So I read Jeffrey Brainard’s piece in Science magazine on Clarivate’s decision to punish eLife for innovating – by stripping eLife of a proprietary Journal Impact Factor™ number, that Clarivate itself awards (sidenote: to be clear, I see no value in Journal Impact Factors as they are statistically illiterate, irreproducible, and easily gameable, amongst many other issues that have long been documented). With the
If you’re getting a sense of déjà vu from this blog post title it is probably because we’ve been here before e.g. in 2017, in 2016, in 2015, in 2014. These profitable ‘errors’ seem to keep occurring… Today, Elsevier sold me 48-hours of access to an article in the journal Computational Toxicology , with the title: “Ab initio chemical safety assessment: A workflow based on exposure considerations and non-animal methods”. The price?
The day today is Tuesday 11th June 2024. It marks at least 193 days now since the subscription access journal Heterocycles (e-ISSN: 1881-0942) was taken offline by its publisher. Published since 1973, it is a “key” journal in chemistry and contains over 17,000 articles which have been cited at least 164,000 times. The journal is preserved in the CLOCKSS archive.
As you may have seen in the news, the British Library has been affected by a significant cyberattack. Many of the digital services it provides have gone down and stayed down for many weeks now, whilst investigations take place. I have a lot of sympathy for the BL staff. As has been observed, public services can be a relatively easy target.
This is just a quick post of appreciation for PCI Registered Reports. I’ve recently joined the PCI RR community as a ‘recommender’. One thing that spurred me to join is a rather unsatisfactory experience I had as a peer-reviewer, reviewing a manuscript where the experimental design was deeply insufficient.
In 2017, we have a vast toolbox of informative methods to help us analyse large volumes of text. Sentiment analysis, topic modelling, and named entity recognition are to name but a few of these exciting approaches. Computational power and storage capacity are not the limiting factors on what we could do with the 100 million or so journal articles that comprise the ever-growing research literature so far.
This is a quick post to announce what I’ll be doing next after my postdoc at the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge. From June 2017 onwards, I’m delighted to say I’ll be the new Open Access Grants Manager for Arcadia Fund. About Arcadia Fund If you haven’t heard of it before here’s what you need to know: Arcadia is a charitable fund, set up by Peter Baldwin and Lisbet Rausing in 2002.
There are a lot of really interesting works being published over at Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO). If you aren’t already following the updates you can do so via RSS, Twitter, or via email (scroll to the bottom for sign-up). In this post I’m going to discuss why Chad Hammond’s contribution is so remarkable and why it could represent an exciting model for a more transparent and more immediate future of scholarly communications.
Just a quick update to let you know how the new Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal is going. You may remember I wrote a blog post here explaining my enthusiasm for this new journal. I’m delighted to say it is exceeding my expectations.
Yesterday, I tried to read a piece of research, relevant to my interests that was published in 1949. Sadly as is usual, I hit a paywall asking me for £30 + tax to read it (I didn’t pay). Hincks, W. D. 1949. IV.—systematic and synonymic notes on passalidae (col.). Annals and Magazine of Natural History 2:56-64.