Month: November 2014
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The Times They Are A-changin’: Academia in the Age of Open
The academic world in the Netherlands is abuzz with the government and the Association of Universities in the Netherlands’ (VSNU) firm position in negotiations with Elsevier. The push to open up academic literature to become freely accessible and reusable online, which is usually recognized under the umbrella term of Open Access, has become quite real…
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‘Slow science’ in het digitale tijdperk
Open access betekent ruim baan voor het digitale publiceren. Maar is alle wetenschap hier wel bij gebaat? Een pleidooi voor ‘slow science’ in de tijden van terabytes en 4G.
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How to diagnose their ills?
In 1998, the Australian professor of colonial medicine Warwick Anderson warned his readers that ‘[w]e should not assume that the colonial world was a passive receptacle for germ theories or any other form of Western medical knowledge’.[1] Although Anderson meant that the arrival of new medical theories to the colonies led to changes that were…
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Garlic, magnets, Roman science: a review of Daryn Lehoux, What Did the Romans Know?
In order to keep in touch with what happens in historiography, I sometimes spend a few days reading the introductions of recent historical publications. In a relatively efficient way, it gives me the comfortable feeling that I am still aware of what historians claim they are doing. Sometimes, however, I remind myself to read the…