Around the ScholComm Web: Science Journals Have Passed Their Expiration Date, A Decade of Google Scholar and more

More like this

Continuing with the Program we have set for theScienceOnline09, here are some sessions dealing with the Open Access, the freedom of information and the world of publishing: Open Access publishing: present and future: This session is moderated by Bill Hooker and Bjoern Brembs: The world of…
I'm doing a presentation at this week's Ontario Library Association Super Conference on a case study of my Canadian War on Science work from an altmetrics perspective. In other words, looking at non-traditional ways of evaluating the scholarly and "real world" impact of a piece of research. Of…
Back in the day, Time Warner merged with AOL. It turned out to be one of the worst merger ideas in the history of merger ideas, and I believe the evidence suggests that most mergers actually turn out to be clunkers! AOL was simply at the top of its orbit, nowhere but downhill to go. I wonder, I do…
The controversy about Sci-Hub is raging in the halls of scholarship and academic publishing. What's the story, in a nutshell? Sci-Hub is a Russian website that has used donated institutional login credentials to harvest tens of millions of academic articles and has posted them on their site, free…

On Science Journals...Yes the internet has made the distribution of research results MUCH easier and quicker and science journals charge way too much for this service. But anybody who has used Google is increasingly aware of the importance of a some degree of gate-keeping. The peer review system has many problems but it is SOMETHING. And the difficulty of the "author pays" model (even for those of us who believe that IS where we're headed) is that it removes what little incentive there is for the publisher to act as a gatekeeper. Because the distribution of citations for papers approaches the hyperbolic, the metrics and reputations of journals are mostly set by their ability to capture a few superstar papers, not how well they screen out the poorly thought out or executed research.