From TeleRead:

Fresh fuel has been poured on the smouldering open access/academic publishing debate by Samuel Gershman, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in Josh Tenenbaum’s Computational Cognitive Science Group, in an online articlefor the Boston Globe.  Entitling his piece “The Exploitative Economics of Academic Publishing,” he protests that: “taxpayers in the United States spend $139 billion a year on scientific research, yet much of this research is inaccessible not only to the public, but also to other scientists. This is the consequence of an exploitative scientific journal system that rewards academic publishers while punishing taxpayers, scientists, and universities.”

As you would expect from such a tone, Gershman comes down very much on the open access side of the debate. Not least as he’s been a victim of the notorious Elsevier takedown notices himself.

“Like many scientists, I provide access to my research papers on my website,” he states. “When I published these papers in Elsevier journals, I was required to hand over the copyrights. Therefore, I had no choice but to remove the papers.”

. . . .

Gershman’s basic argument remains highly critical of the closed-access publishers – and hard for them to refute. “Scientists are providing free labor that benefits extremely profitable corporations,” he states. “Taxpayers are subsidizing these corporations, effectively shrinking the amount of funding available for research. Universities cannot afford growing subscription fees.”

Link to the rest at TeleRead

From The Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day:

onolatry, n.

Worship of the donkey or ass. Also in extended use: excessive admiration for or devotion to foolishness or a foolish thing.

. . . .

1924 I. Babbitt Rousseau & Romanticism iv. 144 Nietzsche has depicted the leaders of the nineteenth century as engaged in a veritable onolatry or ass-worship.

Link to the rest at The Oxford English Dictionary

PG can think of so many uses . . . .

From The Telegraph:

It is the world’s most definitive work on the most global language, but the Oxford English Dictionary may be disappearing from bookshelves forever.

Publishers fear the next edition will never appear in print form because its vast size means only an online version will be feasible, and affordable, for scholars.

It’s all academic for now anyway, they say, because the third edition of the famous dictionary, estimated to fill 40 volumes, is running at least 20 years behind schedule.

. . . .

His team of 70 philologists, including lexicographers, etymologists and pronunciation experts, has been working on the latest version, known as OED3, for the past 20 years.

. . . .

Michael Proffitt revealed to Country Life magazine that the next edition will not be completed until 2034, and likely only to be offered in an online form because of its gargantuan size.

“A lot of the first principles of the OED stand firm, but how it manifests has to change, and how it reaches people has to change,” said the 48-year-old Edinburgh-born editor.

Work on the new version, currently numbering 800,000 words, has been going on since 1994. The first edition, mooted in 1858 with completion expected in 10 years, took 70 years.

. . . .

“We look not only for frequency and longevity, but also breadth of use because, once a word enters the OED, it doesn’t come out. It’s a permanent record of language. I don’t think of it as a purely linguistic document, but as a part of social history.”

. . . .

The challenge facing his team was highlighted by associate editor Peter Gilliver, who once spent nine months revising definitions for the word “run”, currently the longest single entry in the OED.

. . . .

“OMG, for example, was first recorded in a letter from Admiral Fisher to Winston Churchill in 1917. The expression ‘to die for’ was used in a novel of 1898, in the same sense as today. Sometimes obsolete terms make a comeback.”

Link to the rest at The Telegraph

From The Ottawa Citizen:

I have just written the world’s worst science research paper: More than incompetent, it’s a mess of plagiarism and meaningless garble.

Now science publishers around the world are clamouring to publish it.

They will distribute it globally and pretend it is real research, for a fee.

It’s untrue? And parts are plagiarized? They’re fine with that.

Welcome to the world of science scams, a fast-growing business that sucks money out of research, undermines genuine scientific knowledge, and provides fake credentials for the desperate.

And even veteran scientists and universities are unaware of how deep the problem runs.

. . . .

Many journals now publish only online. And some of these, nicknamed predatory journals, offer fast, cut-rate service to young researchers under pressure to publish who have trouble getting accepted by the big science journals.

In academia, there’s a debate over whether the predators are of a lower-than-desired quality. But the Citizen’s experiment indicates much more: that many are pure con artists on the same level as the Nigerian banker who wants to give you $100 million.

. . . .

To uncover bottom-feeding publishers, the simplest way was to submit something that absolutely shouldn’t be published by anyone, anywhere.

First I had to write it.

My short research paper may look normal to outsiders: A lot of big, scientific words with some graphs. Let’s start with the title: “Acidity and aridity: Soil inorganic carbon storage exhibits complex relationship with low-pH soils and myeloablation followed by autologous PBSC infusion.”

Look more closely. The first half is about soil science. Then halfway through it switches to medical terms, myeloablation and PBSC infusion, which relate to treatment of cancer using stem cells.

The reason: I copied and pasted one phrase from a geology paper online, and the rest from a medical one, on hematology.

I wrote the whole paper that way, copying and pasting from soil, then blood, then soil again, and so on. There are a couple of graphs from a paper about Mars. They had squiggly lines and looked cool, so I threw them in.

