Super nice week where the only screen I used was the one protecting me from the sun. Ran a half-marathon using summer clothes, ate paella and empanadillas de pisto, saw family and friends. I read a couple books and saw some movies, too. I call it a win.
Just a couple links that I could not help but read:
Another success for academic publishing
Let’s get over this one more time. First, you write your projects and ask for money to develop them. You find the scientists, you hire and also train them. You buy all the equipment, and do the actual research (which sometimes works, but most of the time it does not). After some years, you might have enough data and results to share with the community, which you do by writing a paper. You write it, you prepare the images, you do all the styling and formatting. After that, you send it to a journal, which decides if your results are interesting enough for other researchers. If that’s the case, they send it to a couple scientists for them to review your work. They neither pay those researchers nor the editorial work (which is also done by another experienced scientist). After a couple rounds of revision, if you are lucky enough, they finally accept to publish your paper. You still do some more formatting work, and after that you get a preprint file, in which you still look for grammatical and/or graphical mistakes, which you also correct. Finally, after everything is looking perfect, you pay again (depending on the journal, from ~2k to ~8k €) and they publish the paper. IF you paid enough, the paper will be open access (so everyone will be able to read it for free), otherwise, people will have to pay again to read it.
And yet, after all this nonsense, publishers are getting scammed by people who manage to publish rubbish papers on their «prestigious» journals. Bravo. I guess their solution will involve asking for scientists to check for this without paying them.
Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published, on nature
Videogames > movies
Exhibit number 13545621. It still amazes me how video games have taken over almost all the entertainment industry by now. Even though I have always preferred this media over films and tv shows, I really never thought that the mainstream would finally end embracing the medium. However, news like this show how video game companies are starting to take over more traditional (even though highly technical) ones. Expect similar movements in the near future, and also the «old» companies going into game development (Netflix already did a couple months ago).
Unity to pay $1.6 billion for The Lord of the Rings VFX maker Weta Digital, on the verge
Peter Jackson Sells Weta Tech Assets to Unity for $1.62B, on the Hollywood reporter
And that’s it for the week. Stay safe!
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