There has been much news already this year, some of it disturbing. The Andrew Auernheimer case and the Aaron Swartz case (which ended tragically) show that there can be serious consequences to encouraging openness. Luckily, the scholarly community can fix the current problems with access itself, given enough will. Governments seem to be realizing how important the issue is, and the Australian Research Council is the latest funder to enact an OA mandate (albeit a flawed one). It will be interesting to see how long it takes New Zealand to follow suit.

I have been invited to participate in the Open Research conference in Auckland, 6-7 February and am looking forward to it. It’s hard to quantify, but I have a strong feeling that 2013 is the year in which open access is finally regarded as a problem that is essentially solved. We can then turn our attention to the more serious problem of filtering the huge amount of free information: “traditional” peer review is not working well, and this problem will persist independent of access. A radical rethinking of careerism and a reconnection with the true spirit of scholarship is needed: the demand side of publishing must be addressed.

New on arXiv.org is an excellent article by Bjoern Brembs and Marcus Munafo – Deep Impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank.

• A useful summary article “The Poverty of Journal Publishing” explaining the economics of the current system, and discussing better alternatives.
• Bjoern Brembs’ slides “Limited Access is a Symptom – Not the Disease”

The “gold OA” (pay-to-publish) model of scientific publishing has an obvious downside – in a market driven by producers, not consumers, some pretty low quality stuff can be produced. There are many organizations that seemingly exist only to part foolish authors from their money, with very low quality control and a variety of unscrupulous practices. They often solicit submissions by email. For authors, it is essential to consult Beall’s list of predatory open access publishers (and his list of criteria for inclusion in this list) before getting involved with any such outlet.

Thanks to Zoran Skoda, here is the link.

This week I went to a talk by Alex Holcombe who is active in the open access movement (if it can be so characterized) and a co-creator of the great Scientist Meets Publisher video which must be seen, even if you have seen it before. It seems there is a small but active community of OA advocates here at UoA which I hope to join.

In the last year I have seen a flood of stories on plagiarism, and academic misconduct more generally. In the world of journalism, there have been some high-profile cases: Johann Hari, Jonah Lehrer and Fareed Zakaria. In politics, several German politicians have recently been affected, including the Defence Minister.

In Zakaria’s case, it seemes at least plausible that the offence was committed by an assistant, and he signed his name to something without reading carefully. As pointed out by Richard Bradley,

people who seem like they’re doing much more than most of us could do in the same amount of time…probably aren’t really doing it.

There have been a few other recent cases of very “productive” and rather famous academics getting into trouble by overextending themselves, for example  Marc Hauser.  There has even been a case at my own university. Some of these cases involve plagiarism, and others falsifying data. The common thread is an attempt to cut corners and have the rewards without the hard work. Retraction Watch is often a good source of information on such cases.

In the academic sphere there have been some amazing developments in cheating lately: Hyung-In Moon’s attempt at influencing the peer review process is the latest one I know. It seems that the rewards for cheating are overpowering the penalties for being caught. Perhaps we need to work harder on ostracism, and explain to these people that it’s OK not to appear to be superhuman, or in fact better than you really are.