Note: the blog post linked below is a joke, and I very much regret that pointing that out is necessary. Real academic publishing is so nuts and so close to this that I can almost imagine it happening.

Academic Publisher Unveils New Journal Which Prevents All Access To Its Content This entry was originally posted at http://unjapanologist.dreamwidth. ( Read more... )

HuffPo brings a pile of bizarre with 50 Shades of Grey in Scientific Publication: How Digital Publishing Is Harming Science. A scholar called Douglas Fields argues against open access, mainly by attempting to paint it as a dastardly government takeover of science that will mean the end of rigorous research. I was a little disappointed that he didn' ( Read more... )

"I don't mind that these fics with the serial numbers filed off get published commercially. I just wish they'd publish the good fic."

I've seen a lot of people react like that to Fifty Shades of Grey, and it seems to be bubbling up again with the news that a book based on a One Direction fic* called Me, Myself, and One Direction is also getting ( Read more... )

There's a lot of different ways in which you can screw up as an academic, from doing sloppy research full of methodological flaws and bad analysis (maybe so you can quickly monetize it as a popular book), to deliberately plagiarizing and denying other researchers credit for their work in an academic economy where people's reputations and jobs ( Read more... )

I recently bought the Kindle edition of this book. $89 for an e-book is beyond obscene, but I rather desperately needed it for research and there was still room in the budget. I considered getting it as a one-month rental for the equally obscene price of $40, but the rentals page explained that the number of highlights that can be made in a rental ( Read more... )