Two years ago, the Great Awokening came for blind auditions in America’s top orchestras. Any educational or cultural differences were insufficient explanations for the disparities between white and black players … Continue reading “The Strange Attack on Blind Reviewing”
Here’s a business plan: Sell a product that … some of the world’s most highly educated scholars, working at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, invest thousands of hours … Continue reading “Challenging the Academic Publisher Oligopoly”
The past decade has ushered in dramatic growth in the number of postsecondary degree options available to US students. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of … Continue reading “Are More Options Always a Good Thing? The Backfiring Effects of Academic Proliferation”
Academic freedom is under assault by people who want to control research and speech. One of their strategies exploits the gatekeeping functions of journal editors to censor unpopular ideas. The … Continue reading “Misusing Editorial Power to Censor Unpopular Research”
Researchers have been grumbling about the state of scientific publishing for years. Now, rumor has it that the Trump administration (yes, those science-haters!) may be trying to fix at least … Continue reading “The Mess That Is Science Publishing”
Science Publishing Is Incoherent, Expensive, and Slow Communication is essential to science. The aim of scientific publication is to convey new findings as quickly as possible to as many interested … Continue reading “The Tangled Web of Scientific Publishing”
Editor’s Note: This is part II; part I can be found here. Professor Brian Wansink is head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. The lab has had … Continue reading “Peer Review: the Publication Game and “the Natural Selection of Bad Science””
The British journal Nature, home in 1953 to Watson and Crick’s important DNA paper, was by 1966 rather in the doldrums, with a backlog of submitted manuscripts and losing ground … Continue reading “How Is Science Judged? How Useful Is Peer Review?”