I have been spending my quarantine absorbing research on COVID-19 -- especially economic research -- and, in the process, have written a book, Economics in the Age of COVID-19 that will be published at the end of the month by MIT Press. Here is what is interesting about the process. Clearly, this has been quick. …
News from Management Science (Business Strategy)
I recently took over from Bruno Cassiman as the Department Editor for the Business Strategy section at Management Science. This seemed like a good opportunity to reflect on some changes being made -- that is, implementing some of the ideas in Scholarly Publishing and its Discontents -- as well as some things I have learned …
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Economists found something surprising and you won't believe what happened next
Luigi Butera and John List have examined how cooperation is impacted on by uncertainty -- and not just any uncertainty but Knightian uncertainty where outcomes cannot easily be described by a probability distribution. They examine a situation where experimental subjects are contributing to a public good whose returns are uncertain and where individuals may or …
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Why are peer reviews private?
That is a question raised by the experience of a "rogue" neuroscientist profiled in Wired today: SAM NASTASE WAS taking a break from his lab work to peruse Twitter when he saw a tweet about his manuscript. A PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College, Nastase had sent his research out for review at a …
Scholarly Publishing and its Discontents
It's 2017 and so it is high time I wrote and released another book. And so here it is. This one is about scholarly publishing and summarises the research of many people including those generously funded by a Sloan Foundation grant into the Economics of Knowledge Contribution and Diffusion. This book isn't for everyone. It …
Et tu SSRN?
SSRN -- the social science paper repository -- is being acquired by Elsevier. SSRN has always been a for-profit entity and so it shouldn't be a surprise that this has happened. Put simply, there is a commercial rationale to this especially given that it is hard for smaller scale entities -- and SSRN despite its …
The Gates Foundation’s open access move ignores a better way to open knowledge
Last week, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation went far further than any other organization in mandating open access. From January of next year, all research funded by the Foundation will have to be made available and free online -- including appropriate metadata to make the research searchable. While others, such as the Wellcome Trust …
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Prizes for Teams?
The Nobel prize for physics this year was controversial. It wasn't controversial because of the idea 'wot won it' but the number of people who contributed to that idea. However, the Nobel prize has a rule that there can be at most three recipients in a given year. (That doesn't apply to Peace but it …
What is an economic means of assigning credit?
In a recent post at VoxEU (based on a recent working paper entitled "Willful Blindness") Stan Liebowitz argues that the assignment of credit by economics departments to academic researchers is "uneconomic." By this he means that in co-authored papers the credit shares sum to more than 1. Instead, in a survey of economics department chairs he finds that …
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A new type of scholarly journal boycott
We have seen numerous boycott calls with regard to academic publishers but they have generally been about market power and its exploitation. Today, a more serious boycott call was launched with the claim that some publications are harming science itself -- a potentially more serious charge. The call comes from this year's medicine Nobel prize …
Digitopoly 