I think we’ve all had enough of the Impact Factor as a way of measuring the quality of journals.

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It’s a bit shocking to find that SV-POW! is going on for twelve years old. (Our very first post was on 1st October 2007, so we’re about fifty days short of that anniversary.) It’s cost us almost nothing to run the blog in that time — in financial terms, at least.

We as a community often ask ourselves how much it should cost to publish an open-access paper. (We know how much it does cost, roughly: typically $3000 with a legacy publisher, or an average of $900 with a born-open publisher, or nothing at all for many journals.) We know that peer-review is essentially free to publishers, being donated free by scholars. We know that most handling editors also work for free or for peanuts.

I hate to keep flogging a dead horse, but since this issue won’t go away I guess I can’t, either. 1. Two years ago, I wrote about how you have to pay to download Elsevier’s “open access” articles.

From the files of J. K. Rowling. Publisher #1 Dear Ms. Rowling, Thank you for submitting your manuscript Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We will be happy to consider it for publication. However we have some concerns about the excessive length of this manuscript. We usually handle works of 5-20 pages, sometimes as much as 30 pages. Your 1337-page manuscript exceeds these limits, and requires some trimming.

I was astonished yesterday to read Understanding and addressing research misconduct, written by Linda Lavelle, Elsevier’s General Counsel, and apparently a specialist in publication ethics: So here (right in the first paragraph of Lavelle’s article) we see copyright infringement equated with plagiarism.

In the last few weeks, it’s been my pleasure and privilege to give invited talks on open access to both UCL and the University of Ulster. (Both of them went well, thanks for asking.) Now they come to process expenses, and both universities have asked for scans of my passport. I explained to UCL that I was only expecting expenses, not a fee, and they backed down;

It’s well worth reading this story about Thomas Herndon, a graduate student who as part of his training set out to replicate a well-known study in his field. The work he chose, Growth in a Time of Debt by Reinhart and Rogoff, claims to show that “median growth rates for countries with public debt over roughly 90 percent of GDP are about one percent lower than otherwise;

More of my thoughts on the Finch Report; you may wish to read part 1 first. As before I will be quoting from the executive summary (11 pages) rather than the full report (140 pages). Changing culture Section 4 ( What needs to be done , on page 7) begins as follows: This is a crucial point.