Publishers: Save Authors’ Time

Predatory publishers: Time for action

Plenty is being written about predatory publishers (Clark & Thompson, 2017; Pickler et al., 2015) but little is being done to stop them. The one valiant effort to expose them: Beall’s List of Predatory publishers, has been forcibly removed from the Internet (Watson, 2017a), and while someone else has made the list available online (http://beallslist. weebly.com/; accessed 18 September 2017), th...

Authors, Publishers, and Public Goods: Trading Gold for Dross

Reference Accuracy: Authors', Reviewers', Editors', and Publishers' Contributions

Scientific authors are responsible for the accuracy of their writings and references to others' works. However, relying on authors is not enough when it comes to processing their manuscripts. Joint efforts of authors, peer reviewers, editors, and publishers throughout the publishing process may prevent most reference errors. This article analyzes essential aspects of bibliographic management an...

Did a Switch in Time Save Nine?∗

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court-packing plan of 1937 and the “switch in time that saved nine” animate central questions of law, politics, and history. Did Supreme Court Justice Roberts abruptly switch votes in 1937 to avert a showdown with Roosevelt? Scholars disagree vigorously about whether Roberts’s transformation was gradual and anticipated or abrupt and unexpected. Using newly collected ...

Academic publishers' time-loop: another mechanism to manipulate impact factors?

The festive season at the end of the year is the time when it strikes us that academic publishers use their time machines to catapult their products back in time, presenting us with January and even February journal issues of the following year. For example, the February 2012 of Cretaceous Research was published on 30 November 2011; the January 2012 issue of Ecology Letters was published on 1 D...