Mastodon

A blog by Ross Mounce

  • I am supporting RIO Journal. I think you should too

    Today (2015-09-01), marks the public announcement of Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO for short), a new open access journal for all disciplines that seeks to open-up the entire research cycle with some truly novel features I know what you might be thinking: Another open access journal? Really?  Myself, nor Daniel Mietchen simply wouldn’t be involved with…

  • What is Journal Visibility?

    I’ve just read a paper published in Systematic Biology called ‘A Falsification of the Citation Impediment in the Taxonomic Literature‘. Having read the full paper many times, including the 64-page PDF supplementary materials file. I’m amazed the paper was published in its current form. Early on, in the abstract no less, the authors introduce a…

  • I’m saying NO to Wiley

    [Update 2015-09-19: since writing this, I notice my open access article has now been unpaywalled at Wiley’s site. No-one from Wiley has reached out to me to explain how, why, or when this happened. No compensation has been offered, nor any apology. I note that all the other articles in the special section, which should also…

  • Advice for journal-publishing academic societies

    I read some sad news on Twitter recently. The Ecological Society of America has decided to publish its journals with Wiley: ESA journals move to new publishing partner, John Wiley & Sons. Tough decision, tho. Ecotrack will fade away & I can't say I will miss it. — Scott L Collins (@ESA_Prez2013) July 30, 2015…

  • Command-line access to research: getpapers

    With a first commit to github not so long ago (2015-04-13), getpapers is one of the newest tools in the ContentMine toolchain. It’s also the most readily accessible and perhaps most immediately exciting – it does exactly what it says on the tin: it gets papers for you en masse without having to click around…

  • Deep indexing supplementary data files

    To prove my point about the way that supplementary data files bury useful data, making it utterly indiscoverable to most, I decided to do a little experiment (in relation to text mining for museum specimen identifiers, but also perhaps with some relevance to the NHM Conservation Hackathon): I collected the links for all Biology Letters…