Ultima puntata – solo in senso cronologico – della rissa sulla piccola “hobbit” dell’Isola di Flores (che sembra meritare il suo nome): sapiens affetta da microcefalia, ipotiroidismo, “cretinismo” ecc. oppure appartenente a una specie Homo estinta soltanto 17.000 anni fa, circa?
Su PLoS One, Karen Baab et al. scrivono:
Geometric morphometric analyses of landmark data show that the sole Flores cranium (LB1) is clearly distinct from healthy modern humans and from those exhibiting hypothyroidism and Laron syndrome. Modern human microcephalic specimens converge, to some extent, on crania of extinct species of Homo. However in the features that distinguish these two groups, LB1 consistently groups with fossil hominins and is most similar to H. erectus. Our study provides further support for recognizing the Flores hominins as a distinct species, H. floresiensis, whose affinities lie with archaic Homo.
Com. stampa con punto interrogativo e ultima puntata della rissa solo in senso cronologico, motivi nel primo post dell’oca s., il 7 settembre 2006.
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Questo qui no, ma altri papers su PLoS One fan cadere le braccia. Per es. “Memory Color Effect Induced by Familiarity of Brand Logos” di Atsushi Kimura et al. che dopo penose acrobazie concludono:
the current results provide behavioral evidence of the relationship between the familiarity of objects and the memory color effect and suggest that the memory color effect increases with the familiarity of object, albeit non constantly.
O questo sul ritmo più o meno rilassante della musica che influisce su quello della camminata…
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Plan B
Christian Azar e altri due svedesi pubblicano sulle Environment Res Lett. un modello “energia-clima” (e costi) in cui la cattura & stoccaggio del carbonio da biocarburanti (BECCS) limita l’aumento della temperatura a +1,5°C e 2°C entro il 2100 o il 2150, anche se per un po’ il limite viene superato il limite e sempre che la tecnologia si diffonda da qui al 2070.
E’ il primo modello del genere che vedo, da collaudare con altre tecnologie da “emissioni negative”. Gli autori sottolineano che ne risulta una fattibilità teorica – interessante di per sé, trovo, anche per le conclusioni:
The option of global negative emissions increases the possibility of meeting stringent overshoot temperature targets. This benefit of BECCS is also, somewhat paradoxically, its main political risk. The possibility of achieving negative emissions in the future may be perceived as a carte blanche for delaying emission abatement efforts. We caution against such an interpretation for a number of reasons.
– First, because of the long atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide, the less we emit in the near term, the more ambitious targets can be reached in the future.
– Second, the potential rate of temperature decline (about 0.6?° C per century) is too slow to act as an ‘emergency brake’ on short timescales, if climate damage becomes unacceptable.
– Third, the extent to which BECCS can be made available in the future is uncertain, due to uncertainties in land availability as well as technological constraints.
– Fourth, there are ecological and climate risks associated with the higher temperatures during the transient phase. This makes overshoot targets contentious, although they may be necessary in order to reach low temperature levels.
Finally, to reach global negative emissions, other zero-carbon technologies need to be developed, nurtured to maturity by learning-by-doing in the marketplace and deployed at a very large scale. This transition takes decades or more. Thus, near term emission reductions relative to business-as-usual scenarios take place and are cost-effective in all our model runs with temperature targets. In fact, by the end of the century, most of the abatement originates from technologies other than BECCS.
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Formiche e risc. glob.
A Retraction Watch segnalano una ritrattazione insolita, d’altronde è insolito che un lab europeo pubblichi in una rivista cinese.
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“Avestia”
Altro nome da aggiungere all’elenco degli editori predoni, organizzatori di conferenze idem e Accademie virtuali. Jeffrey Beall dice che “Avestia” sembra il nome di un farmaco per le allergie, in realtà è quello di una small pharma indiana.
I have read jeffery Beals’ recent posting against OA publishers and would like to
express my personal opinions on his so called predatory fighting blog
1. He seems to plan to kill all OA publishers on infancy stage. Many
motivated people may wish to start a good quality OA publishing firm but
may have no good experience. He plans to prevent all these people having
any progress.
2. His most arguments are premature, just because an OA publisher
publishes one or two plagiarized papers does not mean the publisher must
be blacklisted. He just needs to provide awareness and inform publishers
on your website that scientific community does not like it and ask them
to be more careful in future. Many OA publishers try to use free
materials such as gmail to reduce their expenses, their website may have
some broken links, they may not be familiar with more professional stuff
like having metadata for each article to promote their job, properly.
