PhD Comics on open access

The most excellent Ph.D Comics on open access (click to enlarge):


(Oh, and don't miss out on 'Nature vs. Science' Parts One, Two and Three).

Change in Academia

I recently came across a very interesting new blog: Gideon Burton's Academic Evolution (tag line: "the order is changing, the change needs order") about the impact of Web 2.0 and associated developments on academia. Burton, a professor at Brigham Young University, has maintained a more general blog since late 2007, but created a breakaway blog in the hopes of emulating Chris Anderson (of "The Long Tail" and Wired fame) by writing a book via a blog.

Anyway, check out the blog -- it's certainly worth a read. Relatedly... Nature has an editorial out questioning the use of metric-based research assessment.

The great divide in anthropology

There is a rather simplistic, but nonetheless interesting, article in the Times Higher Education Supplement on the great divide in anthropology between evolutionary and socio-cultural anthropologists. An excerpt:

On one side are the evolutionary anthropologists. "(They believe) our behaviour is based on things that we did to find mates in our years of evolution," says Alex Bentley, a lecturer in anthropology at Durham University. "Then we have the social anthropologists. Some of them really strongly reject this kind of thinking. They consider it reductionist. They are focused on the specifics of culture."

Put crudely, social anthropologists describe and compare the development of human cultures and societies, while evolutionary anthropologists seek to explain it by reference to our biological evolution. The two sides of the one discipline are struggling to unite.

Do also have a look at the comments, there are some real corkers...

Video: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Many of you have no doubt already seen Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Randy Pausch's wildly popular 'last lecture', "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". For those of you who haven't, watch it, seriously (it's embedded below, or click here. You can also download the lecture via iTunes). The back story, briefly, is that Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September 2006 and later given only a couple of months to live. He gave this lecture in September of 2007 and he died in July, 2008.

Science in the South

Science is carrying an interesting editorial this week by Mohamed Hassan, the executive director of the Third World Academy of Science, who argues that, while science has surged in parts of the South, it has stagnated elsewhere. The good news is that developing countries produce 20% of the articles published in international journals. The bad news is that a couple of countries - China, India, Brazil, Turkey, and Mexico - account for over half that proportion. Indeed, according to the figures Hassan quotes, sub-Saharan Africa generates just 1% of international journal articles.

There is certainly reason for hope, though. I have long thought that recent advances in information technology - especially "Web 2.0" innovations, but the 'basic' internet too - has made it possible to do cutting-edge science far away from traditional research and education centers in the developed world. Podcasts, blogs, online audio lectures, freely shared public talks, and other new developments allow for self-study of unprecedentedly quality and depth. And a movement to open access, together with RSS and free science news services, make it possible to keep abreast of the latest developments. Moreover, email and academics' generosity with their time and findings, make getting input from leading experts entirely feasible. (Of course, all of this depends on cheap and reliable internet access, but that's becoming more usual in Third World countries). Admittedly, there is good evidence that, in neuroscience research at least, there is still a very strong geographic concentration in a couple of locations in the rich world. But my own personal experience of doing and learning about science in a backwater - and that's what Durban is, no doubt - suggests that less capital intensive-research can flourish in the developing world.

While I'm yet to publish a paper in an international journal, that'll change soon(ish). Watch this space...

Open Access day

As I've said before, I strongly support open access. I don't want to sound sanctimonious, but I honestly think the fight for the golden road to open access is one of the most important in academia. So I'm pleased to point out that today, October 14th, is Open Access Day. The day, co-sponsored by PLoS, SPARC, and Students for Free Culture, is meant to "broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public."

Support open access. It's important.

(Relatedly, there is a brand-new contributor to Science Blogs: John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons and now blogs about copyrights and other relevant issues at Common Knowledge).

Evolutionary Psychology joins the 21st century...

The online open-access peer-reviewed journal Evolutionary Psychology has finally joined the 21st century... They've launched an RSS! Now it'll be possible to keep track of new articles properly. (They've had a email notification system for a while, but I didn't find that particularly useful).

