“A question arose recently about an early career scientist who has been slow to publish results from their PhD research. Now that this person is on the tenure track (TT), they have to make decisions about how best to spend their limited time: pursuing new research vs. finishing old projects …” (more)
[FemaleScienceProfessor, 3 March]
“My job is to conduct research and publish the results, so I’ve become interested in discussions on the internet about models of publishing. There are three tensions in the field: (1) who pays to publish research? (2) who decides what gets published? and (3) who takes any profits? …” (more)
[BishopBlog, 26 February]
“Twenty years ago North America, Europe and Japan produced almost all of the world’s science. They were the aristocrats of technical knowledge, presiding over a centuries-old regime. They spent the most, published the most and patented the most. And what they produced fed back into their industrial, military and medical complexes to push forward innovation, productivity, power, health and prosperity. All good things, though, come to an end, and the reign of these scientific aristos is starting to look shaky …” (more)
[Economist, 11 November]
“Today McGraw-Hill Education announced that it has bought a lecture-capture company called Tegrity Inc, putting the textbook publisher squarely in the education-software business. Officials say they made the move because of the importance of ‘user-generated content’ as textbooks go digital …” (more)
[Jeff Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 October]
“Academic publishing has already reached a point where too much material of too little substance is being published, and this trend is continuing …” (more)
[Stanley W Trimble, NAS, 23 August]
“There is a perception that publishers fleece academic writers. It is true that they sometimes may ever so slightly take advantage of an academic’s salaried situation and professional need to publish. But over more than two decades, I’ve struggled with enough academic book costings to know how hard it is to make them work …” (more)
[Katharine Reeve, Times Higher Education, 5 August]
“… I may be biased about all this, as I have spent quite a few years researching and writing the history of editors and publishers. However, I do think their role is essential in the world of books. The idea of writers uploading their books to the internet and readers simply finding them by searching is a chaotic one, as well a cold and uninviting one …” (more)
[Niamh Cullen, The Little Review, 25 July]
“Previously in this blog I have asked whether today’s university system has the balance between teaching and research about right. But if we accept for a moment that research is a key element in an academic career, and that it is right that it should be so, it would still be appropriate to ask how (and possibly even whether) research performance should be assessed …” (more)
[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 8 June]
“The November issue of The Writer carried an interesting article titled ‘Is a University Press Right For You?’ in which Paola Corso ticked off the positives of publishing through a university press rather than a big-house publisher. Though the article is geared for writers, I thought it a good opportunity to tweak it toward the reader considering the wealth of authorship under its care …” (more)
[Megan Shaffer, Night Light Revue, 7 February]
“I apologise to those of you who have kindly been following this series: it has taken me far longer to get to the end than it should have …” (more)
[Juliana Adelman, Pue’s Occurrences, 6 January]
“Darwin took so long to publish The Origin of Species, he would never have gained permanency/promotion in current academic job market” (tweet)
[Sinead McEneaney, Twitter, 31 December]
“Every postgraduate student perhaps encounters sooner or later the chilling phrase ‘publish or perish’. At the same time, some students inevitably become aware of academics that seem to some extent able to defy this rule, and of the mischievous musings of canteen gossipmongers on how this can be so …” (more)
[History Compass, 8 December]
“The Internet gives everybody the chance to become a publisher. It is now possible for science to reach large audiences, with the potential to eliminate the role of established filters and gatekeepers, such as the traditional peer reviewed scientific journal. This also means that science can be easily reviewed, assessed, rated and commented upon by anybody, reinforcing scientific democracy. Poor research might thus be identified more quickly and debunked. The challenge is to create open access systems and ensure that old gatekeepers are not simply replaced by new ones …” (more)
[John Wood, Science Business, 23 September]
“It costs more to publish an article in a humanities or social sciences (HSS) journal than to publish one in a science, technical, or medical (STM) journal – over three times as much, according to a report soon to be released by the National Humanities Alliance in the United States. The full report is to be released as soon as possible, according to NHA committee chairman William E. Davis. In the meantime, a summary by Jennifer Howard in July 20th’s Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription required] has been generating much discussion and comment …” (more)
[Aoife Geraghty, Read Around Research, 27 August]
“Scholars are embracing the internet to bypass publishers and speed the process of research. Academic publishing seems a world away for most of us, but it’s the intellectual infrastructure that underpins modern life. And, like nearly everything else, it’s being speeded up by the internet …” (more)
[Quinn Norton, Irish Times, 7 August]
“Academics have warned of the ‘Wikipediaisation’ of scholarship following allegations of plagiarism and an ethos of ‘quantity over quality’ in US academic publishing. The controversy stems from the publication of a textbook by Routledge that drew heavily on material from one of its earlier guides. The first text, Theory for Religious Studies, was published in 2004, when the authors signed a contract giving Routledge the right to use the material however it wanted in return for credit and royalties. However, when the authors – William E. Deal and Timothy K. Beal, professors of religious studies at Case Western Reserve University – spotted that much of a later book, Theory for Performance Studies (2007), was identical to their own, they complained to the publisher …” (more)
[Melanie Newman, Times Higher Education, 2 July]
“Such is the pressure to write that academics have no time to read the flood of published work. Academic publishing has always had its own economy and culture, but sector expansion and the intensified push for print have combined to make it a distinctly odd affair. In most subjects, it is a heavily producer-driven activity, generated more by writerly imperatives than by readerly requirements, even allowing for the idea of the communal pursuit of knowledge …” (more)
[John Corner, Times Higher Education, 11 June]
“Sharing research information via a more open access publishing model would bring millions of pounds worth of savings to the higher education sector as well as benefiting UK plc. This is one of the key findings from a new research project commissioned by JISC. Professor John Houghton from the Centre of Strategic Economic Studies at Melbourne’s Victoria University and Professor Charles Oppenheim at Loughborough University were asked to lead research that would throw light on the economic and social implications of new models for scholarly publishing. The research centred on three models …” (more)
[JISC, 27 January]
“I’ve just listened to a programme on Radio 4, Peer Review in the Dock, which claimed to discuss the evidence that peer review in science and academia is a flawed process. It turned out that the subject of the programme was actually rather narrower than that, concentrating on the perceived flaws of peer review in publication of research, rather than the wider use of peer review in assuring standards in learning and teaching or in the Research Assessment Exercise …” (more)
[Ellie Clewlow, Intersecting sets, 13 August]
Ninth Level Ireland 