Friday Links – August 15

How Successful People Stay Calm (from LinkedIn)

  • Article explains optimal stress and includes 10 best strategies for managing stress (and emotions).

Churnalism: When Press Releases Masquerade as News Stories

  • British YouTube video illustrating “churnalism” (media articles based on press releases) with examples of how some fake press releases made it into mainstream media.  By Churnalism.com (promotes their churnalism detection extension for Chrome and Firefox). (Shared on the ili-l listserv by Maryke Barber).

Demand Media Infographic

  • Infographic illustrating how “content mills” work based on one example.  Shows how content (matching web search terms) is written for the internet to generate ad sales. (Also shared on the ili-l listserv by Maryke Barber).

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) seeks to weed out ‘predatory’ OA journals.

… following criticism of [DOAJ’s] quality-control checks, the website is asking all of the journals in its directory to reapply on the basis of stricter criteria. It hopes the move will weed out ‘predatory journals’: those that profess to publish research openly, often charging fees, but that are either outright scams or do not provide the services a scientist would expect, such as a minimal standard of peer review or permanent archiving …

More background and perspective from Rick Anderson via the Scholarly Kitchen.