“But Mike”, you say, “What’s wrong with publishers making a profit?” Nothing is wrong with publishers making a profit. PLOS made an operating profit of 21.5% in 2011 (though they plough it back into their mission “to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication”.) BioMed Central also makes a profit, and since they are a for-profit company

As things stand there are two principal types of written communication in science: papers and blog posts. We’ve discussed the relative merits of formally published papers and more informal publications such as blog-posts a couple of times, but perhaps never really dug into what the differences are between them. Matt and I have been discussing this offline, and at one point Matt suggested that authorial intent is one of the key differences.

Last Friday I got an email from Dr Stuart Taylor, Commercial Director of the Royal Society, wanting to set up a phone-call to talk about the issue I raised about the editorial procedure on Biology Letters . I got back to him with my Skype handle, but without fixing a date or time. Then on Monday this week I was approached by Lucas Brouwers, a journalist for the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

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Folks, In response to our recent post about reject-when-you-mean-revise and submission-date massaging at Royal Society journals, Susie Maidment tweeted: Since then I have heard from several other sources — including Stuart Taylor, Head of Publishing and Commercial Director of the Royal Society — that these practices are widespread. Can anyone confirm this from their own experience? It needs to be stamped out wherever it happens.

Just a quick one for Matt Butler, who in a comment on the orignal postwrote: I just looked as well, and here’s what I saw: {.size-full .wp-image-6939 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-6939” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6939” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/10/06/biology-letters-does-trumpet-its-submission-to-acceptance-time/biology-letters/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/biology-letters.png”

If you haven’t already read the last post, please go do so before reading this one.

I’ve recently written about my increasing disillusionment with the traditional pre-publication peer-review process [post 1, post 2, post 3]. By coincidence, it was in between writing the second and third in that series of posts that I had another negative peer-review experience — this time from the other side of the fence — which has left me even more ambivalent about the way we do things.

Here’s a blast from the past: {.size-full .wp-image-6889 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6889” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/10/02/2000ads-bizarre-fin-handed-compsognathus/2000ad-prog-8-back-cover-flesh-card-game-compsognathus/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2000ad-prog-8-back-cover-flesh-card-game-compsognathus.jpeg” orig-size=“521,344” comments-opened=“1”

In a third “open letter to the mathematics community”, Elsevier have announced that, for “the primary mathematics journals”, they now offer free access to all articles over four years old. The details page shows that 53 journals are involved.

Having taken time to discuss at length why we posted our neck-anatomy paper on arXiv, let’s now return to the actual content of the paper.