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I missed Open Access Week last week, but here is a great video on OA from Jorge Cham (of PhD comix (Piled Higher and Deeper). It is a bit limited in its conception, ignoring important distinctions such as Green OA vs. Gold OA (it is only about the latter). But as a rationale for OA for scientists and scholars, it is great: OA video, click here . I love these illustrated/animated lectures. My favorite is David Harvey's lecture on Crises of Capitalism , part of the British series "RSA Animate"). Okay, now who is going to do the artwork for one of my lectures?

You have a great paper to submit to a journal for publication. What journal should you pick? Should you aim high, at a top-tier journal, or try for a lower-ranking journal? Your chances are better at the latter, but the publicity and prestige are much better at the former. Sometimes lower-ranking journals are more efficient in getting papers reviewed and published, so in many cases you will have a publication in hand much sooner if you go for the lower-ranking journal. Even if the top journal is fast, a rejection means more time formatting and rewriting the paper for a new journal.  We all face these choices, but they loom larger for graduate students and young scholars. They need quick publications, which would favor a lower-ranking journal. But a paper in a top journal looks awfully good on your CV. These questions are on my mind now as I begin looking over applications for an archaeology position in my unit. Candidate A has two papers in top journals, but candidate B (at the sam...

Last May, the U.S. House of Representative passed an amendment that would allow Congress to interfere with the peer review process at the National Science Foundation. Specifically, the bill would prohibit the NSF from funding research in political science. Does this have any implications for archaeology? The amendment was sponsored by Rep. Jeff Flake (R) from my state of Arizona. Flake wants to politicize funding at NSF. He objects to wasteful spending on merit-less research by political scientists, such as $700,000 to develop a new model for international climate change analysis and $600,000 to try to figure out if policymakers actually do what citizens want them to do. There is quite a bit online about this, including Ezra Klein's blog at the Washington Post and an excellent editorial in Nature , which includes the statement, " To conclude that hard problems are better solved by not studying them is ludicrous . Should we slash the physics budget if the problems of dark-ma...

I find myself convinced by Erik Olin Wright's arguments that scholars should actively contribute to Wikipedia. Wright is a sociologist, a productive senior scholar and current President of the American Sociological Association. His views are set out in a clear and concise article in the ASA's newsletter, Footnotes (from November 2011). He has initiated a Wikipedia initiative at the ASA. Here are some quotes from the newsletter article: "I like to think of Wikipedia as an example of a "real utopia." It embodies ideals of equality, open access, participation, and deliberation in a domination-free environment. It has created a public good available to all." "Wikipedia has become an important global public good. Since it is a reference source for sociologically relevant ideas and knowledge that is widely used by both the general public and students, it is important that the quality of sociology entries be as high as possible. This will only happen...

There was an interesting story on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday about a historian (Timothy Messer-Kruse) who tried editing an article in Wikipedia, only to have his changes immediately reversed as soon as he made them. The article concerned the Haymarket affair, when rioters at a labor demonstration in Chicago in 1866 tossed a bomb at police and several people were killed. Evidently Messer-Kruse found some evidence that the standard version of this event, as told in history textbooks, may not be entirely correct. He thinks his attempted revision of the Wikipedia entry was reversed for ideological reasons. The Haymarket affair has been an important part of labor history, and partisans of organized labor apparently did not approve of Messer-Kruse's version of events. The NPR story mentions an interesting-looking book that I have not seen yet: Weinberger, David     2012    Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts a...