This text is an introduction to recent work by Collier, Eberhardt, Mühlmann and Rodriguez:| Research Practices and Tools
In a publish-or-perish system of scientific communication, large numbers of articles are written and submitted to journals. Editors face the...| researchpracticesandtools.blogspot.com
(A PDF version of this post is available on HAL.)| Research Practices and Tools
Since 2012, thousands of academics have been boycotting the academic publisher Elsevier, whom they blame for overpricing its journals, and more generally for resisting open access to the scientific literature. Of course, most major academic publishers are guilty of the same, but Elsevier stands out as the worst offender. For instance, Elsevier was the last major publisher to join the Initiative for Open citations, years after all the others. Elsevier did not join the Initiative for open abstr...| Research Practices and Tools
Since travel by plane is one of the main sources of carbon emissions by researchers, climate scientists who take the plane have been called hypocrites in the air. The expression could be applied to many other researchers, who worry about climate change (without necessarily working on the subject), but fly much more than is really needed.| Research Practices and Tools
Academic journals as gatekeepers| Research Practices and Tools
When it comes to good practices, research institutions are often good at declarations of principles, and not so good at implementation. For example, it is easy to declare that research assessment should be qualitative and not rely too much on bibliometrics, but harder to do it in practice.| Research Practices and Tools
My previous post reproduced a letter from Maxim Chernodub, suggesting how French scientists could help Ukrainian colleagues, and also calling French scientists to not boycott Russian collaborators. However, it seems that we will not have much choice in the matter, at least if we follow the official directives, which I will paraphrase below.| Research Practices and Tools
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Western researchers have been wondering how to help our Ukrainian colleagues, and how to behave with our Russian colleagues. A letter by French-Russian-Ukrainian physicist Maxim Chernodub has been circulating, which offers valuable perspective and advice on these issues. (It was written on 27/02/2022.) Below is the text of the letter, reproduced with the author's permission. | Research Practices and Tools
There seems to be a consensus among universities and research funders that research assessment should not be based on crude quantitative metrics, such as: numbers of articles, numbers of citations, journal impact factors, the h-index, etc. The 2012 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) formulates principles which could greatly improve research assessment if they were applied, although I would argue that the DORA is misguided in its recommendations to authors. The DORA has be...| Research Practices and Tools
“Science family of journals announces change to open-access policy”: the title of this Nature news article may sound boring, but the news are not:| Research Practices and Tools
In conformal field theory, correlation functions of primary fields are covariant functions of the fields’ positions. For example, in two dimensions, a correlation function of N diagonal primary fields must be such that | Research Practices and Tools
In my first post about the ERC’s recent withdrawal from supporting Plan S, I tried to explain ERC’s announcement using publicly available information on the ERC, Plan S, and their recent news. The potential dangers of this approach were to miss relevant pieces of information, and to give too much weight to calendar coincidences.| Research Practices and Tools
The European Research Council (ERC) just announced that they would withdraw their support for Coalition S, the consortium of research funders behind Plan S. Plan S is the valiant but not universally welcome attempt to impose strong open access requirements to research articles, without paying more money to publishers.| Research Practices and Tools
Abstract| Research Practices and Tools
In the context of the conference GFP 2019 on polymer chemistry, I am taking part in a roundtable on Open Access. Chemists are coming quite late to the Open Access debate. The preprint archive Chemrxiv is young, not widely used, and not independent from publishers. The traditional subscription-based publishing system, and the standard bibliometric indicators, dominate communication and evaluation. And when chemists are dragged into the debate by discipline-agnostic initiatives such as Plan S, ...| Research Practices and Tools
For scientists, writing well (or well enough) is a critical skill, as written texts are essential for communicating research. Of course, not every scientist should be able to write well, as some may rely on collaborators. In a lecture on "Writing physics", David Mermin emphasizes the importance of language and writing through a famous example:| Research Practices and Tools
This post is motivated by a request from JHEP to review a recent article by Anton de la Fuente. I am grateful to the author for stimulating correspondence.| Research Practices and Tools
Since November 2017, I have been an editor of the WikiJournal of Science, a Wikipedia-integrated, broad scope, libre open access journal. For me this is one way of encouraging academics to write in Wikipedia, by making it possible to publish Wikipedia articles in a recognized academic journal. The WikiJournals as they now exist may not yet be ideal for that, but they are already providing valuable insights into the difference between Wikipedia standards and academic standards, academics' atti...| Research Practices and Tools
This post is based on a joint talk with Riccardo Guida given at IPhT Saclay on May 7th.| Research Practices and Tools
This is the text of my habilitation defense, which took place on December 21st 2018. The members of the jury were Denis Bernard, Matthias Gaberdiel, Jesper Jacobsen, Vyacheslav | Research Practices and Tools
I have been using this blog for publishing the reviewer reports that I write for journals, since the journals typically do not publish the reports. However, the new journal SciPost Physics does publish the reports for accepted articles. I have recently reviewed an article by Gorbenko, Rychkov and Zan for SciPost Physics, and written about the experience: it would seem that I need not blog about that article, since my report is already online.| Research Practices and Tools
The principles behind plan S have already sparked lots of debate, including an open letter denouncing the plan, based on objections that I found not very convincing. Now that the plan’s promoters have published their draft implementation guidance (and are inviting comments on it), the discussion can become more specific. Given the boldness of the principles, their implementation cannot be painless, and is bound to raise criticisms if not resistance. It is therefore both crucial and difficul...| Research Practices and Tools
After a coalition of European science funding agencies announced their Plan S initiative for open access, a number of researchers wrote an open letter criticizing the move, under the title “Reaction of Researchers to Plan S: Too Far, Too Risky”. To summarize, they fear that Plan S would increase costs, lower quality, and restrict academic freedom. In order to evaluate how seriously these fears should be taken, let me start with a 5-point analysis of the issues, before discussing the open ...| Research Practices and Tools
After long and tortuous negotiations, the French consortium Couperin has claimed victory in its recent agreement with Springer, after having secured price decreases. This claim seems reasonable, as prices of big deals with publishers tend to increase steadily. Of course, critics can still point out that Springer remains very expensive compared to smaller, more efficient publishers. But at least Springer seems amenable to some compromises in negotiations. And one should not forget that the gre...| Research Practices and Tools