Astronomy | Personal

The Weekly World News

The Weekly World News

Whenever you throw a party, there is always someone who double-dips the guacamole. In this case the jerk was Ephraim Hardcastle, a pseudonymous correspondent in the Daily Mail. This nimrod thought the most important thing to say about one of the biggest science stories in 50 years was that two of the experts asked to appear on the BBC news that night were both women of colour. Hardcastle’s shtick is similar to that of the old Weekly World News columnist Ed Anger — with the difference that Anger was a conscious parody.

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Sausagefests…

Sausagefests…

This week a Sausagefest of a different sort has been bouncing round the science tweetosphere: a big, international quantum chemistry conference with 29 plenary speakers and session chairs, all of whom were men.

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Open Sesame II

Open Sesame II

So what gives?  So far as I can tell, Elsevier hopes to negotiate blanket deals with science funding agencies and consortia of institutions to cover the cost of these journals.  And I suspect many scientists will be apprehensive at the thought of Elsevier inserting themselves even more deeply into the world’s scholarly infrastructure.

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Open Sesame

Open Sesame

more importantly, the Archive has reached the point where it threatens to do to traditional journals what MP3s did to record shops, as it represents a radically new model for scientific publishing.  In particle physics and astrophysics, the Archive is essentially complete — I almost never see traditionally published papers that are not also posted to the Archive.

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