This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let us know if you find a mistake. UPDATE *, 09/01/2015: A commenter made me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before.

Skinner used the term “schedules of reinforcement” to describe broad categories of reward patterns which come to reliably control the behavior of his experimental animals. For instance, when he rewarded rats for pressing a lever at a given interval after the last reinforcement (i.e., fixed interval; FI), the animals would pause pressing the lever until just before the interval was over and then start pressing the lever like mad.

I recently was sent a report from a university-wide working group on the publishing habits within the Freie Universität Berlin. I don’t think this document is available online, but I think I’m not doing anything illegal if I publish some of the survey results here. The working group polled all faculty members of the university on various questions concerning scholarly publishing.

Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as Nature or Science . After all, in this competitive and highly specialized days, where a scientist is published all too often is more important than what they have published.

This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in publisher profits, the remaining difference between legacy and SciELO costs amount to US$3160 per article.

There is an interesting study out in the journal PNAS: “Evaluating big deal journal bundles”. The study details the disparity in negotiation skills between different US institutions when haggling with publishers about subscription pricing.

Thinking more generally about the “Recursive Fury” debacle, something struck me as somewhat of an eye opener: the lack of support for the authors by Frontiers and the demonstrative support by their institution, UWA (posting the retracted article). Even though this might be the first time a scholarly journal caved in to legal pressure from anti-science groups, it should perhaps come as no surprise.

Do you remember the RWA? It was a no-brainer already back then that the 40k that Elsevier spent was well-invested: for months, Open Access activists were busy derailing this legislation, leading a virtual standstill on all other fronts. now, just over two years later, two Republican representatives introduced the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology (FIRST) Act.

Talk about egg on face! Nature “the world’s best science” Magazine sets out to publish back-to-back papers on – of all topics – stem cell science.

tl;dr: So far, I can’t see any principal difference between our three kinds of intellectual output: software, data and texts.   I admit I’m somewhat surprised that there appears to be a need to write this post in 2014. After all, this is not really the dawn of the digital age any more.