Anyway, here are some of the coolest looking recent studies (all links to full pdfs):

• Men’s faces convey information about their bodies and their behavior: What you see is what you get (Shoup and Gallup).
• Parent-offspring conflict over mating: The case of family background (Apostolou).
• Human vocabulary use as display (Rosenberg and Tunney).

The first of these papers looks particularly interesting and it's related to my research to boot. Expect a review of it soon...

Facebook for Academics

Richard Price, a philosopher at All Souls College, Oxford, has just launched Academia, a social networking-type site for academics. The site aims to display every academic in the world - from graduate students to emeritus professors - in a tree-like structure of universities, colleges, departments and so on. The idea is for each academic to create a personal page on the site (here's mine, here's my supervisor's), which then lists her research interests, websites, papers, conference presentations, and so on. There is also the equivalent of Facebook's "friending": you can add someone as a "contact", which, like Facebook, then sends that person an email to confirm the connection. All this information is then browseable via the above mentioned tree, which displays how people are connected to their departments and colleagues. It's a bit hard to explain so have a look at UKZN's slot on the tree.

By the way... I haven't yet mentioned Academic Blogs, a wiki for listing academic blogs and thus a great way to find serious reading material. Ionian Enchantment is listed under Neuroscience / Cognitive Science and even has its own page.

Open access, under attack

I like open access. In my opinion, the serials crisis is an absolute travesty and, despite my 'capitalist' instincts, the spectacle of huge companies making profits from the efforts of academics who (a) are not in the companies' employ and (b) are funded (largely) by taxpayers, utterly disgusts me. So it rather pisses me off that the august Nature magazine (which, I should note, I have difficulty accessing because my institution can't afford the subscription fee) has published a bloody screed against PLoS, the best known open access suite of journals. The screed opens thusly:

Public Library of Science (PLoS), the poster child of the open-access publishing movement, is following an haute couture model of science publishing — relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals.

Sigh. I'd respond myself, but I doubt I could be objective. Luckily, Living the Scientific Live has criticized the article at length and Blog Around the Clock has compiled a list of blog reactions.

Jobs for academic types

Benoit Hardy-Vallee, author of the fantastic blog Natural Rationality, has a great little post on what to do with a Ph.D outside academia. He even has a whole section of links to resources for philosophers on finding non-academic jobs! Who would have guessed it? Philosophers in demand!

Is academia a cult?

Bug Girl thinks so. I'm not sure how serious she's being, as I don't read her blog regularly, but her post is certainly funny, interesting and suggestive. Assuming she is being serious, I can only say I'm somewhat skeptical. It has certainly not been my experience of academia and it would surprise (and really worry) me if many people did experience it that way.

Open access

I recently moved between universities: from the University of Cape Town to the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Unfortunately, my new university is a bit under resourced and doesn't have institutional access to quite a few journals. (Including fairly prominent ones). It was then (and particularly when I started blogging) that I realized just how frustrating, annoying and counter-productive the barriers to accessing knowledge really is. I suspect many people who access the web mainly from their well-financed institutions also fail to realize just what an issue this can be.

The bottom line with respect to open access is this: scholars do research, peer review it and even edit the journals, all without expecting to be paid. (Researchers get paid by their institutions, of course, and part of their job description is usually producing academic papers - the point is scholars don't expect to be paid by journals for their work). The publishing houses, however, charge exorbitant prices for access to their scholarly journals and the result is a high financial barrier. There was a time the arrangement between the scholarly community and publishers made sense: before the internet was created, when journals had to be printed in order to be distributed. Since it's now possible to distribute journal articles digitally at extremely low cost, this relationship has become outdated and unnecessary. As the Budapest Open Access Initiate put it, the internet makes possible :

world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

Open access is good for everyone except those companies with a vested interest in the status quo. We should not let a special interest group stand in the way of a great public good being realized.

What to do? If you are an author, self-archive and consider publishing in open access journals. (Opening access, by the way, seems to increase an article's readership and impact). Everybody else, spread the word (e.g.: join my group on Facebook: "Support Open Access"), support open access journals (read them, cite them) and sign the Budapest Open Access Initiative if you haven't done so already.

P.s. Yes, I realize I'm late on the bandwagon.