Two giant stalking things

"Disease and depravation stalk our land like... two giant stalking things."
- Edmund Blackadder

Well, the two giant stalking things on my radar today (I do have a radar, it makes me look like a Teletubby) are these two stories, one good, one decidely less so.

• Quantum computation expert Dave Bacon (aka The Quantum Pontiff) has announced the launch of SciRate.com - a digg-like service for arXiv papers - in this humorous posting. This is a very exciting development and could let some of the better papers in arXiv rise to the top and get more attention than they currently do.


• A frankly depressing report from Nature on "PR's pit bull" discrediting open access publishing. Peter Suber (see comments) provides the incredulity felt by many.

I think we'll see what advice filtered through to the major publishers in public statements/press releases over the next few months. My guess is that - following this expose - they won't be able to use these arguments even if they wanted to.