Publishing

There's been some recent discussion about what eBooks will mean for publishing (ScienceBlogling Chad Orzel has a good roundup). As it often is, my take on this is 'follow the money.' Maybe my reading habits are skewed*--or more accurately, my book acquisition habits are skewed--but about eighty percent of the books I read I check out from the library (it's lower for fiction, nearly 100 percent for non-fiction). I don't think most books, especially non-fiction, where it's really hard to judge from reviews if a book is any good, are worth the full hardcover price (or even a twenty to thirty…
The never-ending discussion of whether the Web can or should replace books has shifted into the corners of blogdom that I follow again, with Kevin Drum arguing for more books, Henry Farrell arguing for shorter books, and Jim Henley agreeing with Henry, and expanding it to fiction. They're all at least partly right-- more shorter books would be a good thing. I do want to pick up on one thing Kevin said, though. He writes: This is, I grant, a purely personal reaction, but one of my occasional frustrations with the blogosphere is a sense that people sometimes think they can understand complex…
I'm a scientist and my research is supported by NIH, i.e., by American taxpayers. More importantly, the science I do is for anyone to use. I claim no proprietary rights. That's what science is all about. We make our computer code publicly available, not just by request, but posted on the internet, and it is usable code: commented and documented. We ask the scientists in our program to do the same with the reagents they develop. Reagents are things like genetic probes or antibodies directed against specific targets mentioned in the articles they publish. There is an list of the reagents on the…
Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.) The session was led by John McKay and Eric Michael Johnson. John posted the text of his presentation and Eric posted his presentation a la YouTube. I'm going to take this as permission to skip doing a proper recap here. Instead, I'm going to write about the big ideas this session raised for me. First, I'm struck by how easy it is for those of us who were trained to do science to know very little about where scientific practices come from --…
These are a continuation of my notes. This portion has been transcribed from my scribble - I was sitting on stage for the second half of the day so live blogging didn't really seem appropriate :( If there is something wrong, not malicious, just bad handwriting.   Diane Harley, Senior Researcher and Director, Higher Education in the Digital Age Project She's an anthropologist who has long studied the issues around new technology for scholarship and teaching. She's not an advocate for any particular type of approach for integrating new technology. She looks at value systems and faculty…
I attended this one day pre-conference session on February 3, 2010. I got here after the first group of speakers, unfortunately, due in part to #snOMG and part to parking confusion.   Barbara Kline Pope on Free at the National Academies Press Mission is to disseminate books from National Academies while being completely self sustaining.  Their content is created by volunteers who are subject matter experts asked to examine a particular issue of interest. Everything from global climate change to the care and treatment of lab animals. Very much the long tail, biggest seller had  13k sales, but…
       Image: Gideon Mendel / The GuardianJournalist William Fisher of the Inter Press Service News Agency has just used my recent work on Haiti for his story on the need for transparency and equality in the development aid that the West provides to Haiti: Journalist Eric Michael Johnson, writing in The Huffington Post, notes that "Haiti has a historically unhealthy dependence on foreign commerce and finance, from the colonial days of the sugar trade to the current assistance provided by developed countries." "Now the same politicians and financial elites that helped create this mess are…
Many of us self-styled journalists and bloggers lack formal training in what news reporting is really all about. Fortunately Charlie Brooker at BBC4 has this helpful report that can make even the novice journalist a professional reporter in no time. While this is primarily intended for TV journalists, I think there are some effective strategies that can still be gleaned from knowing just what professionalism is really all about. H/T David Wescott
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 raw material that we can trim it into reasonable shape. (Which means I am responsible for my deadlines, but we knew that.) I'm also way too close to the work to be able to see it objectively. So, 99% of the time, the editor is right. Read it. It's good, and very true. "Yeah, but that's…
Here at ScienceBlogs we regularly take The Huffington Post down a notch by pointing out such cutting edge lunacy as vaccine denialism or pseudoscientific spiritualism masquerading as health advice. Now the latest in a long list of unsubstantiated crazy is on full display. Some writer named Eric Michael Johnson, who clearly thinks he's so self important as to include his middle name, has published an article called "Haiti's Political and Economic Earthquake" on the US and World Bank role in maintaining Haiti's poverty. Since 1990 there have been two US-supported military coups, a series of…
