Surveillance Publishing

From my just-published Elephant in the Lab piece: Siphoning taxpayer, tuition, and endowment dollars to access our own behavior is a financial and moral indignity. That we are paying the sellers a second time, after budget-draining subscription and APC outlays, is a...

‘The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv’

Alberto Pepe, Matteo Cantiello, and Josh Nicholson, in their arXiv paper calling on arXiv to overhaul itself: Disclaimer: This article has originally been written and posted on Authorea, a collaborative online platform for technical and data-driven documents. Authorea...

‘Sometimes, accessing money is a bigger problem than making a sale’

The Knowledge Futures Group's Gabe Stein, writing about the head-scratching hurdles faced by KFG in its effort to secure financial support from libraries: If we were selling to for-profit corporations we’d mostly be able say “enter your credit card info here” and that...

‘In defence of writing book reviews’

David Beer, in his love letter to the academic book review: Rather than being at the centre of disciplines, they are seen to be something of a luxury: an indulgent misuse of time spent reading, cover to cover, and then writing something that does not have any...