The ‘publish or perish’ mentality is fuelling research paper retractions – and undermining science

When scientists make important discoveries, both big and small, they typically publish their findings in scientific journals for others to read. This …

Open access is shaping scientific communication

Recognizing the importance of ensuring access to taxpayer-funded scientific knowledge and underlying data, many national governments and …

Publishing nightmare: a researcher’s quest to keep his own work from being plagiarized

A scientist reviewing a study spotted figures that looked identical to his own, leading to a frustrating campaign to prevent its publication. Dan …

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How Are AI Chatbots Changing Scientific Publishing?

Since ChatGPT was released to the public almost three years ago, generative AI chatbots have had many impacts on our society: They played a large …

University rankings are unscientific and bad for education: experts point out the flaws

We rank almost everything. The top 10 restaurants in our vicinity, the best cities to visit, the best movies to watch. To understand whether the …

Academic publishing

If the choice is between impact factor and maintaining the content’s integrity, there is little contest 27 August Difficult conversations about how the …

More Woes for Wiley — and Us

To add to their problems — a stock in “a downward channel pattern,” an OA brand in the trash, and a CEO sent packing — now Wiley has been hit with …

Why The Walled Garden and Prairie

This Chautauqua is a series on what is generally seen as two major incompatible views on how to design, implement and operate information systems. The aim is to explore how both general approaches make sense in different ways and in combination rather than in antagonism. In choosing Walled Garden and Prairie to categorise these two general approaches it might seem that I have a negative bias to one or the other, that really isn't where this is coming from. Walled Garden is often treated as a derogatory term, with hard perimeters, command and control hierarchies and long term planning but its also (in its original use) about providing the right conditions for different plants with different requirements and a structured navigation which allows maintenance, gardening without obstructing or affecting the rest of the Garden. In its way the Prairie might seem without controls, borders, vulnerable and inefficient but it's also resilient because there is no single point of failure and burning it down periodically keeps it healthy.

Walls and Trust Nothing

At its simplest level the most obvious feature of the Walled Garden is the Wall. Walls have all sorts of connotations for us, especially at this moment in history, and they begin with protection by exclusion. Being surrounded by a wall gives us a feeling of security and control over who or what can gain access inside and control as to what and who leaves. In its original use for a real garden the wall was much more about protection, shelter and providing the right environment for the plants and crops. The surrounding wall warms in the sun and raises the ambient temperature for plants in the north of the garden, it provides shelter from prevailing and strong winds and it organises the land separating it for management.

Interfaces All The Way Down

A common habit when coding a new service, or class object with methods is to postpone actually writing the code that does the thing by adding another layer. The initial impetus to this is Good, abstract the detail from the caller, use the interface to be able to flex what the code does and so on. Often though it becomes a kind of procrastination; oh this layer isn't quite right, I need to orchestrate some dependency and filter what happens depending upon some logic that really doesn't belong at this level. And one of the ways out of that conundrum is to make another layer (or in some languages have a friend class).