Social Science Space

Chapters in books are, thanks to digital open access, once again rivalling journal articles in their visibility to academic communities, their usefulness as teaching resources and in their ability to tackle innovative and state of-the-art topics.

The principal investigator of an experiment to see how well academic videos can help students understand journal articles suggests the answer is yes, it can help a lot.

A new report from the Committee on Publication Ethics, or COPE, offers an intriguing way to look at the differences between academic disciplines: what do journal editors routinely identify as struggles?

Predatory publications are different from mainstream journals because they charge exorbitant fees to publish the articles they solicit, and they don’t follow any of the quality assurance processes expected in academic publication. Academics in the developing world have become a favorite target for these journals, and many seem to be falling into the trap. We need to ask why.

The need to ‘publish of perish’ may send many academics adrift in unknown and dangerous waters of the predatory and vanity journals. It’s worth keeping a weather eye before sailing over the edge.

Authorship of an article seems like it ought to be straightforward, but of course it’s not. Even with greater scrutiny, abuse of the process — both adding the wrong people and subtracting the right ones — continues.

The editor of an open-access journal looks at the benefits (and some of the headaches) associated with that model.

So you’ve written a snappy and yet accurate and informative title for your journal article, and so after your victory lap you spend just a few seconds thinking about the keywords. That’s probably a mistake, argues the just-retired editor of an important political science journal.

Simon Ball, Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow, discusses the dangers of Gold Route OA to the Humanities and scholarship in general.