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

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.

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.

This has done the rounds on Twitter a lot recently, and justifiably-so but just in case you haven’t seen it yet… I thought I’d quickly blog about this excellent graph published on a FrontiersIn blog late last year (source/credit: http://blog.frontiersin.org/2015/12/21/4782/ ) With data from 570 different journals, it appears to demonstrate that rejection rate (the percentage of papers submitted, but NOT accepted for publication at a

Today (2015-09-01), marks the public announcement of Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO for short), a new open access journal for all disciplines that seeks to open-up the entire research cycle with some truly novel features I know what you might be thinking: *Another open access journal? Really? * Myself, nor Daniel Mietchen simply wouldn’t be involved with this project if it was just another boring open access journal.

I read some sad news on Twitter recently. The Ecological Society of America has decided to publish its journals with Wiley: Whilst I think the decision to move away from their old, unloved publishing platform is a good one. The move to publish their journals with Wiley is a strategically poor one. In this post I shall explain my reasoning and some of the widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of this change.

With a first commit to github not so long ago (2015-04-13), getpapers is one of the newest tools in the ContentMine toolchain. It’s also the most readily accessible and perhaps most immediately exciting – it does exactly what it says on the tin: it gets papers for you en masse without having to click around all those different publisher websites. A superb time-saver.

Wiley & Readcube have done something rather sneaky recently, and it’s not escaped the attention of diligent readers of the scientific literature. On the article landing page for some, if not all(?) journal articles at Wiley, in JavaScript enabled web browsers they’ve replaced all links to download the PDF file of the article with links that direct you to Readcube instead.

Last Friday, I genuinely thought Elsevier had illegally sold me an article that should have been open access. This post is to update you all on what we’ve found out since: The Scale of the Problem No one really knows how many articles are wrongly paywalled at all of Elsevier’s various different sales websites.