Academic publishing

Jisc Digifest hears openness could bring benefits, but some cite plagiarism risks

Female researchers now account for 37 per cent of first authors in medicine’s top journals, says US study

Pat Thomson identifies five abiding fears that prey on the scholarly mind

Raul Pacheco-Vega offers six tips on how to keep the words flowing and hit your deadlines

Study suggests there may be long-term benefits from publishing, but critics warn of ‘too much, too soon’

But peer review processing firm must deal with author comments like those on ‘consenting mole rats’

The UK’s first academic conference on hip hop comes straight outta Cambridge

New book in the style of LA crime fiction offers maths lessons from a private eye

Drug company hopes to provide a new home for studies that try to replicate previous experimental results

Analysis suggests higher selectivity fails to increase journals’ impact factors

New York proposes free college courses for inmates while Romania cracks down on its ‘publish or perish’ loophole, finds Ellie Bothwell

Who loses out when a scholar fails to acknowledge earlier related work? Ron Iphofen on the evergreen virtues of desk research

Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative billed as a ‘grassroots’ response to concerns over reproducibility

Hundreds of mathematicians who moved to the West are enjoying success in the US and Europe, new study suggests

Analysis of seven prominent medical journals finds randomised controlled trials are far less likely to receive a press release than weaker observational studies

Scholar's anti-thank you has got the HE world talking, says Scott Jaschik

Plos Biology launches new section looking at how experiments are run and incentive systems for scientists

First anniversary of atrocity sees words of Enlightenment figures rekindled 

We need to wake up and defend this vital practice, not sleepwalk to an unhappy ending, says Lars Fischer

Pat Thomson on the scholarly virtues of putting your thoughts online

The most popular higher education articles of the year, based on website traffic

Research organisations who previously worked with the troubled children’s charity have sought to clarify ‘misleading’ descriptions of clinical work

As fans await the release of The Force Awakens, could Star Wars help teach psychoanalytic concepts in university?

Philosophers Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum speak up for the benefits of writing collaboratively

A masterly study of the building has been published more than 40 years after its author’s death

Prosecutors accuse academics of colluding with publishers to boost their standing and sell more books

Alternative metrics reveal the research that received the most online attention

Too many senior scholars abuse their power when it comes to assigning credit, argues Bruce Macfarlane

Organisation hopes use of ORCID system will end confusion over authorship and researcher identity

New publishing model aims to make research accessible to all without charging authors

Experts debate how scholarly publishing is going to have to change

Ken Levy, who publishes in both philosophy and law journals, finds the latter group’s system unfair, distasteful and wasteful

PaperRank service will allow researchers to rate papers online in bid to accelerate and open up process

The measure of scholarly impact is now being manipulated so much that it has ceased to be meaningful, editorial claims

Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society urges scholars to claim from pot of almost £5 million in uncollected funds

The quality of scholarly editing is ‘extremely uneven’, says Brian Bloch

Public scrutiny may force up quality of peer review, suggests study

Tricks of presenting a successful academic conference paper are revealed by co-author of a popular public speaking guide

Matthew Reisz reflects on the issues raised by Linsey McGoey’s new book on ‘philanthrocapitalism’

Articles that are free to view are also more frequently shared on Facebook, new research finds

£20,000 essay-writing competition shortlist features two UK scholars

Scholar urges delegates at conference in the Netherlands to use measures like Twitter to measure public engagement, rather than turning them into new metrics

Study finds ‘super ties’ with another academic can lead to higher citation rates

Academic ‘scallywags’ are gaining doctorates thanks to the circulation of dodgy theses within some universities, says the founder of plagiarism pressure group

Fears that 40 per cent levy could leave academics and students unable to access new research

Majority of academics publishing in journals with lax peer review are from Asia, study concludes

Theses in open-access repository at Dublin City University have been downloaded almost 1.4 million times

Potential leader-in-waiting is fighting for her career after becoming latest German politician to face academic fraud claims

Peer review system ‘lacks capacity’ to deal with ‘flood’ of new papers, meaning some could be unjustly dismissed

Matthew Reisz celebrates the joys of profiling scholars

Books interview: Karen Shook speaks to David Wootton, author of The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution

Dalmeet Singh Chawla looks at short, sharp new ways to impart information from journal articles

Transition to ‘make-or-break’ stage for female academics is a significant challenge, study explains

10 must-dos for postdocs identified by Catherine L Drennan, professor of chemistry and biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All scholars do it, but some are simply blowing their own trumpet, says Pat Thomson

The current review process has many holes, says Apostolos Koutropoulos

Alice Dreger resigns her post after institution censored a risqué story in a medical journal

Matthew Reisz reflects on the kind of texts one might want to be wary about reading on the train

Researchers find an unexpected link between brevity and popularity

The rise in ‘kilo-authors’ and ‘gift authorship’ is causing the academy to rethink how it assesses the worth of academic publications