The Boycott of Elsevier

As pointed out by Chris Fairless in the comments on a recent blog post of mine, a movement has started to boycott Elsevier because of their aggressive business practices that hurt libraries and restrict information. The petition is called http://thecostofknowledge.com/ and started with a blog post here. You can take a stand by signing up […]

The politicization of the scientific publishing process

On one topic, Congress seemed to be moving in the right direction. Over the past few years, emphasis was placed on making the research that taxpayers funded open access—in other words, free for all to view. According to a recent article by Wired, a bill called the Research Works Act introduced by Reps Carolyn Maloney […]

The decreasing number of studies with negative results

When I lived in Oklahoma, Chuck Doswell used to lament to me that it was difficult to publish null cases in meteorology (for example, when something was forecast to happen, but didn’t). Later, when talking to Roseanne McNamee at the University of Manchester, she lamented the same. There are even several journals for negative results: […]

Even the University President gets rejected

From the weekly update by University of Manchester President and Vice Chancellor Dame Nancy J. Rothwell, DBE, FRS: I had some bad news on the research publication front, my research group had a great paper rejected by completely unreasonable referees – they were obviously biased – or at least we think so. More work to […]

Very short abstract

From arXiv.org: Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement? M. V. Berry, N. Brunner, S. Popescu, P. Shukla (Submitted on 13 Oct 2011) Abstract Probably not. [Thanks to Dan Housley for pointing this out.]

Will asking a question get your science paper cited more?

My friend Jim Steenburgh over at Wasatch Weather Weenies alerted me to this column in the Guardian newspaper. The column points out something that we scientists may know but forget from time to time: factors other than the quality of the science determine whether and how often our articles get cited by others. Among the […]

The Top Journals in Science (for retractions)

Roger Pielke Jr. reports on a Wall Street Journal article on the number of retractions published in scientific journals. The top three journals in the number of retractions (1900 to 2010)? 1. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (57 retractions) 2. Science (54 retractions) 3. Nature (43 retractions) Graphic here by N. Saunders. Think […]

Please don’t write multiple-part papers!

I’ve talked about this topic of writing multiple-part papers before. Earlier this year, I published an article about what the data show from Monthly Weather Review. Schultz, D. M., 2011: Rejection rates for multiple-part manuscripts. Scientometrics, 86, 251-259. [PDF] I found that although the rejection rates for multiple-part manuscripts were not that different from the […]

The proliferation of scientific literature

For some perspective on my previous post about the growing number of online open-access journals, I was reminded today of an article by Brian Vickery (1999) describing the development and explosion of the scientific literature during the 1900s. That article discussed the fact that many scientists were already overwhelmed by the huge amount of scientific […]

The Increasing Number of Open-Access Publishers: A Good Thing?

As a specialist in your field of research, we are pleased to invite you to contribute to our forthcoming Open Access book, XXXXXX. The book will be published by XXXXXX, Open Access publisher of books and journals in the fields of science, technology and medicine. XXXXX is a pioneer in the publication of Open Access […]

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