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Special issue on publishing reform?
I’ve just been invited to edit a special issue in the MDPI journal ‘publications‘ on a topic I can specify. If I do it, I thought it should revolve around replacing journal rank (i.e., altmetrics, ALM,...
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The cost of the rejection-resubmission cycle
Rejection is one of the unpleasant but inevitable components of life. There are positive components to rejection: they build character, they force you to deal with negativity and sometimes they force...
View ArticleScience Magazine rejects data, publishes anecdote
Yesterday, Science Magazine published a news story (not a peer-reviewed paper) by Gonzo-Scientist John Bohannon on a sting operation in which a journalist submitted a bogus manuscript to 304 open...
View ArticleHow embarrassing was the ‘journal sting’ for Science Magazine?
By now, everybody reading this obscure blog knows about the so-called sting operation by John Bohannon in Science Magazine last week. As virtually everybody has pointed out, the outcome of this stunt...
View ArticleNot to be outdone, Nature Magazine rejects data, publishes opinion
Barely a fortnight has passed since Science Magazine published the outcomes of a hoax perpetrated by one of their reporters, John Bohannon. Not surprisingly, the news article was widely criticized, not...
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How Nature Magazine consistently prefers anecdote over data
Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as Nature or Science. After all, in this...
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Are more retractions due to more scrutiny?
In the last “Science Weekly” podcast from the Guardian, the topic was retractions. At about 20:29 into the episode, Hannah Devlin asked, whether the reason ‘top’ journals retract more articles may be...
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So many symptoms, only one disease: a public good in private hands
Science has infected itself (voluntarily!) with a life-threatening parasite. It has given away its crown jewels, the scientific knowledge contained in the scholarly archives, to entities with...
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Just how widespread are impact factor negotiations?
Over the last decade or two, there have been multiple accounts of how publishers have negotiated the impact factors of their journals with the “Institute for Scientific Information” (ISI), both before...
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Even without retractions, ‘top’ journals publish the least reliable science
tl;dr: Data from thousands of non-retracted articles indicate that experiments published in higher-ranking journals are less reliable than those reported in ‘lesser’ journals. Vox health reporter Julia...
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