Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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Just how widespread are impact factor negotiations?
Björn Brembs January 8, 2016
doi:10.59350/4zbhe-k5036
Over the last decade or two, there have been multiple accounts of how publishers have negotiated the impact factors of their journals with the “Institute for Scientific Information” (ISI), both before it was bought by Thomson Reuters and after. This […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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So many symptoms, only one disease: a public good in private hands
Björn Brembs September 17, 2015
doi:10.59350/7tw94-qme49
Science has infected itself (voluntarily!) with a life-threatening parasite. It has  given away its crown jewels, the scientific knowledge contained in the scholarly archives, to entities with orthogonal interests: corporate publishers whose fiduciary duty is not knowledge dissemination or scholarly communication, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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How to write your grant proposal?
Björn Brembs December 4, 2015
doi:10.59350/4qk6y-cw767
Posting my reply to a review of our most recent grant proposal has sparked an online discussion both on Twitter and on Drugmonkey’s blog. The main direction the discussion took was what level of expertise to expect from the reviewers […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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How free are academics, really?
Björn Brembs December 17, 2015
doi:10.59350/nbd4r-wq274
In Germany, the constitution guarantees academic freedom in article 5 as a basic civil right. The main German funder, the German Research Foundation (DFG), routinely points to this article of the German constitution when someone suggests they should follow the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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Don’t be afraid of open data
Björn Brembs November 16, 2015
doi:10.59350/snxxh-06390
This is a response to Dorothy Bishop’s post “Who’s afraid of open data?“. After we had published a paper on how Drosophila strains that are referred to by the same name in the literature (Canton S), but came from different […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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Chance in animate nature, day 1
Björn Brembs November 10, 2015
doi:10.59350/fgj2z-q6x52
Ulrich Herkenrath, a mathematician working on stochasticity, convened a tiny symposium of only about a dozen participants discussing the role of chance in living beings. Participants included mathematicians, philosophers and neurobiologists. Herkenrath: “Man as a source of randomness” Herkenrath kicked […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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Data Diving for Genomics Treasure
Björn Brembs November 25, 2015
doi:10.59350/a5wdb-xdh90
This is a post written jointly by Nelson Lau from Brandeis and me, Björn Brembs. In contrast to Nelson’s guest post, which focused on the open data aspect of our collaboration, this one describes the science behind our paper and […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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Guest post: Why our Open Data project worked
Björn Brembs November 19, 2015
doi:10.59350/tww6q-ry866
Why our Open Data project worked, (and how Decorum can allay our fears of Open Data). I am honored to Guest Post on Björn’s blog and excited about  the interest in our work from Björn’s response to Dorothy Bishop’s first […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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How do academic publishers see their role?
Björn Brembs March 8, 2016
doi:10.59350/dd6th-dd058
Over the years, publishers have left some astonishingly frank remarks over how they see their role in serving the scholarly community with their communication and dissemination needs. This morning, I decided to cherry-pick some of them, take them out of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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Academic publishers: stop access negotiations
Björn Brembs March 3, 2016
doi:10.59350/wnpsv-sbz25
Three years ago, representatives of libraries, publishers and scholars all agreed that academic publishers don’t really add any value to scholarly articles. Last week, I interpreted Sci-Hub potentially being a consequence of scholars having become tired after 20 years of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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On the productivity of scientists
Björn Brembs May 12, 2016
doi:10.59350/hj1vy-w7823
“an academic career, in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts, creates a danger of intellectual superficiality” Albert Einstein Isaacson W (2008) Einstein (His Life and Universe) (Simon and Schuster, New York), 1st Ed, p […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
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Why cutting down on peer-review will improve it
Björn Brembs December 1, 2015
doi:10.59350/cb1ew-2me34
Update, Dec. 4, 2015: With the online discussion moving towards grantsmanship and the decision of what level of expertise to expect from a reviewer, I have written down some thoughts on this angle of the discussion. With more and more […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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Seeking your endorsement
Björn Brembs March 14, 2016
doi:10.59350/vefte-dy427
I am contemplating to apply to join the European Commission Open Science Policy Platform. The OSPP will provide expert advice to the European Commission on implementing the broader Open Science Agenda. As you will see, some of us have a […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
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Have you seen this response to terrorism anywhere?
Björn Brembs March 23, 2016
doi:10.59350/ynx5x-8mr87
I usually don’t write about politics, but there has been one or the other exception to this rule in the last 12 years of this blog. This time, I’ve been missing one particular response to the various terrorist attacks in […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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