixteen people have been killed so far this year in Manhattan, against only eleven over the same period last year. Does this evidence indicate you are more likely to be murdered, as the headline says? To find out, I tested whether a constant murder rate could explain the results.