Duncan A. MacRae's Page

Has there ever been a moment in history when publication rejection was so easy to stomach? Have authors ever been presented with so many attractive alternatives to having their work appear in an established publication?

As a regular part of promoting my publishing consultancy, I write opinion pieces and submit them to various journals. It’s not a weekly or even monthly endeavor, but it has provided an opportunity to not only communicate to potential clients, but perhaps more importantly, to exp… Continue

In the past few weeks, several stories have emerged in the MSM regarding the limited participation of users in some forms of online social media. As anyone who has stood before a roomful of people and asked for a "show of hands" can tell you, only a select number of people are confident enough to draw attention to themselves. And it seems that online social media is not exempt from that phenomenon. Last month I… Continue

Several articles over the past month have commented on the application of Twitter to the peer review process. The advantages being instantaneous feedback and brevity. On Martin Fenner's blog, the tone was one of both inevitability and enthusiasm--neither of which I share. Since when is brevity, or for that matter speed, the goal of the peer review process?

It may be the hallmark of our… Continue

On demand publishing has great promise for self-publishing societies, in particular those that have found the high cost of initial inventory a potential roadblock. Traditionally, titles would be republished as new editions as new information demanded a significant update to the existing version. In the interim, there was a movement towards supplemental material being distributed via CD-ROM (then online u… Continue

Rich Apodaca posts an interesting piece on the Depth First blog regarding the use of reader feedback in scientific publishing. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) allows readers to directly comment on individual articles as part of their open access initiative, and a recent study by Nascent categorizes the nature of those comments.

I'm always interested in the success or failure of initiatives that rely heavily upon the participation of the audience. Part of the article discussion examines the… Continue