These issues do not mean they are unqualified to run a publishing firm.
3. I personally receive invitation from ELSEVIER to publish new
paper on their recently started journals and it does not mean ELSEVIER is
spamming me, but if a new OA invites me to submit my paper, I must
consider it predatory publisher, why?
4. This publisher believes they can get good indexes in near future,
I believe they do not lie. At least, they have the right to think they
could be successful. It is authors’ responsibility to find more about the
quality of their job and decide to submit or not.
5. There are many OA journals published by ELSEVIER, which are low
quality, “Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences” is just an example
of it. Why doesn’t he ever criticize journals which are published by big
publishers? Does he have any financial relationship with them?
6. I wonder who pays his legal fees, they must be rich enough to
feed you well, Honestly, my gut feeling is telling me that he is hired
by some people just to kill the entire OA publishers.
Mob
1. “He seems to plan to kill all OA publishers on infancy stage. ”
To me, he seems to select dubious ones, and we can always check whether he’s right or not.
2. If I have to pay, I’d rather choose an experienced publisher – or plumber or dentist – wouldn’t you?
3. Spam: I presume Elsevier does not ask plumbers for contributions to a dentistry journal.
4. Indexes: expectations are ok, but predatory publishers often make them up and discredit themselves in the process.
5. – 6. You can’t be serious, there are over a hundred thousand journals and no single person can check them all.
Big publishers are scrutinized by many authors and librarians, and they do get caught occasionally.
Prof. Beale will be wrong sometimes – like all of us – but he is doing a great job, and teaching us a lesson in science ethics as well. He hasn’t been sued, to my knowledge, although he did receive a threat.
if you take a look a few articles from Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences published by ELSEVIER you will find out they are full of mistakes, ask Jeffrey to make a comment and he will simply refuse. He plans to kill all OA publishers, believe it or not.
ELSEVIER sends general invitation for many including me for some topics which are not my speciality.
If Jeffrey were honest, he would not delete my message from his blog immediately. He is hired to kill all OA publishers. He simply has kept all OA publishers in his list to discourage authors but time will tell us that many journals listed in his list will do well.
Innuendo from the usual suspects? Conjectures for sure. “He plans to kill all OA publishers, believe it or not”. He’s only asking to belive him. And why should I do when while ready to insinuate bad intentions, he does not spend a single word on the real and well known problem of the predatory publishers? Way too easy (and common) to rely on innuendo to discredit someone. His choice, but don’t count on me.
Please note the cost of a scientific journal is around 4000$, big publishers cannot reduce their cost and have to charge more than many existing OAs to survive. As new OA rivals are getting famous and be able to publish with much less, big publishers may lose market share. It makes sense to think that a person like Jeffery Beall tries to kill OAs at early stage. The earlier message you see on this blog was posted on his blog and was deleted twice on his forum. I don’t see anything wrong with my message, he could easily respond to things we addressed. You could simply forward this message and ask him to provide legitimate response, but you will see he will remove your message, instead. There are many other evidences to believe he wants to kill OA publishers at early stage. He simply tries to find a couple of plagiarism and jump into conclusion.
I agree that many OAs lie on their website on being listed on well-known indexes like ISI, Scopus, etc. but there are many other OAs who are not. Jeffery Beall simply mixes all OAs trying to kill all of them. Sooner or later people will understand about the nature of his work.
@Mab
big publishers may lose market share
False, Springer bought BioMed Central and increased its market share, Nature Group purchased Frontiers for the same reason.
Jeffery Beall simply mixes all OAs
false again, his two lists show less than 1% of OA journals, none of Biomed Central or PLOS or other decent OAs. You are the one who mixes them all .Instead of attacking Beall, try and understand what he says before commenting here again.
his two lists show less than 1% of OA journals: Where did you find this number? Can you name a new OA publisher, I mean the one started its job within the last three years, outside this site? To the best of my knowledge he plans to kill all new beginners.
You could follow his site and easily find that he removes people’s message any time he sees he does not have a good answer. For example this morning I saw a message asking him to provide a good reason for calling GIF impact factor measurement as a fraud firm and he simply removed the message. You could try asking him this question.
He basically calls all newly introduced OA publishers “questionable or Predatory” and discourages people for submitting papers, even when there is virtually no papers publication on a newly introduced website. He does not know anything about statistics, he simply takes a look at people’s website and if the website is designed improperly, he jumps to conclusion that the site plans to make money.
You say he does not plan to kill new rivals? Ok ask him to criticize “Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences” published by ELSEVIER on his blog and you will see that he will delete your message.
