News desk
For those who’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that we just published an interesting Perspective in PLOS Biology from Dominique Roche and colleagues that provides some practical hints on how to improve public data archiving for scientific research.
And if you’ve been even more on the ball, you’ll also have seen the recent announcement of PLOS’ new Data Policy and subsequent Update on the PLOS website.
The new Data Policy will be implemented for manuscripts submitted on, or after, March 1st. The main change is that all PLOS journals will require that all manuscripts have an accompanying data availability statement for the data used in that piece of research. We’re well aware that this may prove to be a challenge, but… Read more
A week ago in a news article in Science – and along with my colleagues and collaborators, Julian Stirling and Raphael Levy – I was accused of being a cyber-bully. This, as you might imagine, was not a particularly pleasant accusation to face. Shortly following publication of the piece in Science, one of the most popular and influential science bloggers on the web, Neuroskeptic, wrote an insightful and balanced blog post on what might be best described as the psychology underpinning the accusation. This prompted a flow of tweets from the Twitterati.
As one of the scientists at the eye of the storm, I wanted to take some time to explain in this blog post just how this unfortunate and distressing situation… Read more
The post-secondary academic workforce has undergone a remarkable change over the last several decades. The tenure-track college professor with a stable salary, firmly grounded in the middle or upper-middle class, is becoming rare. Taking her place is the contingent faculty: nontenure-track teachers, such as part-time adjuncts or graduate instructors, with no job security from one semester to the next, working at a piece rate with few or no benefits across multiple workplaces, and far too often struggling to make ends meet. In 1970, adjuncts made up 20 percent of all higher education faculty. Today, they represent half.
Increasing the number of Americans who obtain a college degree or other post-secondary credentials is a key to growing and strengthening the middle… Read more
You think that scientists, being quite clever people, would be able to agree on the best way to rank each other’s work. Oh no, not any longer.
The issue really kicked off when recent Nobel Laureate and molecular biologist Randy Schekman professor of cell and development biology at the University of California at Berkeley, USA, accused the big three journals Science, Cell and Nature of “distorting science” by promoting their brands “in ways more conducive to selling subscriptions than to stimulating the most important research.”
Many agree, including Andrew Plested, a biophysicist based at the Leibniz Institute for Molecular Pharmacologie, FMP-Berlin, Germany, who has critiqued alternatives to peer review, referred to as altmetrics. “The journals run by publishers tend to… Read more
Over the past year, Jonathan Eisen’s reading habits have changed dramatically. For most of the past 2 decades, he has kept up with scientifi c literature primarily by combing PubMed, the vast trove of online biology abstracts. But these days Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis, discovers research relevant to his own work without even looking for it.
The insightful librarian helping keep Eisen up to speed is Google Scholar, a free academic search service maintained by the California-based company. Google Scholar has been studying Eisen closely. It keeps track not only of his own 300 papers and the key words within them—Archaea, Plasmodium, phylogenomics—but also the 38,000 citations to his work in published papers, preprint… Read more
Drug companies tend to be secretive, to say the least, about studies of their medicines. For years, negative trials would not even be published. Except for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, nobody got to look at the raw information behind those studies. The medical data behind important drugs, devices, and other products was kept shrouded.
Today, Johnson & Johnson JNJ +0.67% is taking a major step toward changing that, not only for drugs like the blood thinner Xarelto or prostate cancer pill Zytiga but also for the artificial hips and knees made for its orthopedics division or even consumer products. “You want to know about Listerine trials? They’ll have it,” says Harlan Krumholz of Yale University, who is overseeing… Read more
Texas seems—if you’ll pardon the expression—hellbent on destroying science education in the Lone Star State.
Watch this video (from December 2013) of the four Republican candidates for lieutenant governor talking about why they feel creationism must be taught in Texas public schools.* Warning: Weapons-grade ignorance unfolds. I will not be responsible for any exploded heads resulting from watching this.
Click here to read this January 29, 2014 Slate post by Phil Plait.… Read more
The upcoming Australian Science Communicators conference is featuring a talk by the CEO of Greenpeace Australia Pacific. Here’s the abstract (my emphasis):
Greenpeace is a science-based campaigning organization whose purpose is to stand up for the environment. We detect and understand the environmental problems we face through science, and depend on science and technology to provide solutions to environmental threats. Greenpeace is thus in the (not-for-profit) business of communicating science. In his presentation, CEO of Greenpeace Australia Pacific, David Ritter, will outline Greenpeace’s approach to science communication, drawing out some of the tensions and overlap between public science and public campaigning.
This is the same science-based organization that made headlines several years ago for destroying government sponsored wheat crops, which… Read more
Sharing data generated through the conduct of clinical trials offers the promise of placing evidence about the safety and efficacy of therapies and clinical interventions on a firmer basis and enhancing the benefits of clinical trials. Ultimately, such data sharing – if carried out appropriately – could lead to improved clinical care and greater public trust in clinical research and health care.
