With the advent of online publishing in the 2000s, the cost structure of scientific publishing changed drastically. Now, printing and distribution costs have become very low. This has not only lowered the entry cost of new publishers, but it also lifted the natural restriction on the number of papers per issue which provided a strong rationale for gate-keeping by legacy journals.
On the last Friday before Christmas of this ridiculous year 2020, I thought it would be a good idea to deliver the Christmas box personally to all CWTS staff living in the Utrecht area.
Why is it important that Elsevier is going to open its citations? Both DORA and the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) have called on publishers to make the reference lists of their articles openly available. In response to this, almost all large and medium-sized publishers have made their citations openly available in Crossref. Elsevier was one of the very few major publishers that have not yet opened their citations.
Science thrives on an open exchange of arguments and a plurality of perspectives. Scientific discussions should be open, frank and blind: only arguments should matter, not who presents them. Different viewpoints strengthen the scientific debate, and the inclusion of women and minorities in science will only contribute to this. Understanding the role of gender in science is crucial for improving the representation of women.
RRI & OS: two co-existing sets of ambitions Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Open Science (OS) are two co-existing sets of ambitions concerning systemic change in the research and innovation (R&I) system. Initially, RRI and OS may appear to align well.
‘Convergence’ as knowledge integration for grappling with societal challenges Last October the US National Academies held a workshop (available here) to gather views on how to better measure and assess the implications of interdisciplinarity, or convergence, for research and innovation.
Interdisciplinary research for addressing societal problems In this blog I will share some thoughts developed for and during a fantastic workshop (available here) held last October by the US National Academies to help the National Science Foundation (NSF) set an agenda on how to better measure and assess the implications of interdisciplinarity (or convergence) for research and innovation.
When Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, a researcher at Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies, stumbled upon the Twitter feed STS Title Bot, he was immediately struck by its creativity and effortless verisimilitude. Despite being generated by an automated algorithm that has apparently been fed with data obtained through text mining, many titles could easily pass for actual publications in major STS journals.
In this blog post we discuss recent findings on the relation between career trajectories and task specialization. Research careers are commonly envisioned in evaluation schemes as homogeneous pathways in which individuals have to take a series of steps to advance.
The use of metrics is a hot topic in science, and scholars have criticized metrics for being more driven by data than by judgements. Both the Leiden Manifesto and the DORA-declaration, signed by thousands of organizations and individuals, have expressed concerns about the use of metrics on individuals.