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Are we paying US$3000 per article just for paywalls?
Björn Brembs July 30, 2014
This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in publisher profits, the remaining difference between legacy […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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How Nature Magazine consistently prefers anecdote over data
Björn Brembs September 18, 2014
Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as Nature or Science. After all, in this competitive and highly specialized days, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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How important is the Impact Factor?
Björn Brembs October 1, 2014
I recently was sent a report from a university-wide working group on the publishing habits within the Freie Universität Berlin. I don’t think this document is available online, but I think I’m not doing anything illegal if I publish some […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Booming university administrations
Björn Brembs January 7, 2015
This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let us know if you find a […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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If only all science were this reproducible
Björn Brembs April 21, 2015
For our course this year I was planning a standard neurogenetic experiment. I hadn’t ever done this experiment in a course, yet, just two weeks ago I tried it once myself, with an N=1. The students would get two groups […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Everybody already knows journal rank is bunk
Björn Brembs June 3, 2013
Today, finally, our manuscript on journal rank is accepted for publication at Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. One may wonder how a paper that reviews the empirical findings around journal rank ends up in a journal about human neuroscience. After all, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Libraries are better than corporate publishers because…
Björn Brembs August 28, 2013
During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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The cost of the rejection-resubmission cycle
Björn Brembs September 10, 2013
Rejection is one of the unpleasant but inevitable components of life. There are positive components to rejection: they build character, they force you to deal with negativity and sometimes they force you to change your life to avoid future rejections. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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The danger of universal gold open access
Björn Brembs August 30, 2013
During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
posted-content Front Matter
Your university is definitely paying too much for journals
Björn Brembs June 17, 2014
There is an interesting study out in the journal PNAS: “Evaluating big deal journal bundles“. The study details the disparity in negotiation skills between different US institutions when haggling with publishers about subscription pricing. For Science Magazine, John Bohannon of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...