Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access 

Author: Schimmer, Ralf et al.; Genre: Paper; Published online: 2015-04-28; Open Access; Title: Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access

Source: Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access :: MPG.PuRe

An interesting viewpoint on the future of scientific publication, and assessment of its cost.

An interview with Prof. Jorge J. Casal

In the interview Jorge has several insights about his career path and also advice for early stage researchers. I have been Jorge’s friend and collaborator for more than 30 years, and been a witness of how he has followed since he was an undergraduate the path he now gives as advice in the interview. The result has been a successful career doing very original research.

eBooks for €4.80 from Packt publishing

The sale is over!

Packtpub has been actively publishing books on computer programming and related subjects for some time. More recently they have also released several titles about data analysis with R. I have found in recent years several nice books in their catalogue, and this Christmas sale of their full catalogue of approximately 2500 eBooks at a flat price of € 4.80 / $ 5.00 for DMR free PDFs and other formats, and no limitations to repeated downloads is really a nice opportunity to get hold of some good books for little money. Here are some examples of books which I have found useful or good from this publisher:

You can get books at the discounted price through Packtpub offer

Bioinformatics with R Cookbook

R Statistical Application Development by Example Beginner’s Guide

Learning RStudio for R Statistical Computing

Caveat: I had written the post before I received an e-mail from Packt publishing offering to give me two free book PDFs if I wrote such a post.

“Flow”, success and hapiness

Yesterday after our Biophilosophy Society session, I had an interesting chat with Matan about whether switching research subjects is good or bad.

Today, just by chance I ended watching this video from 2008. I think it nicely answers what we discussed. NOW WATCH THE VIDEO… (19 minutes long, but really worth your time)

Only after watching the video, you will understand what follows:

If you you feel that the field your are working on, does not provide enough of a challenge to get you into ‘flow’ at least now and then, then you have two options: find new challenges that you find exciting within your current discipline, or shift your interests to another discipline. Which of these routes you take, is quite irrelevant as long as you can reuse enough of your current skills in the new subject to be within your safe zone of comfort. Reusing the skills does not require the skills to be used in the same way as in the previous discipline, just that you find a way of making use of your skills even if by analogy when analysing a new problem.

I am currently participating in the “Leadership training” organized by the university, and in one recent meetings of my research group when discussing how to better work as a group, I emphasized that for every member of the group their work should be fun. This idea is formalized, and backed with data in the talk in the video I embedded above. So, if you skipped it, scroll up the page and watch it!