Quote of the day

“Success is the ability to move from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

Often attributed to Winston Churchill. What I hate most about British and offline culture is their aversion to failure. My mother used to say that the person who naver made a mistake never made anything, and she was right. The most striking difference between the UK and the US is that honest failure carries very little stigma over there, whereas here it’s an occasion for shame or embarrassment or worse. If you aren’t failing sometimes, then you aren’t trying hard enough. The key thing is to learn from the experience. [/rant]

Elsevier ‘published six fake journals’

We all knew that scientific publishing is a great racket in terms of extracting money from universities. But we could at least console ourselves that the content was peer-reviewed. Well, guess what? According to The Scientist of 7th May 2009,

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals but did not disclose sponsorship the company has admitted. Elsevier is conducting an ‘internal review’ of its publishing practices after allegations came to light that the company produced a pharmaceutical company-funded publication in the early 2000s without disclosing that the ‘journal’ was corporate sponsored.

The allegations involve the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine a publication paid for by pharmaceutical company Merck that amounted to a compendium of reprinted scientific articles and one-source reviews most of which presented data favorable to Merck’s products. The Scientist obtained two 2003 issues of the journal — which bore the imprint of Elsevier’s Excerpta Medica — neither of which carried a statement obviating Merck’s sponsorship of the publication. An Elsevier spokesperson told The Scientist in an email that a total of six titles in a “series of sponsored article publications” were put out by their Australia office and bore the Excerpta Medica imprint from 2000 to 2005. These titles were: the Australasian Journal of General Practice the Australasian Journal of Neurology the Australasian Journal of Cardiology the Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy the Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine and the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine . Elsevier declined to provide the names of the sponsors of these titles according to the company spokesperson.

Publish on Scribd and name your price

From this week, Scribd is allowing authors to charge for content. According to the NYTimes,

The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail.

In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.

Authors can choose to publish their documents in unprotected PDFs, which would make them readable on the Amazon Kindle and most other mobile devices. Scribd also says it is readying an application for the iPhone from Apple and will introduce it next month…