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The blog of neurobiologist Björn Brembs
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Science PoliticsDiscourseOnlinePost-factual SciencePost-truthBiologiaInglese
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Reading the reactionary defense of the digital stone age in AAAS’ flagship magazine Science , I felt reminded of the now infamous “Make American Science Great Again” letter to Trump and all the other public statements by scholarly societies over the last 30 years on how this internet thing is a threat to their revenue and hence must be opposed.

Science PoliticsMarketsMonopolyPublishersBiologiaInglese
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The market power of academic publishers has been a concern for all those academic fields where publication in scholarly journals is the norm. For most non-economist researchers, the anti-trust aspects of academic publishing are likely confusing and opaque. For instance, libraries and consortia are exempted from organizing tenders for their publication needs as each article exists only in one journal with one publisher.

Science PoliticsAnti-scienceAuthoritarianPoliticiansReformsBiologiaInglese
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Academia is under attack from two angles, which seems to suggest that we may not have decades to get our house in order. The first and older of this two-pronged attack comes from politics. Around the world, anti-science movements seek to discredit reason and abolish science.

Science PoliticsInfrastructureRolls RoyceBiologiaInglese
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or: how journals are like 1930s Rolls Royce Phantom IIs Recently, the “German Science and Humanities Council” (Wissenschaftsrat) has issued their “Recommendations on the Transformation of Academic Publishing: Towards Open Access“. On page 33 they write that increasing the competition […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

Science PoliticsCollectiveInfrastructureMarketsPublishingBiologiaInglese
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Last week’s podium on the commodification of open science entitled “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product?” was surprisingly unanimous on the need to radically modernize academic publishing and abolish the current publishing system relying mainly on corporate publishers with monopoly status.

Science PoliticsCompetitionLobbyismMarketsProcurement RulesBiologiaInglese
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The debate over how publishers use the large “non-publication costs” (Fig. 1) that they incur and academic libraries, mainly, are funding has been going on for some time now. Above and beyond the cost items we discuss in our paper on publication costs, it has been established that investments in surveillance technology are also part of the publisher spending academic libraries are financing.

Science PoliticsInfrastructureJournalsOpen SciencePublishingBiologiaInglese
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More and more experts are calling for the broken and destructive academic journal system to be replaced with modern solutions. This post summarizes why and how this task can now be accomplished. It was first published in German on the blog of journalist Jan-Martin Wiarda. Front cover of the now-vanished Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine . Source: Scan from the-scientist.com website

Science PoliticsEmploymentPublishersSurveillanceTrackingBiologiaInglese
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According to a recent study, employee surveillance is rampant in today’s corporate work environment. This study documents how, often under the pretense of cybersecurity or risk analysis (sort of like academic publishers, actually), companies analyze the behavioral data they collect from their employees to help them make “evidence-led”, i.e., algorithmic employment decisions.