Scientific writing

Petr Karlovsky

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Impact of scientific journals

• Clarivate Analytics: Master Journal List
• Clarivate Analytics: Changes in journal coverage
• Misuse of IF in the evaluation of scientific performance (American Society for Microbiology)

Open-access

https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal/
• 2018: Project DEAL: nationwide agreement between German scientific organizations and major
  publishers with Open Access as an important component (German); about DEAL in English
• 2016: All scientific papers to be free by 2020 under EU proposals
• 2016: Alexandra Elbakyan: Robin Hood of scientific publishing or a criminal?
• 2016: Costs of OA publishing in Germany: (Published in PeerJ (2016) 4:2323)
• 2015: Max Planck Society for Open Access
• 2014: China embraces Open Access policy, see also News in Nature, May 2014
• 2013: DFG Open Access Guidelines
• 2005: Open Access-Politik der Universität Göttingen (pdf)
• 2004: Washington D.C.: Principles For Free Access to Science
• 2002: Budapest Open Access Initiative

Scientific community turns against Elsevier

• 2018: Sharp criticism of traditional scientific publishing
• 2017: Clash between scientists and scientific institutions with Elsevier escalates
• 2017: Major German universities cancel Elsevier contracts
• 2017: German scientists resign from Elsevier editorial boards
• 2015: All six editors and 31 editorial-board members of Lingua from Elsevier, starting a competing journal
• 2012: Mathematicians boycott Elsevier
• 2011: Insane profit of scientific publishers
• Petition of scientists against Elsevier (started 2012)

Controversial Beall's list of predatory journals

• 2017: Prejudice, ideological bias and censorship of critical comments undermined Jeffrey Beall's credibility
• 2017: Continuation of Beall's list after January 2017: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access jounrals
• 2013: Joseph Esposito explains how Beall's unfounded attacks against Open Access undermined the virtue of his list of predatory journals

Coverage in databases

• PubMed: Literature database originally focusing on medical research. Now it includes life science and related disciplines but the journal coverage is limited.
• AGRICOLA: Most comprehensive database of literature on agricultural research, including gray sources not listed in ISI and PubMed scientific
• Google scholar: A bibliographic source of steadily growing importance

Recommended open source software

• Zotero: Powerful literature management software, available as an extension for Firefox and in a stand-alone version. Zotero can retrieve references from the web, generate references from pdf reprints (it scans pdf files for author names, titles, journal name etc. and attempts to retrieve the matching references from Google Scholar), generate reference lists in diverse formats required by journals, insert references during manuscripts writing in LibreOffice or MS Word...
• LibreOffice: One of the best office suits available, including text processor Writer, spreadsheet Calc, presentation Impress, database Base, vector graphics Draw, and relational database Base. LibreOffice reads and writes files in Microsoft Office format, thouth complex formatting is not always converted accurately. Impress is less convenient that PowerPoint but it has better PDF export and can be used to rescue old PowerPoint files which new PowerPoint versions refuse to open.
• Synyx Draw and ChemSketch: Drawing chemical formulas and reactions
• GIMP: High-end image processing with a performance comparable to Photoshop but steeper learning curve
• ImageJ: In spite of the old-fashioned appearance of the interface and the website, this scientific image processing sofware with a number of plugins is very powerful. Examples of applications: measurement of root length, densitometry of electrophoretic bands and Western blots, counting bacterial colonies, analysis of microscopy images, quantification of leave area, processing medical X-ray images...

 

Molecular Phytopathology & Mycotoxin Research
Georg-August-University Goettingen
Grisebachstrasse 6, 37077 Goettingen, Germany
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