Getting named on a journal article is the ultimate prize for an aspiring academic. Not only do they get the paper on their CV (which can literally be money in the bank), but once named, all the subsequent citations accrue to each co-author equally, no matter what their contribution.
The move towards including the first person perspective is becoming more acceptable in academia, notes the University of Queensland’s Peter Ellerton, who adds, there are times when invoking the first person is more meaningful and even rigorous than not.
The necessity of rigorous if uninspiring academic writing is perhaps best illustrated with the story of a prominent 18th-century intellectual named Franz Anton Mesmer. He believed that illnesses were caused by blockages that interfered with the healthy flow of magnetic fluid through the body.
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?
The academic publishing paradigm is changing, driven in large part by calls for open access to publicly funded research. In this second of two parts, the university librarian for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill explains the thinking behind of a pilot program UNC inked with a major academic publisher.
As the educational reading landscape shifts to digital, Naomi Baron argues we must find proven strategies to help students become more aware of the best ways to read and study online – especially as regular printed textbooks gradually begin to disappear.
The future of the academic monograph has been questioned for over two decades. At the heart of this ‘monograph crisis’ has been a publishing industry centred on the print publication of monographs and a failure and lack of incentives to develop business models that would support a transition to open digital monographs. In this post Mike Taylor argues that if monographs are to be appropriately valued, there is a pressing need to further integrate monographs into the digital infrastructure of scholarly communication. Failing this, the difficulty in tracking the usage and discovery of monographs online, will likely make the case for justifying further investment in monographs harder.
In the wake of Elsevier shuttering access to its current journal articles at the University of California, the university librarian at UC-Davis reviews the context of the dispute and argues open access offers the best path for academia’s future.
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.
A new preprint was recently shared on PeerJ Preprints on the Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations. Alice Fleerackers, Juan Pablo Alperin, and Erin McKiernan discuss the investigation and the findings on how the flawed metric is currently used in tenure and promotion decisions in universities across North America.
Large data sets can now be quickly analyzed to assess whether or not certain features, previously deemed unimportant, can actually affect the chances of a research paper being accepted for publication. In this post, James Hartley looks at new research on weekly submission dates.
The U.S. military’s innovation incubator, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has signed the Center for Open Science to create a research claims database as DARPA’s first step to assign a ‘credibility score’ to social and behavioral science research.
