‘Hello, I am here to help!’ For several afternoons as an undergraduate student in New Delhi, I would take a bus to a bustling market and settle into a small office for the Childline counseling service. I was trained as a volunteer responder and counselor for children in distress. All afternoon, the phone would ring. It would usually be a child suffering from exam stress or anxiety and a few tips would go a long way.
The Web was created as a coordination and cooperation tool for scientists. Subsequently, it had a revolutionary impact on almost all aspects of our life. The rise of a “network society” did in the end, however, only had a minor effect on the forms of organising among the scientific community. Its paradigm of scientific communication and cooperation between a scholar and a publisher dates back to the early 17th century.
Global rankings have decisively shifted the nature of the conversation around higher education to emphasise universities’ performance in knowledge economies. How did that happen and why are rankings becoming increasingly important? The emergence of global rankings coincided with the acceleration of globalisation at the turn of the millennium. This is because higher education is a global game.
Museums, libraries and archives play a pivotal role in the preservation of human knowledge. They also see themselves as custodians of cultural and natural heritage. The task of natural history collections is twofold: on the one hand, they preserve our knowledge about nature, on the other, they hold records of the history of human exploration and conquest of the earth.
How can a research organization systematically spark innovation in science? The Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft (LBG) borrowed its name from the famous Austrian physicist, mathematician, and natural philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann. We are greatly indebted to him for his way of looking at the world and science itself.
Let’s start with the obvious. Evaluation and assessment are part and parcel of the scientific profession. Universities want to hire the best faculty, funding agencies want to support the best projects, and journals want to publish the best papers. To this end, scientists serve as members of hiring and promotion committees and on panels for funding agencies. We also write evaluation letters and reviews of manuscripts and proposals.
This is a crosspost from Open Interview thatbrings you Beall’s exclusive interview with Santosh C Hulagabali . In this interview, he has answered all pertinent questions with regard to Indian and Asian publishing practices, trends, issues, challenges and ways to mitigate the hurdles. Indian academic community- especially library professionals have high regard for your fight against dubious
From Subscriptions to Publish and Read The DEAL consortium negotiates nationwide licensing agreements for its “nearly 700 mostly publicly funded academic institutions in Germany such as universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutions and state and regional libraries”. Of concern are three major negotiations, namely those with the large corporate publishers Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley.
New digital research infrastructures and the advent of online distribution channels are changing the realities of scientific knowledge creation and dissemination. Yet, the measurement of scientific impact that funders, policy makers, and research organizations perpetuate fails to sufficiently recognize these developments.
During the last decade I have been conducting research on scholarly communication, primarily focusing on how open access in various forms has been introduced into an environment traditionally supported by subscription-based distribution models. Establishing the historical development and current status of journals and articles publishing open access still requires a lot of manual data collection.
