The HBR saga continues today with HBR responding both in the Financial Times and to me personally about some of the issues that have been raised this week. To recap, here are links to: My initial post My clarification My Financial Times article The HBR response in the Financial Times today was written by the …
Clarifying the issues with Harvard Business Review
My post last week on Harvard Business School Publishing's pricing rules for Harvard Business Review articles used for teaching managed to grab lots of attention. That was, of course, my hope given my use of the 'evil' tag. While that seemed like a bold claim, sometimes you need to draw emotion to get everyone focussed. …
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Harvard Business School Publishing crosses the 'evil' academic line
I am pretty sure that Harvard Business School spends some time teaching its students about Google's "Don't be evil" business statement. While I am also pretty sure that it doesn't take it at face value, I would be very surprised if it challenged not being evil as a worthy goal. If their attempts to introduce …
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Looking again at "Big Deal" scholarly journal packages
One of the things pointed to in the debate over market power and scholarly journals is the rise of "Big Deal" packages. Basically, this has arisen as publishers bundle journals together for a single price. Indeed, as the publishers have merged and acquired more titles, these bundled packages have become more compelling with individual journal …
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Will reputation metrics open scientific publication?
That is the contention of Richard Price, the founder of Academia.edu. Aaron Swartz was determined to free up access to academic articles. He perceived an injustice in which scientific research lies behind expensive paywalls despite being funded by the taxpayer. The taxpayer ends up paying twice for the same research: once to fund it and …
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You knew it was coming. Google Scholar cites can be manipulated
Google Scholar works via algorithm. It examines papers that are hosted in certain domains (usually, publishers and higher education institutions) and then constructs citations based on those papers. As it is easily accessible and also includes citations from unpublished papers, Google Scholar is becoming increasingly popular as a key metric for academic performance. A new paper by Emilio …
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What an academic article of the future should look like
There is much discussion these days about the future of scholarly publishing. Much of this surrounds the value of traditional publishers. When challenged those publishers point to the value and potential value they create. Here is Elsevier responding to a recent boycott led by mathematician Tim Gowers: And we invest a lot in infrastructure, the …
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Opening up library subscriptions to scholarly publications
The people at PHD comics have posted a video summarising the case for open access to scholarly publications. It is a good summary of the issues and particularly salient as I spent yesterday at a Workshop that was looking into the economics of these issues. One part of the video was interesting. It was about …
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Tracing patterns of academic rejection
[HT: Scholarly Kitchen] A new paper published in Science (of course, paywalled) examines publications in biological sciences from 2006 and 2008 to see how many were accepted at first instance and how many were initially rejected (or rejected at least once prior to acceptance). 75% were accepted first time around while many otherwise went through the system quickly. Not surprisingly, …
Particle physics goes open access
From Nature, The entire field of particle physics is set to switch to open-access publishing, a milestone in the push to make research results freely available to readers. Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers …
Digitopoly 