There is still no evidence that Gunung Padang is an ice age pyramid, and I am still not a fan of retraction

The peer reviewed paper published last year in Archaeological Prospection that claimed Gunung Padang in Indonesia is a 25k year old pyramid has now been retracted by the journal. As I noted at the time, the paper does not support its main claim. It doesn’t provide evidence that Gunung Padang is anything but a volcanic…

Diamond Open Access would cost no more than what we currently spend on academic publishing

Expensive journal subscriptions charged by big commercial publishers, create a significant barrier for access to publicly funded scholarship. Increasingly, these are being replaced by Author Processing Charges (APCs), which create a significant barrier to publishing scholarship, and have cynically been branded as “Gold Open Access” by the same publishers. In my view, this kind of…

Hopewell Airburst Paper Retracted (Why do retractions exist?)

Just this week, the journal Nature Scientific Reports retracted a paper published last year by Tankersley et al. about a hypothesized comet airburst that would have destroyed the Hopewell culture in the Midwestern US about 1500 years ago. This has been a rough few months for airburst and asteroid impact claims in archaeology. Earth-Science Reviews…

The White House announcement on Open Access is kinda big, but kinda not

Last week, the White House issued a guidance memo on Open Access, to not quite as much fanfare as could have been expected, and causing (so far) surprisingly muted controversy.  The memo requires US federal agencies that fund research to ensure that any publicly funded peer-reviewed scholarly publications “are made freely available and publicly accessible…

At what career stage should you publish what?

Manya Whitaker’s recent Chronicle column on publishing strategies generated some Twitter discussion (Here is an example, and here is another). Whitaker is critiqued for suggesting that early career researchers should focus on peer-reviewed journals from credible publishers, at the expense of more publicly engaged kinds of publishing. They should make sure that their material “appears…