Open review in the wild

Few journals and conferences so far seem to use open review. We mostly see open review practised as post-publication commenting on for example pubpeer.com where it so far seems to be mainly about spotting errors in already published papers.

I would personally like to see more open review employed by journals and conferences in the publishing of scientific papers to increase transparency in the process.
Today I have found such an example thanks to Igor Carron’s post The papers for ICLR 2015 are now open for discussion! The machine learning conference International Conference on Learning Representations uses an open review model where reviews are published, anyone can comment on the papers, and anyone can ask to become a designated reviewer: http://www.iclr.cc/doku.php?id=pubmodel.

Even though independent sites exist for post-publication commenting and review, I think it is especially exciting to see it being actively encouraged and fully integrated into the paper submission and acceptance process by the conference organisers. In addition to providing transparency in the process, I hope it also stimulates more discussion when the it is actively encouraged as we see here.

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Publishing mathematics in ebooks – part 1

This is the first part of what I hope will be a series of posts on my explorations of how to author maths-heavy writing in ebook format.

I have for quite some time now been annoyed with PDFs on mobile phones and tablets. Although there are some fine PDF viewers avaible, it usually still takes a lot of annoying scrolling to read a scientific paper on my phone or tablet. On the other hand, I have recently read a few novels as ebooks on my phone and my tablet and this has been an entirely different, enjoyable experience. The main difference is that the text in ebooks is re-flowable so as to make it easily adaptable to the screen size and preferred font size. This makes ebooks seem like a promising choice as an alternative to PDF for distributing scientific papers in more screen-friendly format. There is just one hurdle: mathematics…

Should we pay reviewers for their work?

I have previously discussed paying reviewers for their work. Although that was in the slightly different context of attracting reviewers for open post-publication peer review, a new open access journal is now introducing this idea in their workflow: http://collabra.org/.

They do this by assigning reviewers and editors points for each paper they handle. A part of the APC of accepted papers goes into a pool and the accumulated points are then used as a basis of distribution to determine how large a bite of the cake each individual is payed. Editors and reviewers may then choose to keep the money, give the money back to the journal’s APC waiver pool, or donate it to their own university’s open access payments.

The journal has taken steps to ensure that this does not lead to inflation in the number of accepted papers just to earn points; editors and reviewers are assigned points for handling papers regardless of whether they are eventually accepted. Another IMO appealing feature of the journal is that reviews can be open if both authors and reviewers agree to this.

I am looking forward to seeing how this goes…

Workshop on Compressed Sensing in Wireless Communication

Qi Zhang, Jacek Pierzchlewski, and I (Thomas Arildsen) are organising a workshop on Compressed Sensing in Wireless Communication on May 22, 2015. The workshop is part of the conference European Wireless 2015 in Budapest, Hungary. Please see the workshop webpage for details on submission etc.