Monday 16 January 2012

Stuff and Things

Part of doing research involves telling other scientists about your research.  A standard way of doing this is to write journal articles.  There are many things to say about the process and practice of writing in journals, from which journals you publish in, and why, to open access models, to the efficacy of peer review.  I'll try to get to those another time.

There are many journals out there, of varying quality and held in various levels of esteem by the science community, for reasons which are mostly reasonable, but probably sometimes spurious.  Journals would, in general, like to get good scientists to send their papers to them, and most journals will do a bit of advertising to encourage submission of articles.  I had a recent email from a journal which is quite young (on its second volume) and looking for people to submit articles.  The journal is called "Advances in Internet of Things." They've emailed me a few times, and I've mostly ignored the email, except to think "what a strange name for a journal," to myself.

It turns out that the phrase "internet of things" is a phrase with a particular meaning, which at least makes the journal title sound less ungrammatical.  What it actually means seems to be a little hard to find out.  There is a .eu website carrying the name.  It has a menu item entitled "what is the internet of things" but it doesn't give a straightforward answer.  It seems to be a way of thinking of turning the relation between anything into either a real or virtual network.  Maybe.  I wouldn't be so surprised if the whole thing were just a piece of hoaxy performance art.

At the very least, I don't think I'll be submitting a paper to the journal.

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