This was originally posted here! Happy New Year everyone! It’s that time of year when all the summaries of an amazing year of research are coming out, and goodness, what a year it’s been! The folk over at Altmetric have been kind enough to summarise the top 100 articles of 2015, measured by their altmetrics …[Read More]
Publishing
How to write to your MEPs about European Copyright reform
This was originally posted here. I mentioned in a previous post how important it is for researchers to equip themselves with knowledge about copyright issues (like this), and to become active in the struggle against publishers in retaining fair re-use rights for research. In the European Commission, this has been quite a high-profile debate this year (see …[Read More]
A thought on impact factors
OK, bear with me on this one. It’s a bit of a thought dump, but it would be interesting to see what people think. You can’t go anywhere in academia these days without hearing about impact factors. An impact factor is a metric assigned to a journal that measures the average number of citations per …[Read More]
The Open Research Glossary round 2
A few months ago, we published the crowd-sourced Open Research Glossary, details of which can be found here. We’ve taken this to the next level now, and published the updated and much prettier version of this resource on Figshare. This means it is now openly licensed for re-use, and can also be cited like any …[Read More]
OpenCon 2015 Applications are Open!
See this post about Open Con 2014 for more information Applications to attend OpenCon 2015 on November 14-16 in Brussels, Belgium are now open! The application is available on the OpenCon website at opencon2015.org/attend and includes the opportunity to apply for a travel scholarship to cover the cost of travel and accommodations. Applications will close …[Read More]
A letter to the Editor of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society
This post is one inspired by the actions of Ethan White and a couple of other ecologists. Spurred on by their actions, I decided to write a letter to the Editor of a major journal in my field, the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Ethan has performed similar actions too, and this letter draws …[Read More]
Welcome to the Open Glossary
At the London satellite event for Open Con earlier this year, myself and Ross Mounce were given some useful feedback after our joint talk on ‘Open Data’ by one of the attendees. Apparently, some of the terminology was too complex, or specialist, for the subject, and some of the talk was unable to be followed unless you were …[Read More]
Top 10 dinosaur facts!
For those of you who may not have been aware, I was fortunate enough to recently publish a dinosaur book for kids, complete with build-it-yourself pop-out dinosaurs. I’ve recently published an article in The Guardian about it, which features much of the great artwork by Vladimir Nikolov. It’s all about some of the perhaps less …[Read More]
One small step for Nature..
Macmillan have released an interesting press release, announcing that all research papers published in their 49 Nature Publishing Group (NPG) journals, including Nature, will be made free to read online, via one of Digital Science’s pet projects, ReadCube (note that Digital Science is also owned by Macmillan). These articles can be annotated in ReadCube, but not …[Read More]
What causes high retraction rates in high-profile journals?
A Nature News piece is out today featuring comments from me, about how high retraction rates correlate with impact factors in scholarly journals. However, the piece cherry picks my comments a little, and doesn’t really go into that much depth. Bjorn Brembs already has a response up, and seeing as when I was contacted for …[Read More]