Footnotes came largely from a paper on wine chemistry. The finished product is completely meaningless.

. . . .

I submitted the faux science to 18 journals, and waited.

Predators moved in fast. Acceptances started rolling in within 24 hours of my submission, from journals wishing to publish the work of this young geologist at the University of Ottawa-Carleton.

First came the Merit Research Journal of Agricultural Science and Soil Sciences, which claims it sent me to “peer review” by an independent expert in the field who gave me a glowing review. It laid out my article and was ready to post it online 48 hours after submission — for $500.

. . . .

Only two turned me down, for plagiarism. And one of these will turn a blind eye and publish anyway if I just tweak it a bit.

Link to the rest at The Ottawa Citizen and thanks to Matthew for the tip.

From The Association for Psychological Science:

 Procrastination and impulsivity are genetically linked, suggesting that the two traits stem from similar evolutionary origins, according to research published in Psychological Science.

. . . .

“Everyone procrastinates at least sometimes, but we wanted to explore why some people procrastinate more than others and why procrastinators seem more likely to make rash actions and act without thinking,” explains psychological scientist and study author Daniel Gustavson of the University of Colorado Boulder. “Answering why that’s the case would give us some interesting insights into what procrastination is, why it occurs, and how to minimize it.”

From an evolutionary standpoint, impulsivity makes sense: Our ancestors should have been inclined to seek immediate rewards when the next day was uncertain.

Procrastination, on the other hand, may have emerged more recently in human history. In the modern world, we have many distinct goals far in the future that we need to prepare for – when we’re impulsive and easily distracted from those long-term goals, we often procrastinate.

Thinking about the two traits in that context, it seems logical that people who are perpetual procrastinators would also be highly impulsive.

. . . .

[Researchers] found that procrastination is indeed heritable, just like impulsivity. Not only that, there seems to be a complete genetic overlap between procrastination and impulsivity — that is, there are no genetic influences that are unique to either trait alone.

That finding suggests that, genetically speaking, procrastination is an evolutionary byproduct of impulsivity — one that likely manifests itself more in the modern world than in the world of our ancestors.

In addition, the link between procrastination and impulsivity also overlapped genetically with the ability to manage goals, lending support to the idea that delaying, making rash decisions, and failing to achieve goals all stem from a shared genetic foundation.

Link to the rest at The Association for Psychological Science

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From The Heart and Craft of Life Writing:

Although few things bond people like food and sharing recipes, I didn’t intend to include recipes in my mini-memoir, Adventures of a Chilehead, for several reasons:

1) Some of the stories are set in restaurants and I couldn’t include recipes for those.
2) Recipes for things like frijoles, chile con carne and enchiladas are easily found on the web.
3) When I cook, I use recipes as mere suggestions and cook by the seat of my pants based mostly on what’s in the kitchen at any given time. How do you write recipes for that?
4) Some ingredients, like chile powder, are unreliable in strength.

The finished book bears the subtitle “A Mini-Memoir with Recipes.” Obviously I changed my mind, primarily because most people who read early versions of the manuscript told me they wanted recipes.

. . . .

Most memoirs that include recipes put a single recipe at the end of each chapter. For example, Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Judith Newton’s Tasting Home: follow this pattern. Since some of my stories take place in restaurants or feature hot pepper sauce, and some stories spin off three or four recipes, it didn’t make sense to put them with the chapters. Besides, the length of the recipes would interrupt the flow of the stories.

Link to the rest at The Heart and Craft of Life Writing

From The Millions:

At the Edinburgh Book Festival 2011, Michael Holroyd lamented – as aging biographers are wont to do — the decline of biography. “I have a nostalgia for visiting private houses to find letters and journals and to root around in the attic,” he said. “But the fact that a lot of material now is on the computer takes the romance out of it, and now it’s about examining what lies behind the delete button — the horror.”

While his take is self-consciously crankish, Holroyd’s suggestion that the computer represents a turning point in biographical writing carries some weight.  After centuries of shuffling papers, biographers must now deal with the sudden digitization of the self, and the behavioral changes that have followed. Contemporary literary biographies — of Susan Sontag, David Foster Wallace, Nora Ephron, John Updike, all of whom adopted email quite late in their lives — are petri dishes for a new age of biography.

Contemporary literature scholar Stephen Burn, who is currently editing the correspondence of David Foster Wallace, describes compiling emails as an “exercise in reverse engineering.”  Since Wallace does not seem to have kept any of his emails, Burn has had to track down friends, colleagues, editors, and fans who have saved the emails he sent them. As a result, he finds himself “tracing lines backwards from published books, stories, and essays, to make visible the various dialogues along the way that led to the finished work.”

. . . .

In contrast, what Burn identifies as “the real dark shadow cast over scholars by email correspondence” is the fickle nature of fast-changing technology. We may believe that recent history is safely tucked away in the digital fortress, but electronic content actually faces far greater threats than traditional materials like diaries, files, and letters. Whether as a result of bit rot, unstable storage devices, technical failures, or systemic obsolescence, Burn and other scholars fear that “potentially great letters or exchanges [will be] locked within hard drives that can no longer be accessed.”

