"When I privately asked them why they had used R*-trees, while it was easy to check experimentally that they did not help, the answer was “it was the only way to get our paper in a major conference”. So my work has been made more complicated for the sole purpose of impressing the reviewers: “look, I know about R*-trees too!”"

"The goals of the journal are to promote sharing of high-quality scientific software (e.g. there must be a test suite with 100% code coverage), promote discussion of best practice in research software development, and to enable researchers to be rewarded through publication for the time spent on developing software tools for others to use."

"BaRf stands for "Bioinformatics aggregated RSS feeds". It provides RSS feeds of titles and abstracts of the most recent papers published by journals that may be of relevance for people involved in Bioinformatics. We don't claim this list is complete - if you have suggestions for journals that should be added (and appear in PubMed) please let us know. The list of currently available journals along with the RSS feed XML links can be found on the right of the page."

"Now tell me again: Why do we submit papers to, referee papers for, and buy journals from these people? Some sort of misplaced sense of loyalty? Or some sad combination of apathy and inertia? What will it take for the research community to cut Elsevier loose?"

"After a bit of work we believe we have solved most of the practical problems that have to be taken care of before starting a free journal. This is probably the easy part. Now we have to decide if it is a good idea or not.

The aim is to have a high quality journal for the CG community that is run by the CG community and free to everyone (really free, no cost to publish and no cost to access). Obviously such a journal needs the support of the CG community to be successful. The work should be shared among the community, i.e., the editorial board and editorial manager(s) should be replaced regularly. "

"When the editors raise prices we don't like it. But when the lower them or agree to put things online, thats a bribe. They can't win. Well- if they just put EVERYTHING online and cheap then we will stop complaining and threatening. If they can't find a way to do that and make a profit they should not be in the business."

"If adding value gives one a claim to control access to the result, then at least two stakeholder organizations have that claim, and one of them has a much weightier claim than the publisher."

Entire print run of Journal of Cel Science available online for free.

Any academic authors care to join a collective action?

A good appraisal. "Grow up, people. Smile, put on your grownup undies, and stop throwing good money down the rathole of an already-lost fight."

"What they showed was that faculty with earlier surname initials were disproportionately positively represented among tenured faculty at top ten economics departments..."

e.g., "We take their rights FOR THEIR PROTECTION."

"Even journals in a technical field don't have RSS feeds."

"there are at least 350 scholarly journals for which the price of a single institutional subscription exceeds the revenue needed to provide hosting and technical support for an open access scholarly journal"

via Danny Yee

Musing about the relative focus of self-attention in different academic fields