Tag: Evergreen

  • Soundness vs. importance in publishing (PeerJ computer science journal announced)

    Soundness vs. importance in publishing (PeerJ computer science journal announced)

    Today, PeerJ announced the creation of a new open access computer science journal. After a bit of back and forth a while ago I had accepted the invitation to be on the editorial board. (My main concern was that PeerJ is a for-profit organization but co-founder Pete Binfield convinced me that this will only be…

  • How academics spend their time? Not me.

    How academics spend their time? Not me.

    I just read this review of how professors spend their time while working. It struck me that a key component that I spend a substantial amount of time and energy on is missing: Fund raising. Here is a visual summary of the article courtesy of someone on reddit: I first looked through other practices like…

  • Springer Verlag adding insult to injury

    Springer Verlag adding insult to injury

    Springer Verlag by way of its incompetence to properly edit manuscripts has been a royal pain in my butt for a long-time. In the most egregious example, one of their editors changed the title of what was a crowning paper of many years of research work. He turned “open source” into “open course”, completely altering…

  • The economics of financing Ph.D. students as company contractors

    The economics of financing Ph.D. students as company contractors

    Occasionally companies approach me with the following proposal: If I’m willing to supervise one of their employees for an external Ph.D. thesis, they’ll pay into my University budget an annual lump sum, typically something like EUR 10000. I almost always reject such proposals, unless I can change some of the critical terms, because these proposals…

  • 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…