http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/10/25/why-so-many-retractions/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/10/25/why-so-many-retractions/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:29:17 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/11910795746

Via jtotheizzoe:

The trouble with retractions

Retractions of scientific papers are up 10-fold, but publishing rates are only up by 44%. What gives? Why is so much research being pulled back, or worse, declared fraudulent?

(via Nature News)

The FJP: Here’s a potential answer for you. It comes courtesy of an article in The Register about the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project that we Tumbled earlier today. In it, Richard Muller, the project lead, discusses that science needs to be more open in its publishing practices.

When contacted by The Reg, Muller responded in an email that he believes scientific papers should be widely circulated in “preprint” form before their publication. “It has been traditional throughout most of my career to distribute preprints around the world,” he writes. “In fact, most universities and laboratories had ‘preprint libraries’ where you could frequently find colleagues.”

This preprint system, he told us, is being stifled by major journals. “This traditional peer-review system worked much better than the current Science/Nature system, which in my mind restricts the peer review to 2 or 3 anonymous people who often give a cursory look at the paper.”

While this more tightly controlled review method may enhance the prestige of major journals, Muller told us, it does nothing for the advancement of science.

“I think this abandonment of the traditional peer review system is responsible, in part, for the fact that so many bad papers are being published,” he writes. “These papers have not be vetted by the true peers, the large scientific world.”

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project

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http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/10/25/mapping-boarder-disputes/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/10/25/mapping-boarder-disputes/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:55:56 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/11908470407

Via Nature:

Clashes at sea. Disputed borders. It is not the usual stuff of science. But researchers and scientific journals are being pulled into long-simmering border disputes between China and its neighbours. Confrontations involving research vessels are raising tensions in the region, while the Chinese government is being accused of using its scientists’ publications to promote the country’s territorial claims…

The battle is… spilling over to the pages of scientific journals. Critics say that Chinese researchers are trying to make their country’s possession of the South China Sea a fait accompli by routinely using maps that show its extended marine boundaries. For example, a 2010 review of the impacts of climate change on water resources and agriculture in China, published in Nature, included a map with an inserted area that implied that most of the South China Sea was part of China.

Last month, in an online posting that was also sent to Nature and other journals, 57 Vietnamese scientists, engineers and other professionals living around the world complained about the use of such maps. The letter laments the Chinese government’s use of “‘back door’ tactics”, and argues that it is “using your magazine/journal as a means to legitimize such [a] one-sided and biased map”. A map that appeared in a review of Chinese demography published in Science provoked similar criticism. Science responded with an Editor’s Note stating that the journal “does not have a position with regard to jurisdictional claims” but that it is “reviewing our map acceptance procedures to ensure that in the future Science does not appear to endorse or take a position on territorial/jurisdictional disputes”.

See also, Uncharted Territory.

Image: Disputed territory in the South China Sea. Source UNCLOS/CIA via Nature.

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project

]]> http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/10/25/mapping-boarder-disputes/feed/ 0 http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/17/social-media-there%e2%80%99s-a-magazine-for-that/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/17/social-media-there%e2%80%99s-a-magazine-for-that/#comments Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:00:58 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/9048145463

No, seriously, there is. Not that that’s a bad thing but perhaps we’d feel a little more secure in its quality and viability if the Web site itself was a little more — how shall we say — inspired.

Via ReadWriteWeb:

The first issue of [Social Media Monthly] is out today. Publisher Cool Blue Company announced its availability at the Barnes and Noble bookstore chain in the U.S., as well as distribution in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark…

…The publication is also available as a “standalone flash digital e-zine” and an iTunes app.

The debut issue’s cover was designed by Yiying Lu, known for his design of Twitter’s fail whale.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

The Wall Street Journal reports that AOL is spending approximately $160 million a year on Patch, its hyperlocal news network.

Unfortunately, Patch’s revenue model is an ad-play and people just aren’t visiting these local sites in large enough numbers to make them attractive to advertisers. Ever hopeful, Tim Armstrong, AOL’s CEO, says the Patch network will eventually be profitable.