Do you really think one person can make a comprehensive survey on over 400 publishers alone and his results can be trusted?
Honestly, I have tried to believe he wants to do something for scientific community but the more he posts the more I become suspicious about the nature of his work.
Finally, if you read all his posts you will find out that he has been busy with different court trials.
Mob
@Mab/Mob
“less than 1%”: pretty obvious, there are 10.000 OA journals on DOAJ, and it’s a selective directory, with lots of “newly introduced OA publishers” that aren’t on Beall’s list.
“Procedia”: your problem, I don’t take orders from anonymous strangers and can’t see why any blogger should.
“GIF” : if that’s the”Gloabal Impact Factor (sic!)“, I think it’s bogus. And I remove slanders as well, unless they make my point – like yours
“if the website is designed improperly”: i.e. quoting fake impact factors.
“400 journals”: less than 2 per week, not many for a university librarian. I had to check 30 in one week.
“trials”: threats aren’t lawsuits, futile lawsuits don’t end in court.
@Gvdr
ELife in 2”…
I can: peerj.
Time to think: 2 sec. 😉
My friend
You and I are in the same boat, we both hate criminals, As of today, 9918 journals from over 500 publishers are listed on DOAJ and nearly most of them are listed on his list. Jeffrey Beall believes DOAJ is a vanity index. Just look at his blog. I am glad that you and I point to DOAJ as a good source of OA publishers.
I do accept that if a publisher claims it is ISI index while it is not, it is a sign of predatory activity, I admit that some of these fake OA publishers steal other well known publishers’ identity to make money, and Jeffrey has collected these criminals and mixed them with many other startup OA publishers just to kill all OA rivals.
Let’s think about it more
Mob
How come such a zealous OA defender landed on a blog in italian? Did he specifically targeted italian blogs? Sounds like a premeditated campaign.
Just conjectures, I know, I’m no better than Mab 🙂
@Mob
You’re still making stuff up
Beall lists 126 journals which are not in DOAJ; his 242 “questionable” publishers (out of more than 3.000!) aren’t either, cross-check them on OASPA.
When you’re through, check the 242 web sites, and you’ll see that many them are not startups at al, Academic J. and Bentham Open have been around for 8 years.
@Riccardo
Mob mixes everything up because he wants to kill “Procedia” …
How do you say that, here are the list of DOAJ listed journals from Jeffrey’ list for journal started by letter “A”. As you can see, 16 out of 22 journals are listed in DOAJ representing 72%. I am sure if we check all journals, the rate will exceed 80%.
Academy of Contemporary Research Journal
American Journal of Engineering Research
American Journal of PharmTech Research
American Research Journal
Arab World English Journal
Archives of Pharmacy Practice
Asian Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences
Asian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
Asian Journal of Business and Management Sciences
Asian Journal of Pharmaceutical and Health Sciences
Asian Journal of Pharmacy and Life Science
Asian Journal of Pharmaceutical Research and Health Care
Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences
Australian Journal of Business and Management Research
Ayupharm: International Journal of Ayurveda and Allied Sciences
I am not the enemy of any journal, Please think about it, I am just giving you the fact, you judge by yourself.
Mob
@Mob
“not in DOAJ” : sorry, my mistake, I meant in DOAJ and not in OASPA, that’s why you had better cross-check. For instance, those Australian journals you quote were excluded by the Australian Research Council before Beall flagged them. And no, 242 publishers out of 3,000 aren’t even close to 72%.
The others are dodgy as well, you could’t find a decent one. QED and tks for making my point again: you slander Beall because he is doing a good job.
Can you cite where exactly you found 3000 OA publishers? To the best of my knowledge, there are not 3000 OA publishers out there
According to a survey published by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
the maximum number of papers published was 200,000 If an OA publishes 1000 articles per year, the number of publishers would only be 200 in 2009 and i am guessing it is now 500 and not 3000. Jeffrey list is not 249 publishers, it is nearly 450, if you doubt just check his website. He has covered almost all OA publishers. If you think I am wrong, simply name 4 OA who started their job within the past three years and their names are not listed in his list.
Mob
@Mob
“3.000”: Harnad’s “conservative” estimate, includes scientific societies/academies, universities, research centers, non profit and commercial publishers.
“200.000”: that was in 2009.
“1000 articles per year”: wrong median, Plos One publishes over 4,600, Entomologia 8-10
“name 4 OA”: you said one and got two, next time 8? Want more? Go here
“chek his website” yourself and stay away from mine, please.
Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with each other, I will not post any thing on your website, Thanks