Blog » Blog Archive » Reviewing the reviewers. Monday, November 30th, 2009 by Gene Golovchinsky I’ve written about some alternatives to the current review process, and I believe one of ways in which the current process can be improved is by formal recognition of reviewers’ efforts. While many conferences and journals acknowledge reviewers by publishing their names, this does not reflect the quality of the effort put in by some reviewers. A more lasting and public recognition of quality reviewers may be one way to improve the quality of this volunteer effort.
Interestingly, the APS recently instituted a policy of recognizing referees who review the articles submitted to the various APS journals. The basis for choosing the honorees was the quality, number, and timeliness of their reports, without regard for membership in the APS, country of origin, or field of research. Individuals with current or very recent direct connections to the journals, such as editors and editorial board members, were excluded. This Is Broken: From Game Stories to, Well, Everything « Reinven. Update: You might be interested in the follow-up to this post: An Example of Searching for the News Decoder Ring. Maybe I’m just getting cranky, but over the weekend and into today I’ve found myself thinking about some building blocks of journalism and thinking, “You know, this is broken.” Not broken as in “this really needs to be recast for the Web” or “some kind of digital adjunct would help here,” but broken as in “this no longer works, and we need to stop doing it.”
My latest sportswriting column for Indiana University’s National Sports Journalism Center looks at ways to reinvent game stories — the day-after accounts of sporting events that tell you who won, how they won and (hopefully) why they won. I hope I surveyed the potential alternatives fairly, but re-reading my own column this morning, I realized I’d made up my own mind on the question: The game story is broken. If we were starting today, would we do this? Absolutely not. It’s a quietly devastating indictment of journalism. Marching through quicksand. I have been spending a lot of time lately talking to people in various media companies: editors and agents, executives, journalists, producers and directors. It’s a fascinating time to see content industries in action, because they are facing a constantly changing landscape and are really trying to keep up. In other words, they are facing conditions of extreme uncertainty, just like startups. So I generally feel right at home in these conversations.
Most pundits and the people I ask for advice fall into one of two camps. One is explaining the world as it used to work: the importance of gatekeepers, the scarcity implied by limited distribution, and the resulting quality bar that the industry is so proud of. As I talk to established media companies, their responses are surprisingly uniform. Movies > Television > Books > Music > Magazines > Radio > Newspapers Each industry is watching the one in front of it sink into the quicksand.
Personal brands are displacing organizations brands. News @ nature.com - PR's 'pit bull' takes on open. Bookstores Begin Slow Descent Into Obsolescence. I was in Borders Books today looking for a copy of David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous, and it suddenly struck me how ironic it was to be looking for a book about dynamic connectedness in this place of static, disconnected objects and finite shelf space. I used to love bookstores — they were magical places where the whole world of information and stories was at your fingertips.
But I realized today that the bookstore has begun its slow decent into obsolescence, just like every analogue media institution. The bookstore has been replaced by the Web as the place of wonder, and there’s no turning back. I should add a strong caveat here — there are a few places where the book format will continue to thrive — fiction and children’s books principal among them (for years I maintained the delusion that I could be a fiction writer — wrong kind of writing for me).
But there’s a reason why these types of books still work — they are works of art that stand on their own. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. The Journal of Interesting Economics. Blog Tutorials Helping you create a successful blog! Information Processing Letters. Directory of open access journals.
PediaPress - Individual books based on Wikipedia articles. Open Source Used for Scientific Reporting. Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation — HBS Working Kn. In a perfect world, scientists share problems and work together on solutions for the good of society. In the real world, however, that's usually not the case. The main obstacles: competition for publication and intellectual property protection. Is there a model for encouraging large-scale scientific problem solving? Yes, and it comes from an unexpected and unrelated corner of the universe: open source software development.
That's the view of Karim R. What he and his coauthors discovered: "broadcasting" or introducing problems to outsiders yields effective solutions. People often think about open source as a special case, as if such openness can only happen in software. The study and its findings are described in his paper "The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving," coauthored with Lars Bo Jeppesen, Peter A. Thanks to broadcasting, nearly one-third of the previously unsolved problems found successful solutions. "Innovations happen at the intersection of disciplines.
