Category: 1. Research
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Response to Moshe @Vardi’s CACM editorial on open access
In the most recent CACM editor’s letter, Moshe Vardi, the CACM’s editor-in-chief, addresses the question of open access from the perspective of the ACM [1]. The ACM is a non-profit organization for (mostly) computer scientists, and a publisher of conference proceedings and journals. I find the editorial rather disconcerting. Vardi views “the open access movement”…
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Appropriate reviewer remuneration
As an academic, I perform a fair number of reviews. Usually, that’s part of the system, i.e. it is a give and take and fair exchange between colleagues and publishers without any monetary remuneration changing hands at all. Then my university library complained about Elsevier’s predatory pricing and I decided to stop reviewing papers for…
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How I write reviews
As a professor of computer science I get to write a lot of reviews: For Bachelor and Master theses, for dissertations, for grant proposals, and for conference and journal paper submissions. I’d like to explain the logic of the reviews I write, using conference and journal submissions as the example. It is pretty simple: The…
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Elsevier the unpublisher
The battle on the web over academic publishing is heating up, and Elsevier is apparently sending take-down notices to competitor Academia.edu. If there is a publisher loathed by researchers, it is probably Elsevier. (Not so much by me, as I never published with them, but by many others whose papers they keep hostage.) I have…
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Upcoming talk: Open source in university projects (in German)
I’ll be giving a talk on open source strategies for university projects: How to set-up student projects for start-ups and how to organize research projects using open source for the common good. The talk is in German and will be held at the Johannes Kepler Universität (of Linz, Austria). The talk will take place on…
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More hilarious-obnoxious academic spam
It has been bad for quite a while, but this one is beyond ridiculous. Not a request to submit a paper but a request for a review, on a topic that I have no idea about. Straight from the email: Dear Dr. Dirk Riehle, We will be most grateful if you could create time to…