So I read Jeffrey Brainard’s piece in Science magazine on Clarivate’s decision to punish eLife for innovating – by stripping eLife of a proprietary Journal Impact Factor™ number, that Clarivate itself awards (sidenote: to be clear, I see no value in Journal Impact Factors as they are statistically illiterate, irreproducible, and easily gameable, amongst many other issues that have long been documented). With the

If you’re getting a sense of déjà vu from this blog post title it is probably because we’ve been here before e.g. in 2017, in 2016, in 2015, in 2014. These profitable ‘errors’ seem to keep occurring… Today, Elsevier sold me 48-hours of access to an article in the journal Computational Toxicology , with the title: “Ab initio chemical safety assessment: A workflow based on exposure considerations and non-animal methods”. The price?

The day today is Tuesday 11th June 2024. It marks at least 193 days now since the subscription access journal Heterocycles (e-ISSN: 1881-0942) was taken offline by its publisher. Published since 1973, it is a “key” journal in chemistry and contains over 17,000 articles which have been cited at least 164,000 times. The journal is preserved in the CLOCKSS archive.

UPDATE 2024-06-11 posted here. At the time of writing this (2024-04-11), the entire content of a “key” chemistry journal called Heterocycles , with over 17,000 articles in it, from 1973 to 2023, has been knocked offline due to what the publisher vaguely describes as “various circumstances”. The journal has been unavailable to access online since December 2023, which means the content has been offline for four or five months now!

In December last year, it was widely publicized e.g. in Science magazine [1], that Scopus has been instrumental in legitimizing publication scams whereby authors pay to bypass real scholarly peer review and have their work published on a website that looks like a real scholarly journal but is in fact not a proper journal, merely an impersonation of one.

How many learned societies publish Diamond Open Access journals? To seek an answer to the question posed in the title, I sought out reliable data on open access journals.

As you may have seen in the news, the British Library has been affected by a significant cyberattack. Many of the digital services it provides have gone down and stayed down for many weeks now, whilst investigations take place. I have a lot of sympathy for the BL staff. As has been observed, public services can be a relatively easy target.

This is just a quick post of appreciation for PCI Registered Reports. I’ve recently joined the PCI RR community as a ‘recommender’. One thing that spurred me to join is a rather unsatisfactory experience I had as a peer-reviewer, reviewing a manuscript where the experimental design was deeply insufficient.

“In statistics, a central tendency (or measure of central tendency) is a central or typical value for a probability distribution. Colloquially, measures of central tendency are often called averages. The most common measures of central tendency are the arithmetic mean, the median, and the mode.” — Wikipedia. In the UK, we teach school kids how to calculate the mean, median, and mode in Year 6 (kids aged 10-11), it’s simple stuff.

On the 26 ^th October 2021, Springer Nature published version 1 of a (not peer-reviewed) “white paper” titled “Going for gold: exploring the reach and impact of Gold open access articles in hybrid journals” by Christina Emery, Mithu Lucraft, Jessica Monaghan, David Stuart, and Susie Winter.