Category Archives: Uncategorized

Readers of this blog will have seen many posts where I (and by proxy Mike Taylor and others) highlight the unacceptable practices of Elsevier when publishing Gold Open Access. The facts appear to be undisputed – Elsevier is mis-labelling and … Continue reading →

  TWO YEARS ago Mike Taylor publicised that Elsevier were illegally charging for paid open access. Here’s his shocking analysis a few days ago The Illegality is no longer in doubt. Charles Oppenheim is highly experienced and agrees that Elsevier … Continue reading →

AMI is learning how to interpret scientific diagrams. She’s done a lot of text, and vector graphics – now she is moving to images. There’s no simple solution – we have to try a lot of different approaches. Here she … Continue reading →

I have received a reply from Alicia Wise of Elsevier to my assertion that Elsevier was   asserting copyright and charging readers illegally Hi Peter, As noted in the comment thread to your blog back in August we are improving … Continue reading →

There has been considerable twitterage this morning but silence from Elsevier… My guess so far is that thousands of authors have been seriously disadvantaged by Elsevier’s action. They may well have fallen foul of their funding body. They may be … Continue reading →

AMI is learning to extract numbers and paths from images. It’s hard work and requires a lot of heuristics. Here’s her first shot (from BMC Evolutionary Biology DOI:1471-2148-14-20-  expanded: (I’ll select a phylo tree soon). At present we’re just concentrating on … Continue reading →

SEVEN MONTHS ago I showed that Elsevier “open access” CC-BY papers were incompetently labelled (see /pmr/2013/08/12/elsevier-charges-to-read-openaccess-articles/ and following blog posts), and under “Rights and Permissions” charging huge amounts of money. THEY ARE STILL DOING IT. Here’s an Open Access CC-BY … Continue reading →

I got this wonderful message from Ed Saperia earlier this week: I am fortunate enough to be programming the featured speakers for Wikipedia’s annual conference Wikimania, which is coming to London for the first time ever. The themes of the conference … Continue reading →

I love Milvus milvus. (The image from the Wikipedia article CC-BY-SA)) A beautiful bird – extinct in UK in England (sic) when I grew up – we travelled to a remote part of Wales in the hope of seeing them. … Continue reading →

I’m casting around for significant questions that could best be answered by content-mining the current and historical scientific literature. It’s rather like an astronomer saying: “we’ve built a better telescope; now, what shall we point it at?”. We’re developing a … Continue reading →