Discussion Framework for Clinical Trial Data Sharing: Guiding Principles, Elements, and Activities is part of a study of how data from clinical trials might best be shared. This document is designed as a framework for discussion and public comment. This framework is being released to stimulate reactions and comments from stakeholders and the public. The framework summarizes the… Read more
Patterns…cause and effect: mechanism and explanation…scale, proportion, and quantity…systems and system models…energy and matter: flows, cycles, and conservation…structure and function…stability and change…
How does your science and engineering teaching involve concepts that cut across many science disciplines and are central to the K-12 Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)?
These seven crosscutting concepts are presented in the document that framed the NGSS, A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas (NRC 2012) and were previously identified in some form in Science for All Americans (AAAS 1989), Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS 1993), National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996), and NSTA’s Science Anchors Project (NSTA Press 2010).
Click here to read more from this January 26, 2014 NSTA post by Peggy Ashbrook.… Read more
A growing chorus of concern, from scientists and laypeople, contends that the complex system for ensuring the reproducibility of biomedical research is failing and is in need of restructuring. As leaders of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), we share this concern and here explore some of the significant interventions that we are planning.
Science has long been regarded as ‘self-correcting’, given that it is founded on the replication of earlier work. Over the long term, that principle remains true. In the shorter term, however, the checks and balances that once ensured scientific fidelity have been hobbled. This has compromised the ability of today’s researchers to reproduce others’ findings.
Let’s be clear: with rare exceptions, we have no evidence… Read more
The British Science Association has posted the proceedings from its 2013 science communication conference. Click here to the source version of this list.
Reports
Conference ebook
Conference report
Podcast
Listen to the 2013 podcast, hosted by Louise Ogden, Web Editor, British Science Association. Podcast Powered By Podbean
Blog posts
“Challenge, don’t worship, the chiefs and high priestesses of science” – Alice Bell, Guardian
“Science communicators do it for the public” – Nancy Mendoza
“There’s no such thing as not enough time” – Nancy Mendoza
“The changing face of science communication” – Brigitte Nerlich
“Science communication: bridging theory and practice” – Brigette Nerlich, Making Science Public
“Am I the bus or the pyramid of badgers?” – Nicola Rolfe
“Science on TV” - Amy… Read more
Being a scientist is about more than just research alone: there is publishing involved, teaching and outreach, and keeping on top of new developments in policy and data sharing issues. All these are themselves areas for study and analysis. For example, we’ve previously published papers about implementing journal clubs or about the accuracy of Google search results in medical diagnosis.
The study and documentation of such areas of science communication can be challenging to publish because it’s hard to find a suitable venue for these papers. As you can see from the examples above, we have already published such papers, and to make it extra clear that science communication papers are welcome at F1000Research we have created a new subject… Read more
“Doors Closing. Please stand clear of the doors.” For anyone who lives, or has spent time in Washington, D.C., you recognize this as the announcement just before the Metro pulls away from the station. The Metro is one of the things I miss most about living in Washington, D.C. Even in a commuter-friendly place like Portland (which I now call home), the bike lanes and MAX simply can’t move as many people to as many destinations with the efficiency of the Metro. The Metro provides something critical to a buzzing, busy city – people-moving infrastructure.
Infrastructure has been on my mind. The National Academy of Science’s Public Interfaces of Life Science Roundtable just completed our second day of workshops on the… Read more
Have you ever had a sneaking suspicion that, no matter how interesting you find your studies or results, others might be less than electrified by them?
You’re probably right.
Danish biologist Kaj Sand-Jensen argues that the culture of and expectations around scientific-paper writing can turn talented and interesting writers into dull ones, producing articles that—no matter how fascinating the topic—are deathly to read.
Want to know what you’re doing right—er, wrong?
Read Sand-Jensen’s paper, How to write consistently boring scientific literature (Oikos vol. 116), and let us know if you agree.
Click here to read the original January 24, 2014 AGU post by Olivia V. Ambrogio.… Read more
The National Science Foundation recently released a report titled Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: 2012, unveiling important trends in U.S. doctoral education.
The American system of doctoral education is widely considered to be among the world’s best, as evidenced by the large and growing number of international students who choose to pursue doctoral degrees at U.S. universities each year. Many of these students are among the top students in their respective countries.
The report calls attention to important trends in doctoral education organized around five key questions, among them: Who earns a U.S. doctorate? Which fields attract students? What influences the path to the doctorate?
Annual counts of doctorate recipients are a direct measure of the investment in human resources… Read more
As a social scientist who is also trained as an engineer, I am puzzled by how often public-welfare and social-justice issues are viewed as irrelevant or tangential to ‘real’ technical work in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) professions. I carried out a study, the results of which suggest that university education exacerbates this culture of disengagement.