Karim R. Internet Resources - Writers Resources - W. Unsorted [/writers] James Patrick Kelly - Murder Your Darlings - "When time comes to make that final revision, however, you must harden your heart, sharpen the ax and murder your darlings. " Greda Vaso - Determining the Readability of a Book - includes formulas for Gunning's Fog Index, Flesch Formula, Powers Sumner Kearl L. Kip Wheeler - Literary Terms and Definitions L. Kip Wheeler - Comp - Lit - Poetry - Links - more Style - Grammar - Errors in English [/writers]American Heritage - Book of English Usage - free download Band-Aid AP StylebookPaul Brians - Common Errors in EnglishCJ Cherryh - Writerisms and other Sins The Chicago Manual of Style FAQ Gary N.
Curtis - The Fallacy Files - Logical fallacies and bad arguments Prof. Release 1.0. JSTOR - The Scholarly Journal Archive. Some screenshots of TeXmacs (FSF GNU proje. 1.Part of a book I am writing 2.A (very) fancy example 3.Easy access of TeX fonts through the menus 4.Computer algebra sessions inside TeXmacs 5.The Qt Gui running on Mac OSX 6.Examples of the TeXgraph plugin in TeXmacs/Qt/MacOSX 7.Chinese input methods in TeXmacs/Qt/MacOSX 8.Native main menu in TeXmacs/Qt/MacOSX 9.Some maths from Wikipedia (TeXmacs/Qt/MacOSX) 10.VirtualBoxed TeXmacs (TeXmacs/Qt/Windows) 11.Another TeXmacs on Windows (TeXmacs/Qt/Windows) 12.CJK fonts and input methods (TeXmacs/Qt/Windows) © 1999–2010 Joris van der Hoeven.
About LaTeX. From AoPSWiki Latex, or , (pronounced lah-TEK or lay-TEK) is a typesetting markup language that is useful to produce properly formatted mathematical and scientific expressions. Using LaTeX in the Community, the AoPSWiki, or the Classroom If you are just learning for use on the AoPS site, then go to the LaTeX on AoPS page. If you would like to produce full documents of your own, follow the directions below. Getting Started with Writing Documents in LaTeX Download and install MiKTeX and TeXnicCenter, in that order. See also. FadingURL.com. Google's Chief Looks Ahead -- Pa. Google wants new friends. After signing a series of new partners, CEO Eric Schmidt says the Web giant's spate of recent deals is just a start.
Schmidt talked to TIME about changing the company's philosophy and planning its next steps. TIME: You've done a series of recent partnerships with eBay, MySpace, MTV and others. What's driving these deals? I think that to some degree when you're a small company you sort of have to do everything yourself, and as you get more established you begin to realize you'll never get everything done by yourself.
What does Google gain? What was the thinking in picking these particular partners? MTV was very clever. Who do you see as your primary competitors at this point? What about the smaller niche search engines and startups? You recently joined Apple's board. Would you like to see more partnering between Google and Apple? What's your process for planning strategy? Is that part of the legendary list of 100 things Google wants to accomplish? Main Page - Gutenberg. Technical solutions: Certification in a digital era. Nature (2006) | doi:10.1038/nature05008 The Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team at the research library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory conducts research on various aspects of scholarly communication in the digital age, including peer review.
Our research attempts simultaneously to analyse properties of the existing review system, and to formulate feasible alternatives. A core inspiration is that the digital environment allows for (indeed, requires) systemic changes in scholarly communication procedures. This potential for fundamental change is related to two properties of the digital environment that were unavailable in the paper world. First, the core functions of our scholarly communication system can be separated (at least theoretically) in the digital environment1. Second, we will be able to record in a machine-readable form, then aggregate, and later data-mine the collection of events of this system. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. ArXiv Netflix. Technical solutions: Wisdom of the crowds. TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES SORTED BY POPULARITY. Philica - The instant, open-access Journal of Everything. About Philica. An introduction to using Philica.
Academics work hard to produce innovative cutting-edge research, often with very little financial support, but submitting a finished article is by no means the end of their difficulties. We all know that the peer-review process is important for maintaining high standards of work, but the reality is that the traditional system of peer-review, where an editor sends the paper off to two or three anonymous reviewers, is full of serious problems— Unnecessarily lengthy review periods Papers rejected for trivial reasons Reviewers not reading work properly owing to time pressures Publication blocked because a reviewer is working on something similar Reviewers reacting unprofessionally to criticism of their work Tendency for reviewers to be established authors, with subsequent bias against novel ideas and methodologies Good reviews, followed by, “However, I’m not sure it is right for this journal — why not submit to X instead?”
The process may take a month, or it may take years. More information. The Economics of Electronic Journals.