sey075

  The shit is now hitting the fan in the matter of faculty posting their articles on university websites. My colleagues and I have just gotten a "takedown order" from our university. I'm not sure how I am going to handle this. I have always considered my publications page the heart of my scholarly career and the most important thing in my online presence. Pretty soon that page is going to be a mess, with posts of preprints instead of final pdfs, and links to (often locked up) journal websites. Whenever someone figures out an easy way to set up a quickie repository with a reprint button, I'll do that. In the meantime, I really hope that Academia.edu and Selected Works can withstand the pressure from the commercial publishers, and allow my pdfs to remain online at those places. This round of scholarly regression was kicked off when Elsevier started patrolling its "property" in the form of journal articles posted on various faculty websites. Academia.edu was...

A recent article in The Guardian is very critical of the journals Science, Nature and Cell. The problem with those journals -- beyond the fact that they won't accept my articles! -- is that they allow journalism factors to displace scientific reasons in article selection. The article, published online in The Guardian Dec 9, 2013, is titled: Nobel winner declares boycott of top science journals: Randy Schekman says his lab will no longer send papers to Nature, Cell and Science as they distort scientific process. "Schekman [Nobel prize winner in Physiology or Medicine] said pressure to publish in "luxury" journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash." ..... The article quotes biochemist Sebastian Springer: "The system is not me...

A couple of years ago I read a blog post by an academic psychologist (I forget now who or where) arguing for the academic and scientific benefits of using Twitter. She found new papers, found new colleagues, and improved her professional life. So I gave it a try. I signed up, followed some people, and spend a few months making an effort to find something useful. I did find some interesting current-events material, but nothing that could be remotely considered as scientifically or intellectually useful. I still have the account, inactive, in case things change in the future. So, I was looking at an archaeology blog on the page of the American Anthropological Association, titled Archaeology in North America by Robert Muckle. He has a post titled "Archaeology in 140 characters or less," arguing for the value of Twitter. This is a somewhat odd blog, since the entries seem to be undated. Maybe the post was posted yesterday, or maybe it was put up ten years ago. I skimmed through ...