via http://twitter.com/yo_bj/status/200570528430432256 "
Minnesota launched an online catalog of open-source books last month and will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books. (Faculty members elsewhere are welcome to post their own reviews, but they won’t be compensated.) Minnesota professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500, with all of the money coming from donor funds."

There is a troubling trend in scientific publishing for manuscripts to undergo multiple, often lengthy, rounds of review, resulting in significant delays to publication. JCB is announcing new procedures to streamline its editorial process and eliminate unnecessary delays.

A useful antidote (or merely counterpoint?) to the whole Graeber-related nastiness on Crooked Timber a while ago. Similar kind of situation, similar Niceness Police (as Kotsko would put it) showing up in the comments, but still a much more constructive outcome. Eager to read the final follow-up post. [Update-- here: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/04/26/different_worlds_a_last_dhfr_paper_thought.php ] Seriously, guys, this is what the future of scientific publishing and peer review looks like.

1. pass/fail first semester
2. pre-accepted article
3. replication audit
4. a frequent flier system for journals

PaperCritic is a open publication review tool that uses the Mendeley API in order to facilitate commentary and review of journal articles. In short, you can connect it to your Mendeley account and then comment on articles publicly, including rating them on readability, quality of argument, and other fields.

EJPress is a product line designed to address the needs of both small and large journals with manuscript submission, tracking, peer review, and Web production processes. eJournalPress provides the software and support services as a turnkey Internet application. eJournalPress hosts the software and datasets so journals and publishers do not need to worry about hardware, network capacity, data backups, and maintenance issues.

ScholarOne provides comprehensive workflow management systems for scholarly journals, books, and conferences. Our web based applications enable publishers and societies to manage the submission, peer review, production, and publication process more efficiently and provides them with the intelligent information to help make strategic decisions.

via https://twitter.com/#!/lorenterveen/status/169181221518192641

One of my major complaints when I was in grad school was that almost nobody does interdisciplinary research (which is true — the percentage of research papers that span different disciplines is tiny). Then I actually tried doing it, and came to the obvious-in-retrospect realization that collaborating with people who don’t speak your language is hard.

"Science is not a popularity contest; Pagerank is irrelevant as a peer-review mechanism. Basically, scientific peer review is the only process that exists for systematically separating truths from untruths. Like democracy, it has its problems, but at least it works. Social media is probably the worst analogy — it seems to be better at amplifying falsehoods than facts. Wikipedia-style crowdsourcing has its strengths, but it can hit-or-mis"

I think it is well worth thinking quite hard about this question. What makes a piece of mathematics good? I don’t just mean the extreme cases such as a theorem that opens up a new field or solves a major open problem. Those are the easy cases. But if we’ve got one journal that’s “a little bit below Annals” and another that “accepts high-quality papers” but is regarded as step below the first, can we say what it is that papers in the first journal have got that papers in the second lack?

A very detailed look at what a new model of mathematical publishing might be like. Lots of important questions in this post.