Publishing
Category archives for Publishing
Quantitative Analysis of Bullshit in Physics Abstracts
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 25, 2011 Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to “unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text.” Like Bee, I couldn’t resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student, which I…
Filtering Isn’t the Problem
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 19, 2011 Via Twitter, Daniel Lemire has a mini-manifesto advocating “social media” alternatives for academic publishing, citing “disastrous consequences” of the “filter-then-publish” model in use by traditional journals. The problem is, as with most such things, I’m not convinced that social media style publication really fixes all these problems. For example, one of his points is: The…
Academic Poll: Refereeing Ethics
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 8, 2011 The “peer reviewers get worse” item in this morning’s Links Dump drew an immediate comment elsewhere to the effect of “of course they do, because they start pawning reviews off on their students. This one was a surprise to me, so here’s a quick poll to see if my subfield of physics is really that…
Science on the Tree 2010: Literature
Posted by Chad Orzel on December 21, 2010 Continuing our series of science-themed Christmas tree ornaments, we have this cute pair of reading bears: “But wait,” you say, “reading isn’t a science!” Ah, but while reading itself may not be a science, science is nothing without the scientific literature. The really essential step in the process of science is the communication of scientific…
A Quick Reputational Poll
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 16, 2010 In a place I can’t link to, I encountered the somewhat boggling statement that “Nature leans more in the direction of Popular Science than Critically Peer Reviewed [Journal].” Thus, a quick poll: Nature is:online surveys Context is for the weak.
How to Read Scientific Papers Without Reading Every Word
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 9, 2010 Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke’s How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading…
Academic Poll: See Longer Blog Post (Forthcoming) for Details
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 9, 2010 Thoreau offers without qualification some complaints about a paper in a glamour journal, ending with: All of this might have been excusable if the big flashy Glamour Journal paper had been followed up with more detailed papers in other places (a common practice in some fields). However, when I searched to see what the authors…
The Popular Science Writing Process
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 27, 2010 Via SFSignal’s daily links dump, Lilith Saintcrow has a terrific post about the relationship between authors and editors: YOUR EDITOR IS NOT THE ENEMY. I don’t lose sight of the fact that I am the content creator. For the characters, I know what’s best. It’s my job to tell the damn story and produce enough…
Paying For Free Stuff Is a Solved Problem, Isn’t It?
Posted by Chad Orzel on December 31, 2009 A couple of days ago, the LHC Blog asked about the future funding of the arxiv pre-print server, currently hosted at Cornell. Cornell is looking to get some external funding, though: Currently the plan is to ask the “heaviest user institutions” (other university library systems) to voluntarily contribute to support arXiv operational costs. The FAQ…
Why Are You Publishing a Comment, Anyway?
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 20, 2009 I tagged Steinn’s post on publishing a comment a few days ago, because I thought it was pretty funny. In the interim, it’s been picked up by the usual suspects as more evidence of the need to completely discard the current publishing model in favor of something more blog-like. None of the subsequent discussion has…
