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Algorithmic employment decisions in academia?
Björn Brembs September 23, 2021
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 […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Prioritizing academic publishers
Björn Brembs November 22, 2021
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 […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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The beginning of the end for academic publishers?
Björn Brembs June 2, 2023
On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On the same day, the adoption […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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What if Greta Thunberg took a Shell-sponsored professorship?
Björn Brembs December 15, 2022
Or let’s think a a few sizes smaller and imagine a renowned pulmonologist taking the, say, “Marlboro Endowed Chair” in the Mayo Clinic’s Pulmonary Medicine Division, sponsored by Philip Morris. What would they have to endure and how much credibility […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Open Access and the incentives for embezzlement
Björn Brembs October 24, 2022
Wikipedia defines ‘embezzlement‘ as “the act of withholding assets for the purpose of conversion of such assets”. Google defines it as “misappropriation of funds placed in one’s trust”: If one takes the position that researchers at public institutions are entrusted […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Off to Paris for #FENS2022 with two posters
Björn Brembs July 8, 2022
The first conference after the Sars CoV2 pandemic! We’re headed for Paris, France tomorrow and our lab will present two posters, the work of graduate student Andreas Ehweiner and postdoc Radostina Lyutova. Andreas has been working on the cellular and […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Scholarly societies partly to blame for post-truth age?
Björn Brembs September 12, 2022
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 […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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How about paying extra for peer-review?
Björn Brembs February 14, 2023
There are those who demand journal peer-review be paid extra on top of academic salaries. Let’s have a look at the financials of that proposal. The article linked above confirms common rates of academic consulting fees, i.e., anything between US$100 […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Why publication services must not be negotiated
Björn Brembs March 30, 2022
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...
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Should you trust Elsevier?
Björn Brembs March 14, 2023
Data broker RELX is represented on Twitter by their Chief Communications Officer Paul Abrahams. Due to RELX subsidiary Elsevier being one of the largest publishers of academic journals, Dr. Abrahams frequently engages with academics on the social media platform. On […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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EU: academic publishers are monopolists
Björn Brembs April 1, 2022
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, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Interacting learning systems at SfN22
Björn Brembs November 8, 2022
I just sent the poster for this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting to the printer. As our graduate student is preparing his defense and our postdoc did not get a visa (no thanks, US!), we just have a single poster […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Scholarship has no time to waste
Björn Brembs March 31, 2022
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 […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Why did the moth fly into the flame?
Björn Brembs December 21, 2016
Few insect behaviors are more iconic than the proverbial moths circling the lamps at night. These observations are prime examples of the supposedly stereotypic insect responses to external stimuli. In contrast, in our new paper that just appeared today, we […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...