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Plagiarism is nothing to do with copyright
I was astonished yesterday to read Understanding and addressing research misconduct, written by Linda Lavelle, Elsevier’s General Counsel, and apparently a specialist in publication ethics: While...
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Correlation of impact factor and citations: a personal case-study
It’s now widely understood among researchers that the impact factor (IF) is a statistically illiterate measure of the quality of a paper. Unfortunately, it’s not yet universally understood among...
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How is it possible that Elsevier are still charging for copies of open-access...
I hate to keep flogging a dead horse, but since this issue won’t go away I guess I can’t, either. 1. Two years ago, I wrote about how you have to pay to download Elsevier’s “open access” articles. I...
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Interview with Open Access Nigeria
Last night, I did a Twitter interview with Open Access Nigeria (@OpenAccessNG). To make it easy to follow in real time, I created a list whose only members were me and OA Nigeria. But because Twitter...
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What should we do now Beall’s List has gone?
It’s now been widely discussed that Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory and questionable open-access publishers — Beall’s List for short — has suddenly and abruptly gone away. No-one really knows why,...
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Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
I’ve been on Twitter since April 2011 — nearly six years. A few weeks ago, for the first time, something I tweeted broke the thousand-retweets barrier. And I am really unhappy about it. For two...
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Why do we manage academia so badly?
The previous post (Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse) has been a surprise hit, and is now by far the most-read post in this blog’s nearly-ten-year history. It evidently struck a chord...
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Don’t believe the hype: Patagotitan was not bigger than Argentinosaurus
“But wait, Matt”, I hear you thinking. “Every news agency in the world is tripping over themselves declaring Patagotitan the biggest dinosaur of all time. Why are you going in the other direction?”...
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Scientific Reports is an objectively bad journal
As I was figuring out what I thought about the new paper on sauropod posture (Vidal et al. 2020) I found the paper uncommonly difficult to parse. And I quickly came to realise that this was not due to...
View ArticleWhy do people publish in Scientific Reports?
In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why Scientific Reports, in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate Nature, is an objectively bad journal that removes...
View ArticleBlack Lives Matter
Mark Witton says this better than I could: Like many white folks, I have traditionally assumed that simply not being racist was doing my part, and that the actions of others would eventually convert...
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Name the journal. Shame the publisher.
Here’s an odd thing. Over and over again, when a researcher is mistreated by a journal or publisher, we see them telling their story but redacting the name of the journal or publisher involved. Here...
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Cool URIs don’t change
It’s now 22 years since Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote the classic document Cool URIs don’t change [1]. It’s core message is simple, and the title summarises it. Once an...
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When peer-review goes bad … really bad.
THIS POST IS RETRACTED. The reasons are explained in the next post. I wish I had never posted this, but you can’t undo what is done, especially on the Internet, so I am not deleting it but marking it...
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