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DailyDirt: Problems With Peer Reviewed Publications

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Peer review isn’t exactly a sexy topic, but it’s an essential part of academic publishing — and it may need to change a bit to keep up with the times. Peer review is typically a thankless chore that is distributed among academics working in a network of related fields, and sometimes personal politics can enter into the process if the subject matter is obscure enough. Misconduct in peer review doesn’t usually get the same kind of coverage as various journalistic scandals (eg. Rolling Stone, Buzzfeed, etc), but the damages done can be even more significant to society.

• Peer review processes aren’t free of corruption — with some third party agencies offering services that fake reviews or try to improve a paper’s odds of being published in other unsavory ways. The publication system for scientific work doesn’t seem to have a great way to deal with this issue besides retracting (instead of correcting) articles published in error. Dozens of papers have been retracted by BioMed Central recently, but the problems with peer review appear to be much more widespread. [url]
• Some scientific papers are published for a fee — with absolutely no quality control whatsoever. The impressively-titled International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology accepted a paper that consisted of nothing but “Get me off your fucking mailing list” repeated over and over. [url]
• Paying for expedited peer review sounds sketchy, right? Rubriq’s peer-review service promised a review within 3 weeks or your money back — but perhaps these kinds of services should be subject to yet another round of reviews. [url]
• Can publishers try to automate the detection of fake papers and poorly-reviewed articles before they turn into embarrassing mistakes? Artificial intelligence just isn’t that good, but perhaps software will make it harder for people to detect shady predatory publications. [url]

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Filed Under: academia, journals, media, natural language processing, peer review, publications, retractions, rubriq, scandals

DailyDirt: Peer Reviewed Publications Are Everywhere

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Peer reviewed publications have been under some additional scrutiny lately, as some of the practices of peer review aren’t quite as honest and reliable as they once might have been. Fortunately, there are some solutions that create alternatives to the peer review process that involve opening up the content for more reviewers to study, question and verify results. Having reliable information more widely available to the public sounds like it can’t go wrong, but it’s not easy to build a reputation on a small database of preprints. However, as more and more significant results come from unlikely people, the process of peer review will need to adapt and account for unexpected authors.

• Academic journals are a multi-billion-dollar industry with a handful of dominant publishers. These paywalled systems could be disrupted by more open publishing schemes used by organizations such as PLOS, arxiv.org and academia.edu — if the next generation of peer review turns out to be effective and economical. [url]
• PubPeer creates an anonymous forum for criticizing technical papers — offering a kind of alternative to the traditional peer review process to help weed out unreliable publications. However, the anonymous nature of PubPeer may be threatened by a court order to reveal a commenter’s identity over alleged defamation. [url]
• A scientific publication that’s peer reviewed by kids (age 8-16yo) is getting children into the game of science early. Frontiers for Young Minds isn’t exactly the cutting edge of science, but it’s free for submissions and has no paywall. The business model probably doesn’t scale too well, but nobody is likely getting tenure based on papers published before they could legally drive. [url]

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Filed Under: academia.edu, academic journals, arxiv.org, frontiers for young minds, media, paywall, peer review, plos, preprints, publications, publishers, pubpeer, science

From Magazines To Restaurants… Conde Nast Licensing Magazine Names For Restaurants

from the well-there's-an-idea dept

I’m not sure how well this will work, but it does seem like an interesting experiment for publications to expand their revenue streams. Magazine publishing giant Conde Nast is setting up an entirely new division to focus on licensing its magazine names for restaurants. There’s the GQ Bar & Grill and the Vogue Cafe, for example. The focus right now is not on the US market, so these won’t be appearing here, but in places like Hong Kong, Dubai and Moscow. Of course, the general idea isn’t new. As the article notes, Playboy has famously licensed its brand all over the place. However, it is an interesting recognition that a publication’s brand has additional value beyond the publication itself. So what do you think? Techdirt Cafe? Anyone want to license that?

Filed Under: gq, licensing, magazines, names, publications, vogue
Companies: conde nast

Publications Slowly Realizing That Freeing Up Archives Makes Sense

from the took-'em-long-enough dept

Here at Techdirt we have over ten years worth of content, all available for anyone to read, and as we certainly get a fair amount of traffic to those back archives. While we don’t pay that much attention to ad revenues (our business isn’t advertising), access to those archives (mainly from Google searches or links from other sites into a specific older story) represent a fair chunk of our page views and ad revenue. With that in mind, it’s been quite surprising to see so many publications try to lock up their archives — either (worst of all!) taking down old stories completely or trying to lock them up behind a pay wall. Luckily, it looks like more and more publications are recognizing that this is a bad business strategy. The article is in the NY Times, which only recognized this very issue a few months ago. Prior to that, it charged for access to its archives, but since opening it up has seen traffic shoot up and ad revenues appear to be following. The article also mentions how Newsweek has had a lot of success opening up its archive, and Sports Illustrated is getting set to make its own archive available later this week. For all of those publishers who worry that there isn’t enough ad revenue online, it makes little sense to sit on so much inventory. These days, you need to work on using Google to help drive more traffic, not suing it to stop sending traffic. What better way to make money off your archive than getting a lot more people to look at it?

Filed Under: advertising, archives, new york times, publications, sports illustrated