“… it is difficult to do good science, write good scientific papers, and have enough publications to get future jobs.” – so wrote E. Robert Schulman 0f Charlottesville, Virginia, US, in an article for the Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 2, no. 5, 1996, entitled ‘How To Write A Scientific Paper’. The difficulties, it seems, […]
Tag: academics
Paying for information about paying for information (or not)
Heated debates continue regarding the thorny question of ‘Open Access’ to academic journals. Some (e.g. the publishers) argue that it’s financially unsustainable to give free access – while others (e.g. unpaid authors) assert that the forefront of knowledge is not something that should be traded as a commercial commodity. One place where scholarly discussion about publishing […]
Left v. Right: How Academics Face-Pose on the Web
A new study, the purpose of which some may find delightfully puzzling, looks at the self-portraits scholars put on their home pages: “How Academics Face the World: A Study of 5829 Homepage Pictures,” Owen Churches [pictured here], Rebecca Callahan, Dana Michalski, Nicola Brewer, Emma Turner, Hannah Amy Diane Keage, Nicole Annette Thomas, Mike Elmo, Richard […]
The Pharaoh configuration
The Pharaoh configuration is a concept invented by Sydney Brenner in his 2004 essay “Academic Dynamics“: This is a scheme which offers a solution to the fundamental problem of all scientific departments, which is how to get rid of the old — both people and science — and create space and resources for the young […]