Culture, Science, Science and Society, etc.

Journals and personalities

Today, one of my favourite science (t)witterers, @enniscath, posed an intriguing question:

I think it’s a marvellous idea :)

I instantly proposed a thought…

And as for PLosONE, well! Images abound.

The question is an intriguing one, of course, especially as journals/the publishing industry increasingly have to justify their existence (and means of existence) to the scientific community.

So, what personalities would you ascribe to various journals?
And with that…SHOULD they have personalities?If so, what sort of personality is appropriate for a scientific journal?

Are they influenced by the journal’s editorial people, or the scientists who publish therein?

Will a journal’s personality help determine whether it survives or not? Should it?

Discuss!

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UPDATE: Here’s Cath’s very own blog post on the subject

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Other random awesome today includes:

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials, with the fantastic line

Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.

6 new science apps from CSIRO

Life advice from machines

It turns out being a Redshirt is less perilous than you think

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And finally - where have I been recently? Why am I not blogging as often? Well, numerous projects, of course, but I’ve also gone (motor)bike mad :P And been finishing off our Mongol Rally blog from last year (which is almost done!!).

  • BoraZ

    Ha! All those fat, stodgy Elsevier journals with powdered wigs and monocles…stunned as PeerJ runs around them laughing ;-)