Sweet.

I just discovered that I scheduled myself three days of vacation for Wiscon -- I'm off starting Wednesday. I've already booked the flight for early afternoon Friday, so that won't change, but it's stressful for me getting on a plane and coming back and not having any days to just chill at one end or the other.

Six-day week, four-day week, then two-day week. That works.

Can't spell Elsevier without Evil

Librarians have long reviled Elsevier for their opposition to open access, and how they like to charge extortionist prices for journals while pulling in 40% profit margins. This, though, takes the cake:

Merck and Elsevier publish fake peer-reviewed journal.

One of the things that makes this extra-crispy evil is that, ideally, you could just not subscribe to the fake journals. But Elsevier makes it hard to take that option by bundling their subscriptions together, much like the cable company does. The issue isn't that you're paying for something fraudulent, though that's bad enough. The issue is that you've now got something fraudulent popping up in your search results -- much as if your cable company bundled the Playboy channel in with basic cable, and you got breasts in your face every time you channel-surfed.

Except that undergrads can reliably identify actual breasts, and aren't quite as successful in identifying fake research.

I'm annoyed at Elsevier for publishing something like the Journal of Homeopathy, but with homeopathy there are people who think it works and that it's a legitimate subject of research, and ... even though they're wrong, that's different, to me, from something that's only driven by profit.