In a recent series of posts I’ve become fascinated with how unnecessarily fragile the scholarly communications system seems to be in 2017: Oxford University Press have failed to preserve access to the scholarly record (23-01-2017) Documenting the many failures across OUP journals (24-01-2017) Comparing OUP to other publishers (25-01-2107) As a reminder, academics literally invented the internet, I think we can and should be doing

Any good scientist knows that one must have an adequate experimental control when trying to determine the significance of effects. Therefore, in order to test the significance of the 106 broken DOIs I reported at OUP yesterday, I created a comparable stratified ‘control’ sample of 21 journals NOT published by OUP that are indexed in pubmed.

Updated 2017-02-01: Mathematical equation rendering failures spotted at the journal ‘Molecular Biology & Evolution’ (MBE). Added to the lengthy list. In this post I shall try and summarise the different types of error that are occurring across Oxford University Press (OUP) journals at the moment.

This morning, a PhD student asked me if I could get access to copy of: “Bayes factors unmask highly variable information content, bias, and extreme influence in phylogenomic analyses” by Jeremy M Brown and Robert C Thomson which was first published online (ahead of print) on 20th December 2016.

This week I chose the papers for the Brockington Lab ‘journal club’ here at the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge (I prefer to call it the ‘weekly research round-up’ though, because good content has nothing-to-do with journals per se!). We rotate the choice of papers between each lab member every week.

There are a lot of really interesting works being published over at Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).  If you aren’t already following the updates you can do so via RSS, Twitter, or via email (scroll to the bottom for sign-up). In this post I’m going to discuss why Chad Hammond’s contribution is so remarkable and why it could represent an exciting model for a more transparent and more immediate future of scholarly communications.

Just a quick update to let you know how the new Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal is going. You may remember I wrote a blog post here explaining my enthusiasm for this new journal. I’m delighted to say it is exceeding my expectations.

TL;DR summary: ESA data papers should be free to read but Wiley (ESA’s new publishing ‘partner’) just charged me $45.60 yesterday to access one of them. They have done this kind of ‘accidental’ profit-generation before, as have other big publishers. John Wiley &

This has done the rounds on Twitter a lot recently, and justifiably-so but just in case you haven’t seen it yet… I thought I’d quickly blog about this excellent graph published on a FrontiersIn blog late last year (source/credit: http://blog.frontiersin.org/2015/12/21/4782/ ) With data from 570 different journals, it appears to demonstrate that rejection rate (the percentage of papers submitted, but NOT accepted for publication at a

I’ve written 29 blog posts this year! Still time for one more… This work relates to my new postdoc at the University of Cambridge in Sam Brockington’s group. I’ve been closely examining IUCN RedList data for plant taxa and found some rather odd things.

OpenCon 2015 Brussels was an amazing event. I’ll save a summary of it for the weekend but in the mean time, I urgently need to discuss something that came up at the conference. At OpenCon, it emerged that Elsevier have apparently been blocking Chris Hartgerink’s attempts to access relevant psychological research papers for content mining. No one can doubt that Chris’s research intent is legitimate – he’s not fooling around here.