Publishing
Category archives for Publishing
The Trouble With Physics
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 10, 2013 
For something related to the book-in-progress, I was reading Raymond Chandler’s classic essay “The Simple Art of Murder” last night, and stumbled across the following quote, where he laments the number of stories in print in the mystery genre in 1950: In my less stilted moments I too write detective stories, and all this immortality…
Science Online Advice: Writing Books
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 11, 2013 Last Friday, when I didn’t have any time to blog, Zen Faulkes wrote an interesting wrap-up post on Science Online 2013 in which he declared he won’t be back. Not because it was a bad time, but because other people would benefit from it more, and his not going frees up a spot for somebody…
Do the New Paper Dance
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 14, 2012 OK, it’s a paper I mentioned here before, when it went up on the arxiv, but the “Comments on Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics” article I wrote this summer is up on the Physica Scripta web site now, and for the next not-quite-thirty days it’s free to read and download: Searching for new physics through…
How Did the arXiv Succeed?
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 12, 2012 In which we look again at the question of why, despite the image of physicists as arrogant bastards, biologists turn out to be much less collegial than physicists. ———— While I was away from the blog, there was a spate of discussion of science outreach and demands on faculty time, my feelings about which are…
It Figures: The Historical Aesthetics of Scientific Publishing
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 30, 2012 Steve Hsu has a post comparing his hand-drawn diagrams to computer-generated ones that a journal asked for instead: He’s got a pretty decent case that the hand-drawn versions are better. Though a bit more work with the graphics software could make the computer ones better. This reminded me, though, of something I’ve always found interesting…
This Week in the Journal of Previously Solved Problems
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 15, 2012 Over at the Scholarly Kitchen, Kent Anderson complains about the uselessness of comments on journals: Comments in online scientific journals have been notoriously poor — either too much material of uneven quality or too little discussion to amount to a hill of beans. All too often, commenting has to be shut down because internecine and…
The Arxiv Is Not a Journal
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 30, 2012 There’s been a lot written recently about academic publishing, in the kerfuffle over the “Research Works Act”– John’s roundup should keep you in reading material for a good while. This has led some people to decide to boycott Elsevier, including Aram Harrow of the Quantum Vatican. I’m generally in favor of this, but Aram says…
How to Read a Scientific Paper
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 10, 2012 My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general “research methods” class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there’s a lot more specialization by subfield), but I’m going to…
O Brave New-Media World That Has Such Bloggers In It
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 10, 2011 I’ve been incredibly busy this term, but not so busy I couldn’t create more work for myself. Specifically, by writing an opinion piece for Physics World about the FTL neutrino business, that just went live on their web site: The result quickly turned into one of the most covered physics stories of the year, with…
Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 1, 2011 This coming June will mark ten years since I started this blog (using Blogger on our own domain– here’s the very first post) and writing about physics on the Internet. This makes me one of the oldest science bloggers in the modern sense– Derek Lowe is the only one I know for sure has been…