Via the WSJ:

AOL is spending about $160 million a year on Patch, which equates to about $150,000 to run each individual Patch site annually, according to an analyst’s estimate. AOL first focused on building traffic to Patch sites, and just recently started ramping up ad sales. Mr. Armstrong said in a call with investors last week that while revenues for Patch sites are small, they are growing quickly and on track to be profitable over time.

The larger issue is that after spending $315 million on the Huffington Post and over $90 million to buy Techcrunch, 5min Media and Thing Labs in order to transform itself into a content company, overall traffic growth across AOL properties is declining.

Wall Street Journal, AOL Growth Comes at a Cost: After Acquisition Binge, Internet Company Faces Fierce Competition for Ad Dollars.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

— Tina Jordan, Vice President, Association of American Publishers, interviewed by the New York Times.  Publishing Gives Hints of Revival, Data Show.

A survey of 1,963 publishers by two major trade groups reveals that the book publishing industry is on the rebound.

Key findings via the Association of American Publishers: 

Overall U.S. publishing revenues are growing
Publishers’ net sales revenue has grown annually; 2010’s $27.94 Billion is a 5.6% increase over 2008.

Overall U.S. publishing unit sales are up as well
Publishers’ 2.57 Billion net units sold in 2010 represent a 4.1% increase since 2008.

Americans, young and old, are reading actively in all print and digital formats
2010 total net sales revenue in the consumer-focused Trade market is $13.94 Billion, increasing 5.8% since 2008 (and excluding 2011’s e-book sales surge). Both Adult Fiction and Juvenile (non-fiction and fiction) have seen consistent annual gains.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

The Tribune plans to offer subscribers free — or highly subsidized — tablets that will reportedly be built by Samsung. Many think the effort is already doomed for failure.

The plan reminds me of a recent Adweek article about the publishing industry’s ongoing woes with Content Management Systems. In it, Erin Griffith catalogues how BusinessWeek spent upwards of $20 million trying to create a social networking layer on top of its proprietary CMS; how Salon.com — which launched in the 90s — is still using the home-rolled CMS it used in the 90s but is reportedly migrating to WordPress; how Time, Inc. has worked on a home-brewed CMS for seven years but will probably abandon it; and how AOL spent three years trying to create a proprietary CMS before ditching the effort, buying Blogsmith for about $5 million and now trying to migrate to the Huffington Post’s highly customized version of Moveable Type.

Griffith writes:

Add a marketplace crowded with content-management options, tight budgets, and a string of media mergers—and the corresponding change in personnel—and the result is that these troublesome tools are being plied in a cultural clusterfuck. The result is a growing number of bloated, tangled CMS platforms reviled by the editors that publish on them, and the IT teams that maintain them.

That’s just the tip of the Content Management iceberg and doesn’t even begin to touch on the difficulties of creating a friction free workflow for multiple platforms (Web, print, mobile, tablet). In hindsight, it’s easy to say publishers shouldn’t have rolled their own. But with foresight does it make sense for Tribune to get into the tablet game?

The short answer is no, but that’s not to say news organizations should ignore in-house technical innovation.

Instead, it’s to ask how and where they should allocate resources in the pursuit of technological innovation. 

Part of the answer is remembering the core product, journalism, and then investing time and resources into technologies that enhance it. 

For example, technologists from the New York Times and ProPublica collaborated to create Document Cloud, a Web-based platform that allows organizations to analyze large data dumps across multiple documents. 

Document Cloud, in turn, uses Open Calais, a Web service developed by Thompson Reuters that layers semantic metadata over content.

These are innovative technological investments in the service of a publishers’ core news and information product.

Meanwhile, Tribune ramains in bankruptcy, is laying off editorial staff and is plowing human and financial capital into a product that will compete with the iPad, Kindle and other market leaders.

