Joint Committee on Quantitative Assessment of Research Citation Statistics A report from the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in cooperation with the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS)
http://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Report/CitationStatistics.pdf
This is a report about the use and misuse of citation data in the assessment of scientific research. The idea that research assessment must be done using “simple and objective” methods is increasingly prevalent today. The “simple and objective” methods are broadly interpreted as bibliometrics, that is, citation data and the statistics derived from them. There is a belief that citation statistics are inherently more accurate because they substitute simple numbers for complex judgments, and hence overcome the possible subjectivity of peer review. But this belief is unfounded.
Best Current Practices for Journals, http://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/CEIC/bestpractice/bpfinal.pdf is a document endorsed by the IMU General Assembly on 16 August 2010.
MathOverflow when-should-a-supervisor-be-a-co-author
Douglas N. Arnold, Kristine K. Fowler, Nefarious numbers, AMS Notices, arxiv/1010.0278
Arnold-Fowler also prompted
Impact factor engineerings on P. Cameron’s blog: the action of the Goodhart’s law (cf. also here)
Gillespie’s blog, impact factors for statistical journals
Open Journal Systems at Public Knowledge Project
Scholastica academic publishing software and blog
AzimuthProject:Tracing intellectual properties
While in court it is easier to win if somebody had a prior registration of copyright in a copyright office, in principle most of the copyright laws and patent laws in provable cases give advantage to the factual priority of the work, even if not registered. That is, every author’s work is a priori protected from the moment of creation; the registration at a copyright office just makes it easier to prove the priority in disputes.
According to some historians and anti-copyright activists, the copyright in the 19th and early 20th centuries mainly worked for the authors, while today it is structured in a way which protects mainly the publishers and less the authors. In particular, often the authors loose battles with their own publishers in attempts to make parts of their work free or published in a form which they prefer.