Tweet This excellent post covers why academic publishing is obsolete. TL;DR: 1. The time lag is huge; it’s measured in months, or even years. 2. Most academic publications are inaccessible outside universities. 3. Virtually no one reads most academic publications. 4. It’s very unusual to make successful philosophical arguments in paper form. 5. Papers don’t have prestige [...]
Author Archive
June 21, 2012
1
Academic papers today are not meant to be discussion forums
By jose in Blog, e-Science, Opinion, Writing
February 22, 2012
2
The importance of rewriting
By jose in Reading, WritingTweet Most academics really want to improve their writing, because good writing increases your chances of getting your manuscript accepted. Still, I think the academic system doesn´t reward good writing as much as it should. The best advice I´ve seen recently on how to become a better writer is this quora post by Venkatesh Rao. [...]
January 30, 2012
0
To RSS subscribers: sorry, last post was not intended for ap.com
By jose in Announcements, BlogTweet The explanation below may only make sense to you if you read this from an RSS reader. If you don’t please skip it. Have you ever sent an email to the wrong person? Did wish you could pull it back? I just did this, but for our blog (!). I was feeding a WP [...]
January 29, 2012
0
When your users tell you ‘you are not adding value’: Boycott against Elsevier
By jose in e-Science, WritingTweet Scott Aaronson uses an analogy to the game industry to describe the predicament academics are in: I have an ingenious idea for a company. My company will be in the business of selling computer games. But, unlike other computer game companies, mine will never have to hire a single programmer, game designer, or graphic [...]
June 12, 2010
3
Detexify2 – LaTeX symbol classifier
By jose in FOSS, Hacks, Web 2.0, WritingTweet Using HTML5 features, this is the kind of obvious tool that makes symbol lookup faster than doing it by hand. Just draw the symbol in the box and up comes the LaTeX code, and the package name that contains it.