There has been quite a lot of chatter recently about different scientific publishing models. Prompted by Elsevier’s support for the Research Works Act, and the resulting proposed academic boycott. Let there be no mistake: I value the Open Access (OA )model of publication, for both moral and practical reasons that have been elaborated upon in [...]
The Scientist is one of my favorite go-to destinations for keeping up with current biomedical research. That’s why I was rather sad when it was recently announced that The Scientist will be closing down. However, it seems like The Scientist will continue to be published after all: NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – Oct 14, 2011) – [...]
After WWII, Pacific islands occupied by the US military were regularly receiving goods via air. Once the military evacuated , the goods stopped arriving. Some inhabitants of those islands mistakenly thought that receiving the cargo was due to some divine intervention that required rituals they saw American servicemen performing. This eventually led them to [...]
Guest post by Leighton Pritchard The new top-tier competitor to Science and Nature proposed by three leading funders of scientific research last week is a great idea, but I think runs a risk of opening the scientific process to a potentially damaging slander by opponents of science. As practising academic scientists we’re all concerned, and [...]
The Max Planck society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Wellcome Trust have announced their plans for a new journal for biomedical and life science research to be launched summer 2012. From the joint press release: The journal will employ an open and transparent peer review process in which papers will be accepted or rejected as [...]
The National Academies Press are offering all their books in PDF format for free. The announcement yesterday created a serious traffic surge on their site. But the books are still there, and are still free. Got to buy that new 5Tb external disk now….
“The Science Network”: who stole PubMed? Well, their accents don’t exactly fit the population in the NLM….
This came in my inbox today: solicitation to submit manuscripts to a journal completely outside my area of interest and proficiency. My email client software had an interesting reaction to it: The next email in my inbox was this: OK, that’s taking things a bit too far. Random solicitation of editors (did I mention that was not [...]
Since its publication, the paper about bacteria using arsenic instead of phosphorous has been criticized from several different angles. First for the media pre-publication stoking, which lead many journalists to speculate about microbes from Titan while the paper was still embargoed (titanic microbes?), when ultimately it was revealed that we are dealing with earthlings, although [...]
I have written about the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results before and now this just popped in my inbox from JSUR’s Google group. Apparently JSUR is now open for business. JSUR Call for Participation Submit your short (2-4page) and full length manuscripts to the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results. Over the past month [...]
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’, but ‘That’s funny…’ -Isaac Asimov Thanks to Ruchira Datta for pointing out this one. Science is many things to many people, but any lab-rat will tell you that research is mainly long stretches of frustration, interspersed with flashes [...]
One aspect of living in any kind of social setting is being assessed, rated and tested by one’s peers. Constantly. We are social creatures: we need to know who we are up against in any given setting. It is, after all, a matter of life and death, or at the very of gene dispersal. We [...]
(Full disclosure before I start: I am an academic editor in PLoS ONE. I have no financial stake in PLoS, and as far as I know, they have none in me. They’d better not, if they know what’s good for them). PLoS have come up with yet another cool mechanism for scientific communication: PLoS Currents. [...]
