Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Many academics still operate under the flawed logic that good writing must be complex writing (or vice versa).
The more brazen the willingness to commit academic fraud, the harder it becomes to prevent, suggests Ian Freckelton. So while there is a role for codes of conduct or even criminal courts, finding ways to push temptation to deceive even further out of mind will likeley prove even more successful.
In the past few years there has been an insidious rise in predatory journals and publishers, notes Adele Thomas, and African academics have not been immune to their predation.
In a joint statement, 10 editors representing some of the academia’s most prestigious journals for management, organisational behavior and work psychology research, have vowed to publish research that fails to prove a hypotheses.
Peer review is a powerful tool for sussing out the truth, but it’s not all-powerful. We also need to develop ways to reward scientists who do make their publications, data and methodology open for even greater scrutiny.
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.
We need honest researchers who monitor their own behavior; we need to have scrutiny by other researchers in the field; and we need an engaged public. But what do we have, asks Judith Stark.
When McDonald’s came under sustained criticism from campaigners in the 1980s, the company responded by constructing a carefully crafted image of corporate […]