Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
What’s Wrong with Peer Review?
Academic capitalism exhibit a lack of transparency and accountability where it truly matters. Peer review and the ways in which journals often handle peer reviews are one key site of such intransparency and unaccountability.
Making a Modern Encyclopedia Into a Tool for Lifelong Learning
Creating a modern academic encyclopedia is a labor of love – years of effort that is both conceptual and physical, dozens or even hundreds of writers to corral and then try to control, the ever-present march of time threatening to date all your efforts before anyone see your work, and the possibility that even serious scholars might just Google their question rather than reach for a well-vetted volume.
Why Open Access Will Boost Publisher Profits
Shaun Khoo argues that whilst a shift to gold (pay to publish) open access would deliver wider access to research, the lack of price sensitivity amongst academics presents a risk that they will be locked into a new escalating pay to publish system that could potentially be more costly to researchers than the previous subscription model.
Examining Open Access and Commercial Success
If higher fees result in fewer academics wanting to publish with a journal, then it seems likely when a journal introduces or increases its fees, it should see a reduction in the number of articles published. But researcher Shaun Khoo did not find any evidence that this was the case.
#MeToo: Tackling Harassment in Academic Publishing
The #MeToo movement has slowly spread across to other sectors as people begin to come forward with their own stories of sexual harassment and bullying. In academic publishing, this conversation was in part started in February by Alison’s Mudditt’s powerful post on The Scholarly Kitchen. Muddit chaired a recent panel looking at sexual harassment, and ways to combat it, at the annual ALPSP conference.
How Should I Approach Reviewing an Article?
Most early career researchers receive little to no training on how to peer review, and it’s not always easy to find consistent or helpful guidance. Here, during Peer Review Week, Katrina Newitt offers some helpful advice on how to get started.
How Do I Get Published? Five Tips to Successfully Publish an Academic Paper
Standards are high and getting an academic article published is not easy, but there are certain things you can do to improve your success rate. A member of the SAGE Journals Author Relations team — SAGE is the parent of Social Science Space — offers five tips on the smartest way to navigate these challenges.
Literature Reviews Are Already Broken, So Let’s Kill Them
The literature review is a staple of the scholarly article. But when reviews misrepresent previous studies or suggest there’s a paucity of information when there isn’t, doesn’t,this degrade the knowledge base? Richard P. Phelps argues that, given the difficulty of verifying an author’s claims during peer review, it is best that journals drop the requirement for a literature review in scholarly articles.
