All-or-nothing open access evangelism perpetuates the problems of scientific publishing. Writing in the Guardian, one advocate has even suggested that publishing behind a pay-wall is immoral. That form of evangelism is wrong – for now – and may do more harm than good. Yes, there are clear advantages to gold open access. Chief among these …
I’ve taken a little while to get this post done because I’ve been waiting for my recently-published article to go from online-first to being citeable with volume and page numbers. Last year, I was asked to write an editorial on the topic of industry influence on clinical evidence for the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, …
I wrote a piece for the Guardian’s Higher Education Network, all about the power of “no“. The piece was designed particularly with early-career researchers in mind, but there might be some resonance for researchers at other stages of their careers, and maybe even more widely. I always struggle with turning down requests, which tends to … Continue reading »
Upulie Divisekera, prolific tweeter and all-around awesome scientist, wanted to write a thing about open access and was nice enough to ask me for some help. The result, which you can find on Crikey and read for free, captures the costs of publishing and the avenues through which journal publishers make obscene operating profits. Long story … Continue reading »
Guy Tsafnat, me, Paul Glasziou and Enrico Coiera have written an editorial for the BMJ on the automation of systematic reviews. I helped a bit, but the clever analogy with the ticking machines from Player Piano fell out of Guy’s brain. In the editorial, we covered the state-of-the-art in automating specific tasks in the process of synthesising … Continue reading »
I co-wrote a piece for The Conversation about a new article that was published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, written by Andreas Lundh and other luminaries from the research area. The authors showed that industry sponsored clinical trials more often report positive outcomes and fewer harmful side effects. The most interesting result from … Continue reading »
There’s a scene from “The Vartabedian Conundrum” in Big Bang Theory where Sheldon says that his Aunt Marion gave him a stethoscope as a child because “he should have a trade to fall back on” if the theoretical physics thing didn’t work out. Trust me, that’s relevant. But let’s go back a step first. This … Continue reading »
You probably don’t want to hear your doctor proclaiming “I’m so indie, I was prescribing that *way* before it was cool.” Or maybe you do? If you’re a hipster and you really need to know when a particular band stops being underground and teeters on the edge of being mainstream so you can only like … Continue reading »
So #hic12 is nearly here and I’ll be there in a rather unusual capacity. I won’t be giving a talk. I won’t even be standing in front of a poster. I’ll be there as the official twitterer, which means I’ll be flitting around from talk to talk, tweeting from the official @hic_2012 account, and hopefully connecting people … Continue reading »
