I wrote recently about several examples of humorous articles written largely to parody the scientific enterprise which had found themselves, bizarrely, behind paywalls. I argued that libraries are not only footing the bill for access to genuine scientific papers, but also this more frivolous content. Indeed, individual researchers may end up paying an extra fee […]
In 1995, Forbes magazine proclaimed that the giant Dutch academic publisher Elsevier would be “the Internet’s first victim.” It seemed clear to everybody that their business model, in fact the hugely profitable business model of all scholarly publishers, was obsolete. In the same article, Paul Ginsparg, the developer of ArΧiv, is quoted as saying: “We’re […]
Even before the open access movement had coalesced, a time bomb was being duct-taped to its foundations in the form of what became known as “hybrid” open access publishing. The first journal to offer hybrid open access, way back in 1998, was a learned society journal called the Florida Entomologist. As with all roads to […]
Photo by Marco Verch (CC-BY 2.0) From the very beginning of the digital shift, scholarly publishers have acted in what can only be described as bad faith. In the late nineties, Dutch academic journal publisher Elsevier was facing decreasing profit margins resulting from ever-increasing printing and distribution costs for its physical journals. The competitive atmosphere […]
The ambition that took Robert Maxwell from a poor Yiddish background in rural Czechoslovakia to the highest echelons of British society would eventually prove to be his downfall. Maxwell escaped the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, fought in both the Czechoslovak and British armies across Europe and acted as a spy for fledgling state of Israel. […]
The Philosophical Transactions cannot, for much of its history, be described as a financial success. After its initial run under that long-suffering, overloaded secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, the journal continued to be published by successive secretaries of the Society in a largely unofficial capacity and entirely at their own expense. Curiously it […]
The first systematised form of scientific dissemination was the writing of personal correspondence which, as I have explained previously, was decidedly not up to the task. Realising the shortcomings of this method of scholarly communication, several of these nascent scientists hit upon the same solution: the scholarly journal. The first periodical publication that could be […]
I came across this book after reading about it in Times Higher Education, where Miedema was interviewed for an article on narrative CVs. It was mentioned in passing that he had written a book about open science that was also combined with a personal memoir of his experiences. Now, I love a bit of research […]
In 1974, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) published a now-legendary article by Dennis Upper of the Behavior Therapy Unit at the Veterans Administration Hospital, Brockton, Massachusetts. It was titled The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of “Writer’s Block”. Now, it doesn’t take a PhD to make the logical leap to the rather obvious […]
When they first arose in the seventeenth century, the first “learned societies” held regular meetings at which members and their guests performed experiments and demonstrated their findings for an enthusiastic and educated audience. The meetings were often held in secret, due to the potential for conflict between the new scientific approach and the strictures of organised […]
Open Warfare 