I got a paper rejected from a generativist conference a few years ago. A generativist friend of mine said, “Why did you bother submitting your paper to that conference? You knew they were going to reject it.” I said, “Well, the conference was in town, so I figured I’d send something in anyway.” My friend proceeded to tell me a story from her early grad school days about reviewing papers for her school’s signature conference.

People say you should stand up for what you believe in. They say you should look out for those less fortunate, and speak up for those who don’t get heard. They say that those of us who come from marginalized backgrounds, like TBLG backgrounds for example, but have enough privilege to be out in relative safety should speak up for those who don’t have that privilege.

Academia.edu takes your academic work and puts it behind a privacy-defying signup form, laces it with ads, botches the metadata, and tries to appease you by offering stats and social ranking that promote constant comparison. What’s not to like?

In the previous post, I noted that a chemistry publisher is about to repeat an earlier experiment in serving pre-prints of journal articles. It would be fair to suggest that following the first great period of journal innovation, the boom in rapid publication “camera-ready” articles in the 1960s, the next period of rapid innovation started around 1994 driven by the uptake of the World-Wide-Web.

This week the ACS announced its intention to establish a “ ChemRxiv preprint server to promote early research sharing “. This was first tried quite a few years ago, following the example of especially the physicists. As I recollect the experiment lasted about a year, attracted few submissions and even fewer of high quality.

PLOS ONE notoriously and astonishingly does not have a proofs stage: authors do not get to see how their work is typeset until the very day it appears. Worse, they have a policy of only correcting formatting errors that they themselves introduce by issuing a formal correction notice — a heavyhanded method that most other journals use only for serious errors of fact or process. Unnecessary corrections hurt authors.

I was feeling very nervous, sitting there in Professor Bigshot’s office. I had just been accepted into the PhD program, and was visiting the department to get to know everyone and see if it was the right fit. I hadn?t applied to any other PhD program. If I didn’t go here, I probably wouldn’t get a PhD. You can figure out pretty easily who Professor Bigshot is, if you care. I guess you could say I’m giving her a pseudonym for SEO reasons.

Google Scholar is useful, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value. Case in point: the power couple Prof.

I recently received two emails each with a subject line new approaches to research reporting . The traditional 350 year-old model of the (scientific) journal is undergoing upheavals at the moment with the introduction of APCs (article processing charges), a refereeing crisis and much more. Some argue that brand new thinking is now required.

The university sector in the UK has quality inspections of its research outputs conducted every seven years, going by the name of REF or Research Excellence Framework. The next one is due around 2020, and already preparations are under way! Here I describe how I have interpreted one of its strictures;