05 February 2007

The ethics of journals

The boom in nanotechnology means that there is now a rush to get out journals that feed on the surrounding industry of ethics and safety. Springer joins the race going with a new journal, NanoEthics: Ethics for Technologies that Converge at the Nanoscale. Crazy title. Guess they have to make money before the move to open access puts commercial journals put of business.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The naysayers don't quite say the same thing about teaching, but that is probably only because to come out of that particular closet would be to court professional death.

Among their immediate peers they do, Michael, and for some it's a badge of honour.

In my experience, the whingers fall into two camps. There are those who genuinely hate teaching, and only do it because they wouldn't have a proper job without lecturing. And then there are those who whinge about teaching and admin responsibilities, saying that they are a distractrion from research. The reality is, however, that teaching is for them a welcome distraction from research, as they dislike the detail of the latter. Directing PhD students and postdocs is one thing, but crunching data and debugging computer code? I don't think so.

I'm sure, though, that the majority of university faculty enjoy both research and teaching, and while they may struggle to achieve a proper balance between them, they do so in good humour.

Is the use of "PUST" now deprecated? I'm not sure which acronym is worse: PUST or PEST.