AI slop clears peer-review
Here's an image from a paper that was published by Nature Scientific Reports on November 19 and retracted on December 5: This paper made it through peer review at the journal. Let that sink in fo…
Open Access
15 posts
An odd paper about India's gold OA fees
A paper about open-access fees in India published recently in the journal Current Science has repeatedly surfaced in my networks over some problems with it. The paper is entitled 'Publications in…
News coverage in India of open access papers
In a study published in November 2021, Teresa Schultz, of the University of Nevada, Reno, reported that gold, green and hybrid open-access (OA) modes of publishing of scientific papers were correlated…
Are preprints reliable?
To quote from a paper published yesterday in PLOS Biology: Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version…
Citations and media coverage
According to a press release accompanying a just-published study in PLOS ONE: Highly cited papers also tend to receive more media attention, although the cause of the association is unclear. One rea…
Preference for OA research by income group
Two researchers from Rwanda performed a “systematic computational analysis of the biomedical literature” and concluded in their paper that: … papers with authors based in sub-Saharan Africa, papers w…
On that Poynter debate about stock images and ethical visual journalism
Response to Mark Johnson, Article about free images 'contradicts everything I hold true about journalism', Poynter, February 9, 2018. ∞ Let's get the caveats out of the way: * The artic…
Are the papers behind this year's Nobel Prizes in the public domain?
Note: One of my editors thought this post would work for The Wire as well, so it's been republished there. "… for the greatest benefit of mankind" – these words are scrawled across a ba…
Are the papers behind this year's Nobel Prizes in the public domain?
Note: One of my editors thought this post would work for The Wire as well, so it's been republished there. "… for the greatest benefit of mankind" – these words are scrawled across a ba…
No Space Age for us
We are proud of ISRO's being removed from bureaucratic interference and we are also okay with ISRO giving access only to those journalists who have endeared themselves by reproducing press releases.…
OA shouldn't stop at access
Joseph Esposito argues in the scholarly kitchen why it's okay for OA articles (which come with a CC-BY license) to be repackaged and then sold for a price by other merchants once they're out i…
India's OA policy: Learning from Ioannidis
India’s first Open Access policy was drafted by a committee affiliated with the Departments of Biotechnology and Science & Technology (DBT/DST) in early 2014. It hasn’t been implemented yet. Its f…