Category: Comments & Discussion Points
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Are there limits to what one can talk about?
This post discusses attempts to regulate free speech in academic contexts in 2015. The content is no longer current, but is preserved here for archival purposes.
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How are we encouraging predatory publishers?
Recently, Scholarly Open Access, an authoritative blog that tracks the activity of predatory publishers, issued a warning (link no longer active) about The International Journal of English Language, Literature & Humanities (I used to have a link to them as well, but I decided they don’t deserve one), a fraudulent journal that seems to target ELT professionals.…
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“Exclusively hiring native speakers is not discrimination” Seriously?
A reaction to prevailing practices in language education that continue to discriminate against qualified teachers who are not native speakers
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Three reasons why I dislike ResearchGate
Thoughts on (what was in 2014) a new way to share research.
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“Impact factor is a scam”, argues Curt Rice
Curt Rice, the head of the Board for Current Research Information System in Norway (CRIStin), recently published an interesting article in his blog, discussing the uses and abuses of the impact factor. This is reproduced, with the author’s kind permission, below. Quality control in research: the mysterious case of the bouncing impact factor Research must be…
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Elephants, self-promotion, and academic self-presentation
For today, I had originally planned to post some thoughts on Teaching English to Very Young learners, drawing on a small scale inquiry I ran online over the last 10 days. However, that post has been de-prioritised, and in its place I’d like to engage in some rather shameless self-promotion, which I will then use as a springboard in…
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If Scotland votes for independence, what happens to the language?
More than thirty years ago, linguists ventured a guess that the rise in Scottish nationalism might lead to Scottish English re-asserting itself. Were they right?
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Possible scam involving academic publishing?
You will never get a fee for publishing in an academic journal. According to a recent post in Scholarly Open Access (a now [2019] defunct blog, which used to report on academic publishing scams), there is at least one academic publisher so keen to recruit authors and editors that they offer rewards of “1,000-10,000 dollars as…
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Thinking about setting up an academic blog?
I am a relatively recent newcomer to academic blogging: I started my blog in January 2012 (although I did have a personal blog which I started in September 2006). Recently [in 2014], I crossed the 30,000 views landmark [update: as of 2024, the views counter is well over one million], which is perhaps a modest…