This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Publish but be damned — … The article explains that Luque, whose full name is Rafael Luque Alvarez de Sotomayor, has already published about 700 papers, and that “so far this year, Luque has published 58 […]
In 1969 a publishing executive mused about whether and how computers had helped his industry: “Pitfalls to Computer Use in Publishing and Communication,” Daniel Melcher, Journal of Business Communication, vol. 6, no. 2, Winter 1969, pp. 47-51. The author, chairman of the R.R. Bowker Company, says: Most large publishers now have computers; many small ones […]
Stephen Buranyi explored how the business of publishing science (and other) research reports became such a big business. Buranyi’s article, appeared in The Guardian, in 2017: Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created […]
Anyone who’s seen the phrase “This page has intentionally been left blank” and who has been left thinking that it’s a relatively modern construct – think again. Intentionally blank pages have been around, in abundance, since at least the 18th century. Dr. Anne Toner (Trinity College Cambridge, UK), has extensively researched varieties of incompleteness in […]