I am rather late to tooting this...

(Also the decision-making process took longer than we expected.
It was a very valuable learning experience!)

This was the first ever start up fund for a mathematics Diamond OA journal.
We decided to support two journal initiatives.

https://www.mathoa.org/announcement/

One of the journals (Combinatorial Commutative Algebra, https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/CCA/index) has already launched!

With warm congratulations to both projects, we wish you much success in the coming years!

#diamondOA #scientificpublishing #openaccess

What should fluid mechanics papers focus on today?

This editorial argues for a “physics-first” approach: beyond data and simulations, real progress comes from understanding mechanisms and scaling laws.

🔗 https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0329552

#FluidDynamics #Physics #ScientificPublishing #ResearchCulture #OpenScience

I am slowly getting disillusioned about scientific publishing and rigor. I just got a note from google scholar that one of my articles has been cited. Looking it up, they made our "these reasons were named regularly in these categories" into "these categories enable these reasons".

This is utter bullshit!

#science #scientificpublishing

I want to bring to your attention that there is an interesting new development to counter the often exploitative model of Elsevier and others for scientific publishing:
Open Research Europe (ORE).
The platform uses a publish-review-curate model, intended to ensure scientific rigour and transparency. Articles published on the platform are subject to open peer review, with the peer review reports made public. There are no author fees.

Spread the word!

https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/

#publishing #scientificpublishing

Bibliometrics, as a discipline, is as hard as it gets, since it's trying to measure, or even, predict, an outcome that perhaps only years or decades can validate.

Among the statistical models used, complex as they may be, I find missing the details of how the enchilada is made. As in, when we publish a paper, we are often told by the editor, "you are 5 pages over your 5 page limit", and, "you are 100 citations over your 50 citation limit". So we rewrite the manuscripts (hence preprints are often better, at least in the honesty and clarity of the citations) to compress both the text and the references, favouring reviews or simply skipping those that may be considered common knowledge or which "merely" confirm prior claims. Now try to model that. I hope there's focus on preprints for more proper studies of attribution and discovery chains.

#academia #ScientificPublishing

Have we crossed the point yet where "productivity" is seen as a bad word, with negative connotations?

#academia #AcademicChatter #ScientificPublishing

An editor from a Springer Nature journal, a company that posted $2.1 billion in revenue in 2022 [1], from an industry with double-digit percent profits (~30% [2]), kindly asked me, an academic in the UK where salaries continue to plummet [3], whether I would be pleased to review a paper for them, for free ... so I kindly asked whether they would consider paying me. It is only logical.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Nature
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
[3] In UK academia, "Pay has fallen significantly in real terms since 2009, as have pension contributions, and redundancies are rife. Short-term contracts and precarious work arrangements are common, especially for younger staff, as universities struggle to balance their books." https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/28/vice-chancellor-salaries-university-bosses-rich/

#ScientificPublishing #academia