Over at the Freakonomics blog, I have a short essay arguing that the AEA should consider providing more information about candidates for its officer elections. It may be of some interest to readers of this blog.
Information and the AEA Elections
Category: Scholarly Publishing
2013 Workshop Call for Papers
The 2013 workshop will be held on 8-10 November in conjunction with the 13th Annual REER will be held November 8-10, 2013 at the Global Learning Center in Technology Square Atlanta, Georgia. To accommodate this year’s expanded workshops, as well as the Best Student Paper Session, the REER will be held for full days Friday and … Continue reading 2013 Workshop Call for Papers
Post-Doctoral Position
The Research Program on the "Economics of Knowledge Contribution and Distribution" has a post-doctoral fellowship position available for 2013-14. Candidates should have a recently completed PhD and have a research proposal related to the following areas. The impact of open scientific publication on research outcomes and dissemination. The motivations and constraints on the sharing of … Continue reading Post-Doctoral Position
Openness and spam
A little time has passed since this New York Times piece on open access and dodgy journals. Bottom line: anyone can set up an open access journal and hence, bad quality ones are appearing. Moreover, if you go open access with a traditional journal, some publishers may try and cast themselves off as you. At … Continue reading Openness and spam
Is Google Scholar next?
Yesterday, Google announced its “spring cleaning” whereby it, usually, discards products most people had long thought discarded. Usually the products are Blackberry ones that don’t really yield controversy. A few years back, Google retired Buzz which was generally regarded as a failure. Some product retirements are a little more troubling. Consider Google Wave as I wrote about in 2011: Consider … Continue reading Is Google Scholar next?
Looking again at “Big Deal” scholarly journal packages
One of the things pointed to in the debate over market power and scholarly journals is the rise of "Big Deal" packages. Basically, this has arisen as publishers bundle journals together for a single price. Indeed, as the publishers have merged and acquired more titles, these bundled packages have become more compelling with individual journal … Continue reading Looking again at “Big Deal” scholarly journal packages
Will reputation metrics open scientific publication?
That is the contention of Richard Price, the founder of Academia.edu. Aaron Swartz was determined to free up access to academic articles. He perceived an injustice in which scientific research lies behind expensive paywalls despite being funded by the taxpayer. The taxpayer ends up paying twice for the same research: once to fund it and a … Continue reading Will reputation metrics open scientific publication?
Author processing fees
A couple of pointers to come interesting discussions this week on the move to author processing fees by open access journals. The first is from mathematician, Tim Gowers, who defends the use of such fees. He points out, correctly, that the journal he is involved with will not disadvantage any authors as a result of … Continue reading Author processing fees
You knew it was coming, Google Scholar cites can be manipulated
Google Scholar works via algorithm. It examines papers that are hosted in certain domains (usually, publishers and higher education institutions) and then constructs citations based on those papers. As it is easily accessible and also includes citations from unpublished papers, Google Scholar is becoming increasingly popular as a key metric for academic performance. A new … Continue reading You knew it was coming, Google Scholar cites can be manipulated
What an academic article of the future should look like
There is much discussion these days about the future of scholarly publishing. Much of this surrounds the value of traditional publishers. When challenged those publishers point to the value and potential value they create. Here is Elsevier responding to a recent boycott led by mathematician Tim Gowers: And we invest a lot in infrastructure, the … Continue reading What an academic article of the future should look like
Contribution Economy 