Some more pieces on scientific publishing

Here are three more short pieces (here, here, here) on the academic publishing landscape. All three relate to publishing in bio-med and so have only a glancing relation to what goes on in linguistics. We are shielded from many of the problems cited by the relative irrelevance of our work for useful products. There is clearly a lot of pressure on research to come to the right conclusion in some fields. So maybe we should consider our lack of funding from certain sources to be a partial blessing.

The last piece is a bit more interesting than the first two in that it tries to find ways of mitigating the pressures. One of the more interesting claims is that blind review did not do much to help to promote more objective reviewing. Another interesting idea is to have reviews signed and so reviewers are responsible for their comments. Of course, I can imagine that there are also downsides to this, especially if the reviewee is not someone that a reviewer would want to mess with for all sort of personal or professional reasons. At any rate, interesting stuff.