After ten long years, the serious countdown has begun for the publication of my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which will be on sale nationwide exactly SEVEN DAYS from today.  I've been posting about my impending book tour, and all the great coverage the book has been getting, on Twitter and Facebook, but thought I'd also post a bit of a press round up here, and an update, for those who (gasp) don't spend all of their time in those places.  If you don't know what my book is about: it tells the story of a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells -- taken without her knowledge…
Horror author Cherie Priest has a very nice post from a couple of days ago called Control. It's basically about what mass market fiction authors do and don't have control over in the book production process. Now, the mass market fiction publishing niche is hardly the main concern on this blog, but I also think it's interesting to see what she comes up with and compare it with the list of things academic authors both do and don't have control over. On some points it's strangely the same but mostly starkly different. It's also worth contemplating how this list would be affected by an…
This is the brief presentation I gave on Saturday, Jan. 16 as part of this year's ScienceOnline conference. I was thrilled to have PZ Myers, Greg Laden and Janet Stemwedel present (the latter of whom posted her thoughts on the session). John McKay and I led a discussion on the intersection between open access and scientific innovation. See the program description here and these posts for more information. In John's section he emphasized how the early history of scientific publishing was one where individual researchers simply pooled their letters into journals and shared them with one…
2. Rebooting Science Journalism in the Age of the Web (description here): Sciblings Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science and David Dobbs of Neuron Culture as well as the author of Reef Madness and the forthcoming The Orchid and the Dandelion, joined science writer extraordinaire (and duck sex enthusiast) Carl Zimmer and cell biologist/blogger John Timmer for an excellent discussion of what science journalism means in the age of the internet. The take home message was that science journalism is in a state of flux. What had previously been traditional journalism in which the reporter…
This past weekend I was in Durham, North Carolina (my old stomping grounds) attending the annual ScienceOnline Conference that focuses on science communication in the digital age. I am pleased to report that Anton and Bora have built on their previous successes to accomplish something rare for a conference: it was both relevant and refreshingly innovative. In the next few posts I will highlight some of the workshops I attended and what the important message I got from the panelists involved: 1. From Blog to Book: Using Blogs and Social Networks to Develop Your Professional Writing (…
   The Open Laboratory?! You're kidding? Woo hoo!!!!!!!!My post for Nature Network, Male Chauvinist Chimps or the Meat Market of Public Opinion? has been selected for this year's Open Laboratory as an example of the year's best online science writing. For those who have followed the developments of Ardipithecus ramidus, it will interest you to know that Owen Lovejoy used this study as the basis for his argument that male provisioning was responsible for the origin of bipedalism. Many thanks to Bora and Scicurious (this year's guest editor) for selecting my piece. They should be…
In the past few years a number of large electronic resources have gone through rather dramatic interface changes - mostly for the better, mostly desperately needed. Some typical things added are faceted presentation of search results, more personalization options, better ways to save and share items, cleaner design, green. I don't know why but everyone is changing their logo and site theme to some combination of green (kelly or lime), orange, and blue.(ok, I can't wait for this phase to be over!). We could talk about the various qualities of each of these design choices, but instead, I want…
Until the digital age, content was scarce. It wasn't scarce because people didn't create it; it was scarce because it required an investment to distribute it. That's no longer true. Anybody with an Internet connection can make anything they write (or snap or video or sing) available to anybody else with an Internet connection. For just about free. That's just one reason -- among many -- why the amount of content choices available to everybody has mushroomed in the past 15 years. When the supply of something goes up faster than demand, the price of the something drops. Or, put another way,…
One of the open problems in article level metrics is how to automate, quantify, and describe the exposure an article has had in popular science pieces in newspapers and general science magazines. Peter Binfield (PLoS) and Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka. (European Research Council) both brought this up at the NSF Workshop I attended yesterday. I agree that this is needed. The old models of communication in science that either describe scholarly communication among scientists or popular communication with non-scientists are not enough. Lewenstein [1] and Paul [2] (among others) each describe…
tags: Green Man, Blue Cat, literature, ONN, Onion News Network, comedy, humor, satire, fucking hilarious, streaming video Good news for those of you who wish to purchase a new book for your friends and colleagues for Christmas: the book, Green Man, Blue Cat has finally been published to rave reviews! The intended audience is children, but apparently working adults are the biggest fans. I can hardly wait for my review copy! Adults Go Wild Over Latest In Children's Picture Book Series How many thousands of copies do you think will be sent to George Bush as a Christmas present? I'm taking your…