Return of the Ice Bridge : CBC and The Nature of Things double down on the Solutrean Hypothesis

I was surprised to see this morning that CBC and The Nature of Things are back with new coverage of Ice Bridge, a documentary that deals with the Solutrean Hypothesis (SH). The SH proposes that the first people to enter the Americas came from Western Europe 20 000 years ago. To the best of our knowledge, however,…

Bob Wolf 1938-2019

On Monday, Bob Wolf died. He was my first Department Chair. When I arrived at Eastern Connecticut State University in August 1999, he welcomed me warmly. I learned a lot from Bob in the brief two years that I knew him. They were formative years, and he was an important part of them. Eastern is…

One properly radical idea made it into the otherwise conservative Plan S principles

The revised Principles and Implementation document for Plan S remains overall quite friendly to big commercial publishers, with one glaring exception. With its principle 10, Coalition S takes a bold stand: “The Funders commit that when assessing research outputs during funding decisions they will value the intrinsic merit of the work and not consider the…

Aguzzi’s Public Service Open Access proposal: yes, but with an important caveat (emptor)

Adriano Aguzzi proposes in Nature that journals (and publishers) should “compete not for libraries’ or authors’ money, but for funds allocated by public research agencies”. I agree, with an important caveat. Here are my very quick first thougths. I strongly agree with Aguzzi that the shift from a subscription model to an Author Processing Charge…

Writing your tenure package

At this time of year, Assistant Professors turn their minds to their tenure applications. Last week, apparently in the throes of the process, Chris Wolff asked whether anyone had “any advice for someone reluctant to sign their own praises”. I gave some brief replies in that thread, but I wanted to expand a bit here.…