Over Two-Hundred Education & Science Blogs * † - Department of ...

MacIsaac, D.L. 2000. "Communities of on-line physics educators," Phys. Teach. 38(4): 210-
213; online at (196 kB).
Discusses technical and social aspects of discussion lists and gives reference information on four
major physics education lists: Phys-L, Physhare-L, PhysLrnR, and TAP-L.
Miller. A. 2008. “100 Useful Tips and Tools to Research the Deep Web,” online at
. See especially “Semantic Search Tools and Databases.” I thank
POD’s Meggin McIntosh for this reference. I’ve not located any background material on Alisa
Miller.
MIT News. 2009. “MIT faculty open access to their scholarly articles,” 20 March; online at
:
“In a move aimed at broadening access to MIT's research and scholarship, faculty at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology have voted to make their scholarly articles available to the
public for free and open access on the Web.. . . . ‘The vote is a signal to the world that we speak in a
unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas,’ said Bish Sinyal, chair of the MIT
Faculty and the Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning.”
Nielsen, M. 2008. “The Future of Science: Building a Better Collective Memory” APS News,
17(10). The full version appears on Nielson's blog at .
Note the responses and counter responses following Nielsen’s article.
Nielsen, M. 2009a. “Three Myths About Scientific Peer Review,” 08 Jan 2009; online at
:
1. Scientists have always used peer review
2. Peer review is reliable
3. Peer review is the way we determine what’s right and wrong in science
NOTE: Peer Review (pro and con) is a hot topic as judged, e.g., by the 11.6 million hits for a
Google search for “peer review” (with the quotes) on 11 January
2009), rising to 37.2 million on 27 February 2009, and 37.3 million on 16 March 2009.
See also “The Myths of Innovation” [Berkun (2007)].
Nielsen, M. 2009b. “How Are the Mighty Fallen,” online at
, 09 Jan 2009; Nielsen wrote:
The paper. . . .[Gans & Shepherd (1994)]. . . . . is extremely readable (and entertaining), if you have
any interest in peer review. Among other tidbits: an extraordinary list of rejected papers, many of
them among the classics of economics; the estimate from Krugman that 60% of his papers are
rejected on first try; the remarkable story of George Akerlof’s Nobel Prize-Winning paper “The
Market for Lemons”, rejected by three separate journals before being published; the two rejections of
the famous Black-Scholes options pricing paper, also Nobel Prize-winning; Krugman’s comment
that “I am having a terrible time with my current work on economic geography: referees tell me that
it’s obvious, it’s wrong, and anyway they said it years ago.” There’s much more.
Addendum: Joshua. . .[Gans]. . . . also pointed me to a retrospective on the article. . . .[The
introduction by Gans to Rejected: Leading Economists Ponder the Publication Process
(Shepherd, 1995), online at (28
kB).]. . . . . , which makes for interesting followup reading.
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