Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Academic publishing”
A little over a year ago, I wrote about a Heartland Institute conference in Las Vegas where climate change deniers engaged in a failed attempt to poke holes in the massive body of scientific evidence for human-caused climate change. I quoted Bloomberg News: “Heartland’s strategy seemed to be to throw many theories at the wall and see what stuck.” A …
A talk with journalist and science writer Steve Silberman about autism activism, the vaccine wars, and his terrific new book NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.
There are certain advantages to writing out the ideas central to this blog in weekly bursts. Back in the days before the internet, when a galaxy of weekly magazines provided the same free mix of ideas and opinions that fills the blogosphere today, plenty of writers kept themselves occupied turning out articles and essays for the weeklies, and the benefits …
Dr. Richard Smith is an historian specializing in China and its transition to capitalism, and on economics, environmental and ecological issues. He received his doctorate in history from UCLA and has written on the many penetrating investigative reports and research papers on the capitalism’s failures and threats to the preservation of our planet. He is the author of “Green Capitalism: The God that Failed” published earlier this year by the World Economics Association. He is currently working two new books addressing China’s environmental threats and another on capitalism and the global environment.
A study at the University of Montreal shows that the market share of the five largest research publishing houses reached 50% in 2006, rising, thanks to mergers and acquisitions, from 30% in 1996 and only 20% in 1973. “Overall, the major publishers control more than half of the market of scientific papers both in the natural and medical sciences and …
Can we trust scientific literature? A recent report by The Lancet says we can’t, with the report stating “a lot” of scientific studies that are published are incorrect. This is just confirming what can already be seen happening in scientific circles. More and more scientists are coming forward to reveal their research or that of their colleagues has been falsified. Dr. …
Clearing grasslands to make way for biofuels may seem counterproductive, but University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers show in a study today (April 2, 2015) that crops, including the corn and soy commonly used for biofuels, expanded onto 7 million acres of new land in the U.S. over a recent four-year period, replacing millions of acres of grasslands. The study — from …
Dr. Arthur Caplan warns that plagiarism, fraud and predatory publishing is ‘corroding the reliability of research’ NYU Langone Medical Center / New York University School of Medicine (New York, NY) April 3, 2015 – The scientific community is facing a ‘pollution problem’ in academic publishing, one that poses a serious threat to the “trustworthiness, utility, and value of science and …
A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications. The publisher is BioMed Central, based in the United Kingdom, which puts out 277 peer-reviewed journals. A partial list of the retracted articles suggests most of them were written by scholars at …
Scientists are being overwhelmed by too much science. A new scientific study concludes that there are too many scientific studies. Written by researchers in Finland and California, it is entitled “Attention Decay In Science” (pdf). The paper outlines some very simple and difficult realities. For example, it notes that scientists simply can’t keep track of all the studies in their field. …
