Tag: Evergreen

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Publishers, e-books, and DRM

    Publishers, e-books, and DRM

    2012-02-18: Updated the post with translations from the original letter. I’m an Addison-Wesley author and just received a letter from Pearson, the owner of Addison-Wesley, informing me about their thoughts and steps towards e-books and the digital age. The letter is written as an open letter with no apparent secrets, so I’m making it available…

  • Do engineering researchers care about truth?

    Do engineering researchers care about truth?

    So ICSE, the top software engineering conference, rejected our paper, again. The reviewers were actually quite positive: high-quality work, little or no flaws, interesting. One of the reviewers found the paper’s results surprising, asked for more details, and suggested new research directions. The final conclusion of both reviews, however, was the same: The work has…

  • Definition of write-only journal

    Definition of write-only journal

    I thought it is a common term by now but apparently it is not. Here is my definition of “write-only (research) journal”: A write-only research journal is a research journal that publishes papers but is never read (hence write/publish-only). Its purpose is twofold: to (a) give a researcher some reputation return on their work by…

  • Rigor vs. relevance, or: What is the size of a dissertation?

    Rigor vs. relevance, or: What is the size of a dissertation?

    While listening to a colleague’s talk the other day, I got an idea for a Ph.D. thesis (grant proposal). I wrote up a short summary and sent it to him. He thought it was fine but commented that it might be a bit “thin”. This made me wonder: How do we determine sufficient size of…