Category: 1.1 Research (General)

  • Appropriate reviewer remuneration

    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…

  • How I write reviews

    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…

  • Elsevier the unpublisher

    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…

  • Upcoming talk: Open source in university projects (in German)

    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…

  • More hilarious-obnoxious academic spam

    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…

  • How to recognize an academic spam publisher

    How to recognize an academic spam publisher

    I think this is self-evident to the human reader. From an email I got: Your interesting published article “Erratum to: The single-vendor commercial open source business model” drives me to call for new papers and honorary reviewer, on behalf of Computer Communication & Collaboration, which is an English quarterly journal in Canada. Oh well… And…