About the session
10.30am, Monday 30th March 2015
Geoffrey Bilder - Crossref
Watch animals confronted with danger, and their reactions
are sometimes seemingly inexplicable. A bird stalked by
a cat will peck the ground instead of flying away. A cat
encountering an errant dog will abruptly decide to groom
itself. But our attendance at UKSG this year may represent a similar behaviour. Our focus on the apparently important issues of open access, data, metrics and reproducibility is nothing more than an industrial-scale displacement activity. These issues are straw men that we erect and then pummel in an attempt to distract ourselves from a far bigger and seemingly less tractable problem in academia. If, instead, we focus our attention on fixing the bigger, more dangerous problem, then these other issues will likely vanish in a puff of dust and grass.