. . . .

Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf,Edith Wharton, and most recently Penelope Fitzgerald, suggests that “when people are at their most frivolous, superficial, gregarious, and chatty is often when they are most revealing about themselves,” highlighting the interplay between “your secret self, your solitary self, your nighttime self, your gregarious, chatty e-mailing self.”

Link to the rest at The Millions

From Fast Company:

College students today stream movies from Netflix, queue up music on Spotify, and order late-night snacks on Seamless. But when it comes to buying textbooks, many students are still doing things the old-fashioned way: buying pricy paper copies from the campus bookstore at the start of the semester, then selling them back for a fraction of the purchase price when classes are done.

E-books were supposed to be a panacea, but the Kindle and iPad went mainstream and still relief never came. Companies trying to disrupt the industry say it has evolved slower than other content fields because the market is more indirect.

You see, textbook publishers market to professors who pick the books, not students who pay for them–where Apple and Amazon have traditionally directed their marketing. The key to innovation, these companies say, is to not try to beat the big publishing houses at their own game.

. . . .

“Unlike with ordering dinner, students, especially younger students, are very unwilling to do what they perceive could put them at a disadvantage,” says Frank, whose company operates a combination textbook marketplace and price-comparison engine. “They really just want to get off on the right foot.”

. . . .

“The textbook sales cycle is kind of like the pharmaceutical sales cycle,” says Ariel Diaz, the CEO of Boundless, which develops interactive,cross-platform textbooks. “The one making the decision is not the one making the purchase.”

And, says Chegg’s Schultz, traditional publishers developing e-textbooks often contribute their own institutional inertia and just aim to render the successful print version on a screen, not build a new, interactive product.

“In general, publishers are saying don’t mess with my book — I just want you to create a digital representation of that same thing I sell in print,” he says. “I’m losing the ability to create experiences for the student like ‘turn my book into a flash card set’ or ‘turn my book into an image gallery, so I can just use the images to study from.’”

. . . .

Similarly, Boundless began by marketing its books directly to students as a low-cost supplement or alternative to their assigned textbooks, says Diaz. Boundless’ textbook content is generally available for free under a Creative Commons license, and for $20 per book, students get the full interactive package with additional study tools.

“I think the key is to find innovative ways to reach the market,” he says, explaining some students use Boundless’ interactive books to study and then borrow a copy of an assigned textbook from a friend or the college library solely for the homework problems in the book.

Link to the rest at Fast Company

From USA Today:

After Walter George Bruhl Jr. died Sunday at the age of 80, his family discovered he had written his own obituary.

The obit opens with, “Walter George Bruhl Jr. of Newark and Dewey Beach DE is a dead person, he is no more, he is bereft of life, he is deceased, he has wrung down the curtain and gone to join the choir invisible, he has expired and gone to meet his maker,” referencing a Monty Python sketch.

Grandson Sam Bruhl wrote on Facebook, “Typical of my PopPop: he cut out the middleman and wrote his own … obituary. He’s the only man I’ve ever known to be able to add his own humor like this.”

. . . .

Bruhl requested that he be cremated since his wife refused to honor his request — “to have him standing in the corner of the room with a glass of Jack Daniels in his hand so that he would appear natural to visitors.”

Link to the rest at USA Today and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

This item raised questions in PG’s mind – Should authors write their own obituaries? Do they need their editor’s help? Would a sci-fi author’s obit differ from someone who wrote romance? Are zombies ever appropriate?

Does their agent get a cut? Are they required to offer the obit to their publisher before it appears in the newspaper? What about a separate obituary for the pen name?

From The Bookseller:

Direct-selling to institutions by publishers proved a thorny issue at the Bookseller Association’s Academic, Professional and Specialist conference in Brighton.

. . . .

Dan Johns . . .  the chairman of the BA’s academic group, warned he would stop providing publishers with vital information if they continued to sell directly to universities.

The owner of independent academic bookshop The University Bookseller, Plymouth, said the practice was like “self-killing” by publishers because it damaged the important and long-established relationships which have existed between publishers, booksellers and universities and undermined the market as a whole. “We have had great support in Plymouth from publishers so thank you for that – it has been a great year for you guys (publishers) and your reps,” he said. “However, I am aware that the relationship is being undermined by direct selling. It is incredibly short sighted. If I cannot put my trust in a publisher or a publisher’s rep, I will simply not communicate. I will order my books, but I will not tell you anymore than that. I need to know any information I give to you is not being used to get direct e-book sales.”

. . . .

The issue of Amazon’s dominance in the industry was also raised, with Prescott saying that while he wasn’t “having a bash at” the company itself, he thought the competition authorities, namely the Office of Fair Trading, had “singularly failed to see that Amazon’s 80-90% dominance of the e-book market in the UK  posed any sort of short to medium term dangers for our industry as a whole and by extension their customers”.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller