Socialism in science – Part 3 – the Utopian system of post-publication peer review

I am having a blast! So this is what it feels like when you sell your soul. Dr. Lootzeepfehr (a German name, I suppose), with whom the transaction was effected, told me it was going to be good, but I didn’t know it would be THAT much fun. My blog stats are totally out the roof, and Coturnix is having a Jedi Council meeting over at the Science 2.0 friendfeed page about my blasphemous heresies regarding Open Access. The OA Jedi knights thought I would never know, but one of my spy drones spotted a disturbance in the Force in the blogosphere and decided to take a closer look. BTW, Coturnix, would it be too bold on my part to ask you to link to my posts up on “Blog around the Clock“?*** I think that at least the theme of the posts is well aligned with your blog’s profile. The OA community deserves to know the heretical views of the unbelievers. “Know thy enemy” is key to victory, at least that’s what two of Lootzeepfehr’s buddies, Sun Tzu and Niccolo Machiavelli, told me.

During the aforementioned council Mr. Gunn called my scholarly discourse here and here a “snippy little rant”. Well, Mr. Gunn, you ain’t seen me rant yet! But now rant I shall, because (1) you are virtually begging for it (2) I have come across a totally rantable statement, namely that upfront editorial decisions are a thing of the past and that the future belongs to post-print open access review process (I may have simplified it a little, but this is that’s the gist of it). Read on at your own risk.

Socialism in science – Part 2 – I am wiser but not quite convinced

In my previous post I made a bold statement comparing Open Access publishing to socialism. The post was criticized in a number of insightful comments, but hey, I knew I had it coming. There are a lot of people very strongly emotionally attached to OA, and a voice pointing out the weaknesses of this publishing model was bound to cause an uproar. I am glad, because thanks to all the criticisms I heard I have been able to learn a great deal and to see the problem from a number of different angles. But, call it stubornness or whatever, I am still not convinced that OA publishing is on its way to take over the world of high impact scientific publishing. In fact, the extra mile the comments on the blog made me walk resulted in my being more set in my opinion that OA is not the way to go for top-tier biomedical research journals.