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Author: Ross Mounce

  • Scopus: caught-out and shirking responsibility

    Scopus: caught-out and shirking responsibility

    In December last year, it was widely publicized e.g. in Science magazine [1], that Scopus has been instrumental in legitimizing publication scams whereby authors pay to bypass real scholarly peer review and have their work published on a website that looks like a real scholarly journal but is in fact not a proper journal, merely…

  • How many learned societies publish Diamond Open Access journals?

    How many learned societies publish Diamond Open Access journals?

    How many learned societies publish Diamond Open Access journals? To seek an answer to the question posed in the title, I sought out reliable data on open access journals. My first port of call was the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Although DOAJ certainly isn’t a complete listing of open access journals, as is…

  • Resilience: another advantage of openly-licensed content

    Resilience: another advantage of openly-licensed content

    As you may have seen in the news, the British Library has been affected by a significant cyberattack. Many of the digital services it provides have gone down and stayed down for many weeks now, whilst investigations take place. I have a lot of sympathy for the BL staff. As has been observed, public services…

  • Kudos to PCI Registered Reports

    Kudos to PCI Registered Reports

    This is just a quick post of appreciation for PCI Registered Reports. I’ve recently joined the PCI RR community as a ‘recommender’. One thing that spurred me to join is a rather unsatisfactory experience I had as a peer-reviewer, reviewing a manuscript where the experimental design was deeply insufficient…

  • Central Tendency, Citation Distributions, and Springer Nature (Part 2)

    Central Tendency, Citation Distributions, and Springer Nature (Part 2)

    “In statistics, a central tendency (or measure of central tendency) is a central or typical value for a probability distribution. Colloquially, measures of central tendency are often called averages. The most common measures of central tendency are the arithmetic mean, the median, and the mode.” — Wikipedia. In the UK, we teach school kids how to calculate the…

  • Pricing, Citation Impact, and Springer Nature (Part 1)

    Pricing, Citation Impact, and Springer Nature (Part 1)

    On the 26th October 2021, Springer Nature published version 1 of a (not peer-reviewed) “white paper” titled “Going for gold: exploring the reach and impact of Gold open access articles in hybrid journals” by Christina Emery, Mithu Lucraft, Jessica Monaghan, David Stuart, and Susie Winter. Springer Nature present cherry-picked analyses with an experimental design of…