[NOTE: see the updates at the bottom. In summary, there’s nothing to see here and I was mistaken in posting this in the first place.] Elsevier’s War On Access was stepped up last year when they started contacting individual universities to prevent them from letting the world read their research.

In discussion of Samuel Gershman’s rather good piece The Exploitative Economics Of Academic Publishing , I got into this discusson on Twitter with David Mainwaring (who is usually one of the more interesting legacy-publisher representatives on these issues) and Daniel Allingon (who I don’t know at all). I’ll need to give a bit of background before I reach the key part of that discussion, so here goes.

The Scholarly Kitchen is the blog of the Society of Scholarly Publishers, and as such discusses lots of issues that are of interest to us. But a while back, I gave up commenting there two reasons. First, it seemed rare that fruitful discussions emerged, rather than mere echo-chamberism;

I thought Elsevier was already doing all it could to alienate the authors who freely donate their work to shore up the corporation’s obscene profits. The thousands of takedown notices sent to Academia.edu represent at best a grotesque PR mis-step, an idiot manoeuvre that I thought Elsevier would immediately regret and certainly avoid repeating.

It’s now widely understood among researchers that the impact factor (IF) is a statistically illiterate measure of the quality of a paper.

Reading the Government’s comments on the recent BIS hearing on open access, I see this: Following the link provided, I read: I’m completely, completely baffled by this.

I recently handled the revisions on a paper that hopefully will be in press very soon. One of the review comments was “Be very careful not to make ad hominem attacks”. I was a bit surprised to see that — I wasn’t aware that I’d made any — so I went back over the manuscript, and sure enough, there were no ad hom s in there. There was criticism, though, and I think that’s what the reviewer meant.

Robin Osborne, professor of ancient history at King’s College, Cambridge, had an article in the Guardian yesterday entitled “Why open access makes no sense“. It was described by Peter Coles as “a spectacularly insular and arrogant argument”, by Peter Webster as an “Amazingly wrong-headed piece” and  by Glyn Moody as “easily the most arrogant &

Want to get rich? Heck, yes!

Folks, I am preparing a manuscript for PLOS ONE, which uses numbered references rather than author+date citations like sane journals. And I am hating it. I am taking perfectly good statements like: And reformatting them as: Which doesn’t look right at all. My question: how, when using numbered references, can I properly refer to page-range and figure number? Because there has to be a way — doesn’t there?