Big win for Open Access
Major university has refused to renew journal subscriptions with Elsevier. They are pushing for Open Access, will no longer pay excessive fees
Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Major university has refused to renew journal subscriptions with Elsevier. They are pushing for Open Access, will no longer pay excessive fees
Back in 1974, the famed physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology in which the term “Cargo Cult Science” was popularised as a way of describing science that was not really science at all. What we appear to have now is the emergence of Cargo Cult Peer Review. It looks like peer … Read more
A rather frustrating reality for those not lucky enough to have access via a University account are the barriers that exist around many scientific papers. You might perhaps be looking into some topic and would be interested in reading a peer-reviewed paper, but then when you search, you find that it sits behind a paywall put up by … Read more
Indeed yes, a scientific paper entitled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List” has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication. So the story here is that back in 2005 the authors, David Mazières and Eddie Kohler, wrote this “paper” as a joke reply to the gazillions of emails they get from vanity journals. When solicited for a submission … Read more
The Victorian model is passing, the rise of Internet centric open-source journals is here, as an example here is the latest. Stanford neurosurgeon John Adler, MD, has launched Curēus, a new open-source medical journal that leverages crowdsourcing to make scientific research more readily available to the general public. Leveraging the power of an online, crowd-sourced community platform (readers … Read more
One of the many variations of modern creationism (the folks that claim ‘god did it’ is the right answer) is called “Intelligent Design”. There they attempt to refute evolution via the promotion of scientific evidence for an intelligent designer, and also attempt to make it more palatable by omitting all religious terms from what is essentially a religious claim. … Read more