I’ve written before about importance of seeking public engagement with pseudo-archaeology as an opportunity rather than a threat, and of building on people’s interest in the amazing claims of pseudo-archaeologists to foster critical thinking and public education. But how does that work in practice? Here are a few concrete examples from my years of practice.…
Last week, I described my recent adventures trying to figure out why my mother, of all people, was getting frequent emails from Academia.edu, asking her to upgrade to premium. I found that she did indeed have an Academia.edu profile, but that of course, she has never created one. She was even said to have been…
Academia.edu, which is “accelerating the world’s research”, has become notorious among academics for its relentless email appeals to upgrade to their premium service, which allows us to delve beyond the teasers of their free product, and to see things like who is reading us, who is mentioning us in their papers, and all the other…
This week, Krista Mila (@microbialkryta) provides an excellent discussion of why academics need not and should not work 80 hours per week. This is important reading for all academics, especially our early career colleagues and our students. There are reasons why the 80 hour worker has become iconic in academia. I will discuss some of…
This week, a group of 11 European funders introduced their Plan S, under which all scientific (read scholarly) publications must be in open access (OA) journals or platforms and available immediately upon publication, by 2020. There are a number of good early analyses of the plan out there, such as Peter Suber’s. The commercial publishers…
