Hoisted from the comments on Scott Alexander’s ethics/IRB nightmare, an insight I hadn’t seen before:   And, to bring home again the absurdity:

Akihiro Munemasa, Christos Athanasiadis, Hugh Thomas, and Hendrik van Maldeghem share the chief editor role at a journal that’s like many others across mathematics and the sciences. The Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics is a subscription journal published by one of the big, highly-profitable publishers (Springer Nature). But they haven’t been happy with the fees Springer charges for people to read their articles.

Mark Wilson and I wrote the below piece for the Australian Open Access Support Group. The principles we lay out guide our vision for working to create an open access future governed by the community of scholars, not publishers. In March 2017 a group of researchers and librarians interested in journal reform formalized the Fair Open Access Principles.

Elsevier and other publishers’ ability to detect “self-plagiarism” is an instance of text mining the world’s scientific literature. Over at two vision researcher mailing lists, there is much irritation at being asked to remove sentences that duplicate sentences that one wrote in previous papers, to describe for example the methodology of a study.

The APA’s take-down notices have reminded us that our published articles are owned by them. While the APA has claimed that the initiative was simply to “to preserve the scientific integrity of the research we publish and provide a secure web environment to access the content”, the APA’s $10 million a year of subscription income might have more to do with it. Indeed, the APA may be reliant on this income.

This is a follow-up to my previous post, which was about the APA issuing take-down notices and how you can post preprints to keep your science open.

Dear Psychologist, If you have published in an APA (American Psychological Association) journal and posted the article PDF to a website, you may have already received an email from APA lawyers asking you to take that PDF down: The APA is likely within their legal rights here, but there is a way to continue making your work freely available to the world.

Daryl Bem was already rather infamous before he provided, just this week, this excellent quote: The quote, from this piece on the history of the reproducibility crisis, has been posted and reposted, sometimes with an expression of anger, sometimes with a sad virtual head shake. The derision is well-deserved in the context of Bem’s final experiments, which attempted to show that ESP exists.

[a message sent to the vision researcher community of CVnet and visionlist] Our community and our journals should become more aware of the increasing importance of preprints, and in some cases our journals and our community need to act and change policy. Preprints are manuscripts posted on the internet openly (ideally, to a preprint service or institutional repository), often prior to being submitted to a journal.

I write homework assignments for students. I also need to create a different version of the same document with all the answers and scoring guide for the tutors (teaching assistants). It is irritating to create two different versions of the document by hand. To avoid this, I’ve come up with the following imperfect solution: Write the assignment in .Rmd.

The below is what we’ll be presenting at EPC 2017 (the Experimental Psychology Conference of Australasia) near Newcastle, Australia. The topics are attention and letter processing, word processing, and visual working memory. When do cues work by summoning attention to a target and when do they work by binding to it? Alex Holcombe &