Category: 1. Research

  • Academic publications and what is wrong with them

    Academic publications and what is wrong with them

    The most basic academic currency are your publications. While you can’t (or shouldn’t) trade them, they are the way of how other researchers keep track of you and keep score. The higher your score, the higher you are in the pecking order, of course. A publication has two aspects to it that determine its value:…

  • The role and responsibility of an editor or PC chair

    The role and responsibility of an editor or PC chair

    I just saw a tweet arguing that a program committee (PC) chair was being disrespectful of the reviewers, if they (the editor) overruled their (the reviewers) recommendations to accept a paper. I beg to differ. It is the PC chairs job to make the final decision on what gets into the research program and they…

  • Upcoming talks in April and May 2023

    Upcoming talks in April and May 2023

    I’ll be holding the following public (free) and commercial (closed) talks and seminars in the upcoming weeks. 2023-04-20: User-led open source projects and country-level competitiveness at Fraunhofer FOKUS. 2023-04-21: Streamlining open source license compliance (our commercial seminar, through Bayave GmbH). 2023-04-24: Open-source software and sustainability (in German most likely) at the TUM Digital Sustainability lecture…

  • How to acknowledge the use of copyediting services

    How to acknowledge the use of copyediting services

    I looked around research papers and did not find any acknowledgments of copyediting services used. Even before Grammarly and ChatGPT, authors have used human editors, and apparently this was not worth mentioning? This seems unfair to me and may have to change in the age of chat AIs. How about this template for the acknowledgments…

  • Demonstration that Chat GPT is human

    Demonstration that Chat GPT is human

    Or stupid. Probably both. Enough anthropomorphizing already.

  • Activities vs. phases

    Activities vs. phases

    Clarity in writing is essential for successful scientific communication. A pet peeve of mine is the confusion between activity and phase, when discussing about any process, but specifically research processes based on design science. An activity is something that you do. You applied a method. You searched the web. You went for a walk. A…