Oh, dear.

"We survey the reasons for the ongoing boycott of the publisher Elsevier. We examine Elsevier's pricing and bundling policies, restrictions on dissemination by authors, and lapses in ethics and peer review, and we conclude with thoughts about the future of mathematical publishing."

"I therefore have no difficulty in defending Elsevier’s right to price its journals as it sees fit. Equally, I have no difficulty in understanding the decisions of individuals and libraries not to subscribe to Elsevier’s journals. What I strongly dislike is the Chief Executive claiming that the objections of Elsevier’s critics are based on “misstatements or misunderstandings of the fact”. He should be honest and state that in many cases his journals have an element of monopoly power which as a commercial, capitalist company he is determined to exploit as fully as possible. I would respect him were he to say that. For him to claim otherwise is simply false – and as a journal editor it is my job to expose those who speak falsely. That responsibility extends to rejecting comments made by my Journal’s publisher’s Chief Executive, just as much as it extends to rejecting articles that make unsubstantiated and unwarranted claims unsupported by the evidence."

" if some policy increases consumption of something with zero marginal cost (an idea, an academic paper, a song, an e-book, etc.), a minimum, necessary condition to restrict that policy is that the variety of affected new goods must decrease. So if music piracy increases the number of songs consumed (and the number of songs illegally downloaded in any period of time is currently much higher than worldwide sales during that period), a minimum economic justification for a government crackdown on piracy is that the number of new songs created has decreased (in this case, they have not). Applying The First Law to open access mandates, a minimum economic justification for opposing such mandates is that either open access has no benefits, or that open access will make peer reviewed journals economically infeasible."

Somebody (hopefully not me) really needs to write a book about vampirical hypotheses testing.

"The bit that is most striking is the 'papers with 1,328 different co-authors.' My inner Diego Gambetta ... suggests that this may in part be a signalling phenomenon. If you are doing research in a field where someone has convincingly demonstrated that the emperor has no clothes, you want to signal as convincingly as possible that you (in contrast to those losers down the hall/in the department across the river/the country/wherever) have results that really stand up. One obvious way to do this is to get the little boy who pointed out the emperor's sartorial shortcomings to co-author a paper with you. Hence, I suspect, lots and lots of people who are eager to co-author something with Ioannidis (and plausibly, many, many more than he might be comfortable co-authoring with).... (NB that I am not suggesting that Iannidis was motivated by such an opportunity; I would be startled and amazed if he had been)."

But, but, but, Pandora was never _in_ the box!  ETA: Andy was making a joke which went over my head.

Shorter Chad: go to the tortoise, thou hustler, and consider its ways.

This really looks very bad. (And: a journal refusing to share referee reports with someone listed on the MS. as an author? WTF?)

"It would be nice to think that Elsevier will listen to scientist [sic], but I suspect that this will not happen until scientists start getting a little more strident. If you are scientist, publish your work in society journals rather than Elsevier journals. Try to avoid citing work published in Elsevier journals. Elsevier lives by a combination of pricing and impact factor, and scientists have direct control over only one of these—impact factor. Librarian could start looking at Elsevier journal usage patterns; perhaps they can follow Cornell's example, and subscribe to just a few Elsevier journals."

Merck paid Elsevier to gin up a mock peer reviewed journal pushing Merck's drugs. I have already given up on providing free labor to Elsevier in the form of refereeing, but now I am contemplating deliberately avoiding citing papers which appear in their journals.

Having read the papers and re-implemented the method, I now concur with Mark: this is an methodological EPIC FAIL.

Aleks Jakulin on the _Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis_ (with links to more such in the comments)

Yes. (Also, a good description of why "bloggers rambling over the phone" is not worth watching. [Sorry, HF.])

Someone actually got a journal paper out of rediscovering how to integrate. It has over 30 citations.

This may well drive me to drink.

Barro and (especially) Levitt really do not come out of this looking good.

Some good points, but surprisingly bad history (Chinese printing didn't take off, "The Web began as a means of communication among physicists in 1981"!) from a professional historian. Not material to the mostly-sound recommendations.

Michael relieves me (and you) of the need to worry about the h-index

The stupid spammers at WSEAS resort to legal action force Bill to take down a perfectly correct post about how they are, in fact, spamming idiots.

Slow turn-around as a way of making it costly to submit crappy papers. I think I can say that only an economist would make this argument.

PRL turns 50

Including parts of a blog post by the Slovenian minister for growth

Two word, one hyphen: Reed-Elsevier.

" all academic libraries have to seriously ask themselves whose interests they are serving when they continue 'business as usual' with the rent-seekers in the academic publishing cartel"