Chris Mebane

Wow. I used to live in Seattle near Fort Lawton, got married at the Daybreak Star Center, have now lived in Idaho for 30 years and I learn of Edna Paisano from an Australian blogger. Thank you for your digging and this post!

I only know ScholarOne. It definitely does not know the difference between a bad email bounce and non-replies.

Makes me wonder if computer science and machine learning journals are particularly targeted because they use tortured language anyway. Reminds me of the SciGen generated computer sci sounding gibberish from 10y+ ago that got past real reviewers into conferences.

Don’t know any firsthand accounts, but there are lots of little far flung, extremely rural communities in the American west that don’t have cell service or broadband internet, and still use dialup. Idaho in my case, but there are lots of these little hamlets. I’d guess that’s where AOL lived on.

Looking through the linked FBS and RW posts: “Bik had reported the Oncogene papers to the journal in 2019. In February 2024, Bik sought an update and Springer Nature told her the investigation was still ongoing. “
Wow.

“I want to hit this person with a chair so very very much”

No jury would convict.

I concur. PLOS also publishes the article review and revision history. So not just highly selective journals out of reach to most ECRs. Few people likely ever look at it, but transparency is good both for reassurance, and for showing problems on those papers drawing negative scrutiny after the fact.

Of course Microsoft Word has an enabled by default automatic change of short dashes to em dashes.

They weren’t troubled by ethical approval for that either

Noooo! There are chemicals everywhere! I just bought an electric tea kettle and I was alarmed to read that it contains CHEMICALS! Including IRON! No kettle is safe!

Totally off topic, but I was sorry to see a link in the RW daily email that you were being sued for defamation by Shadi Aljawarneh because you pointed out he was a farmer. A citation farmer, that is. Even meritless SLAPP suits are a hassle and expense, so I hope the jurisdiction allows recovery.

Were you deeply impressed?

Published PowerPoint presentations, there’s a CV filler

Remarkable they have no institutional controls to catch this. Or don’t want to. I think Chemosphere had an incredible JIF of 8 or so before Clarivate cancelled them. At least the don’t have to worry about being cancelled from Scopus.

As an author, ScholarOne file uploads are a pain, figures have to be uploaded individually, captioning seldom works. Submitting a manuscript or revisions takes hours. I’ve seen better, but they seem to be proprietary to specific publishers.

Yeah, Clarivate’s ScholarOne still has an early 2000s feel to it. The OUP journal I edit for uses it. It definitely should have let you upload a review file, something glitched. As an editor, reviewer selections are a mess- can’t update emails, have to create a new entry. So you get multiple entries

Are 12 mo fixed term contracts common in the publishing industry? Are these then customarily renewed? I can’t imagine many strong candidates would want a 1-year gig

Not familiar with Nature/Springer’s service, but looks like Clarivate’s ScholarOne service lags. It only reports “under review” and doesn’t distinguish between the editorial office, editor, seeking reviewers, waiting on reviewers, waiting for decision. Elsevier’s screenshot looks lan improvement

I’d like to hope the results would differ for recent graduates rather than rusty, crusty men 30+ years out of their higher education years

Pro tip. It ain’t just the VA

While having political appointees determining good science is bad, to me this decree takes a backseat to the wholesale closing of federal labs, mass firings, and drastic cutbacks of NSF & NIH science support grants.

I’m surprised at how little has been said of the irony that NIH already has a well respected journal, Environmental Health Perspectives, which they are strangling in favor of a startup.

One substantive change is calling for a Weight of Scientific Evidence in evaluations. EPA has required required weighting in risk assessments and it is fraught. Each side weighs the evidence eyeing the outcome. There are always scientific sounding reasons for up or down weighting evidence.

Well at least they issued themselves a Certificate

(PDF) Environmental toxicology without chemistry and publications without discourse: Linked impediments to better science PDF | On Jun 1, 2016, Christopher A. Mebane and others published Environmental toxicology without chemistry and publications without discourse: Linked impediments to better science | Find, read and ci...

Or worse than a paywall, demand the full APC to publish a short letter pointing out flaws. And then editors have the temerity to complain that nasty anonymous people post to PubPeer instead of a proper letter to the editor. An earlier rant on this:
www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Mostly with you-in distinguishing between preprints and peer review vetted articles, as uneven as that may be. BUT- how about a long-form description of what you’re trying to do with Stacks journal. See my detailed comments to your editorial at @ScholarlyKitchen.bsky.social

Maybe Matt Berry will do a reading of one the U.S. Attorney’s letters to the journal EICs. It’s so good to know there’s DOJ concern for protecting the diversity,equity, and inclusion of alternate facts and viewpoints in the learned journals.

… and the publisher handles subscriptions, paywalls, OA fees, and copyright agreements. So policies like whether data availability is a hard requirement or not, preprints are OK or not are with the society, the mechanics of linking the VOR to the repositories is with the publisher.

Commonly the society owns the journal and contracts with a publisher for the mechanics of publishing. The society sets policies, provides the editors, makes decisions on articles. The publisher provides the manuscript management software, layout, online posting, doi’s, indexing, archiving, …

The journals should reply by asking the US attorney to please resubmit his Letter to the Editor through the journal’s online manuscript management portal.