Shortly after the release of Tawny-OWL 1.5.0 (n.d.a) I noticed a strange message being printed to screen, which looks like this:

I am pleased to annouce the 1.5.0 release of Tawny-OWL, the fully programmatic ontology construction environment.

I was entertained to see that Springer recently retracted a set of papers, having apparently detected a set of fake reviewers (n.d.a) The game seems to be that authors suggest reviewers who are real people but with fake emails owned by the authors. Allyson Lister, a colleague of mine, was twice the victim of this form of identity theft (n.d.b/) (n.d.c/) a while back so I am perhaps less surprised to hear that this is happening than some in the scientific community.

I have discussed the issue of peer-review before, and my frustration at being asked to review for journals with high submissions fees (n.d.a) something for which we as academics gain very little credit for.

I’m winding by way back from a busy month with both Bio-Ontologies and ICBO, but in general I think the experience has been really positive, even if interspersing holiday and work travel has rather exhausted me. But both were in Europe and Bio-Ontologies was right next door, so I did not want to waste the opportunity.