From this corner of the Internet, it seems an investment gone wrong. From another corner, Markus Pettersson, head of reader relations and social media at Göteborgs-Posten, writes that Tribune is “afraid, clueless and [has] lost track of what is [its] core product: journalism. It tells everyone including your readers and ad buyers that you have business ADHD, and cannot be relied on to focus on developing your core product: journalism.”

Agreed, and thinking we’ll be writing something very similar to Griffith’s Adweek CMS article a few years down the line. At that point in time, it will be Tribune as the poster boy for tech investment gone wrong.

Some might remember when ESPN tried to create a branded phone. Steve Jobs’ response at the time, “Your phone is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard.”

ESPN, it’s reported, lost $135 million on the venture.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

In early March it acquired BeatThatQuote.com for $60.8 million and within 24 hours penalized it for SEO tactics that violated Google webmaster terms and conditions.

Background via TechCrunch:

Power struggles within Google’s executive team, which have been brewing since the announcement of long time CEO Eric Schmidt’s departure, are apparently bubbling up to the surface.

Case in point: In an extraordinary move to illustrate its independence, say sources, the Google webspam team actually classified Google Places as spam and a content farm, and temporarily removed it from search results…

…The fact that many Place pages only contain content scraped from third party sites and little or no original content was a key factor in the automatic change, say sources. This has been a source of constant tension between Google and the sites they scrape.

The TechCrunch story gets colorful, with Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora cruising the Caribbean on Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt’s $40 million yacht named, appropriately enough, “The Adsense.”

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/03/28/it%e2%80%99s-2pm-do-you-know-where-your-paywall-is/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/03/28/it%e2%80%99s-2pm-do-you-know-where-your-paywall-is/#comments Mon, 28 Mar 2011 18:00:07 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/4162839887

If you’re the New York Times, it should kicking in exactly right now.

For those who blast past the monthly limit of free articles and are feeling a little light in the wallet, might we recommend following @FreeNYT’s Firehose list?

The list aggregates the Twitter streams of various NYT writers and departments. Since the company’s current policy is that social media links to their content will not count against the monthly meter, you can read away for free.

Want to see to see the list laid out more like a newspaper? Try viewing it on Paper.li.

Image Source: ClikServ.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

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http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/03/18/playing-the-numbers-with-the-nyt-paywall/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/03/18/playing-the-numbers-with-the-nyt-paywall/#comments Fri, 18 Mar 2011 21:11:40 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/3946342798

A wholly unscientific view of the New York Time’s paywall that will launch later this month.

Information comes from Felix Salmons’ commentary in Wired, and an earlier news article from Bloomberg.  

First things first: we’re a bit gobsmacked that it cost $40-50 million to implement this solution. Yes, there are a lot of moving parts, and yes, they’ve spent over a year planning this move… but $40-50 million?

Second, total digital advertising revenue runs north of $300 million. This is relies on the New York Times’ 33 million unique monthly visitors. The meter the Times has established is to prevent those uniques from dropping but like all implementations before it, it most likely will.

So the goal here is to increase subscription revenue faster than advertising revenue decreases. 

Third, Here’s where Salmons’ number crunching gets interesting (emphasis ours):

[H]ow much revenue will the paywall bring in? A very large number of the paper’s most loyal readers are already print subscribers, and get access to the website at no extra cost. So the new revenues from the paywall will only come from people who read the website a lot but who don’t subscribe in print.

How many of those people are there? Emily Bell reckons that the number of people who’ll even hit the paywall in the first place is only about 5% of the NYT’s 33 million or so unique visitors. That’s 1.6 million people — compare the 1.3 million people who already subscribe to the paper on Sundays. The former is not a perfect superset of the latter, of course, but there’s a big overlap; let’s say that realistically the NYT is going after a universe of no more than 800,000 people that it’s going to ask to subscribe. And let’s be generous and say that 15% of them do so, paying an average of $200 per year apiece. That’s extra revenues of $24 million per year.

$24 million is a minuscule amount for the New York Times company as a whole; it’s dwarfed not only by total revenues but even by those total digital advertising revenues of more than $300 million a year.

The race begins March 28.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

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