Between 2003 and 2008, I surveyed a total of more than 300 engineering students in four US universities — a large state college, an elite technical college, a small engineering-only university and a small private liberal-arts college. Following students from their first year to 18 months after their graduation, I found that, on average, they left their degrees less interested in public welfare… Read more
When public-school students enrolled in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.
The more than 17,000 students in the Responsive Education Solutions charter system will learn in their history classes that some residents of the Philippines were “pagans in various levels of civilization.” They’ll read in a history textbook that feminism forced women to turn to the government as a “surrogate husband.”
Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it… Read more
Washington, DC – Progress toward making taxpayer-funded scientific research freely accessible in a digital environment was reached today with Congressional passage of the FY 2014 Omnibus Appropriations Bill. The bill requires federal agencies under the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education portion of the Omnibus bill with research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to articles reporting on federally funded research no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
“This is an important step toward making federally funded scientific research available for everyone to use online at no cost,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). “We are indebted to the members… Read more
The newspaper you read this morning, the television show you watched last night, the movie you are going to see this weekend, the computer software you use to prepare your letters or send your email, the music you listen to in the car on your way to work: they are all copyrighted. Copyright permeates our lives and yet, despite its impact on our lives, relatively few people, including lawyers, have sufficient knowledge or understanding of what copyright is. And far too many people, including lawyers, have major misconceptions concerning copyright. These misconceptions are causing a dangerous shift in copyright protection, a shift that threatens the advancement of knowledge and learning in this country. This shift that we are experiencing in… Read more
Does open access increase the likelihood for articles to be cited, or to be cited more often, compared to articles published in subscription-based journals? The questions around such an ‘open access citation effect’ – its size, indeed its existence, and how it may relate to different open access models – have been discussed for many years.
A 2010 literature review by Alma Swan showed that the vast majority of relevant studies found evidence for the effect, and the growing number of such studies adds to our understanding of it and how it varies in relation to factors like academic disciplines, journal ranking, or open access models.
At BioMed Central we’ve seen a strong effect on citations and the Impact Factors… Read more
WASHINGTON — Kailyn Lowry, at age 17, decided to let MTV film her pregnancy and the birth of her first child in the hope of persuading other young men and women to wait to start a family.
“I did get two awesome blessings,” said Ms. Lowry, now 21 and married with a second child. “But I still haven’t gotten my bachelor’s degree, because, one, day care is so expensive and, two, how do you balance studying and having little ones at home?”
Ms. Lowry’s cautionary tale seems to have made an impression on at least some viewers. A new economic study of Nielsen television ratings and birth records suggests that the show she appeared in, “16 and Pregnant,” and its… Read more
There’s little lyrical language to be found in the international report on climate change issued earlier this year. The document from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) runs to 2,200 pages and is crammed with technical details about greenhouse-gas emissions, rising sea levels and atmospheric circulation.
Seattle oceanographer Gregory Johnson was a lead author of the chapter on marine measurements, and even he was having a hard time wrapping his head around the massive compilation. So when a bad cold kept him in the house one weekend, Johnson decided to distill the report to its essence via a centuries-old Japanese art form: haiku.
The result is a virtual booklet that is riding a wave of celebrity on… Read more
ONCE upon a time, it was common for scientists to receive letters from researchers working in other institutions, asking for reprints of papers they had published. It was the usual practice in those days for journal publishers to furnish authors with a couple of dozen such reprints, precisely for this purpose—but, if these had run out, a quick visit to the photocopier kept the wheels of scientific discourse turning, and though it was technically a violation of copyright, no one much minded.
Then, the world wide web was invented—initially, as it happens, with the intention of making it easier for scientists to share their results—and everything changed. Now, any scientist worth his grant has a website, and that site will… Read more
The most important federal funding mechanism for biomedical research in the United States is the R01 grant proposal submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Most scientists submitting R01 proposals request around $250,000 per year for 5 years. This may sound like a lot of money, but these requested funds have to pay for the salaries of the research staff including the salary of the principal investigator. The money that is left over once the salaries are subtracted has to cover the costs of new scientific equipment, maintenance contracts for existing equipment, monthly expenses for research reagents such as chemicals, cell lines, cell culture media and molecular biology assay kits, housing animals, user fees for research core facilities….. basically… Read more
The conventional business model for chemical information has been to collect it, enhance it, then charge for access. This started with the visionary Friedrich Konrad Beilstein who founded the famous Handbuch der organischen Chemie (Handbook of Organic Chemistry). The first edition, published in 1881, covered 1,500 compounds in 2,200 pages.
Now there are tens of millions of compounds electronically abstracted from research literature in great detail, but most are behind paywalls. The closed access model increasingly frustrates the community. In the internet era, citizens – not just practising scientists – want to develop new ways of using information: mashups, linked data, apps, new displays and more.
The open philosophy – free to use, reuse and redistribute – was fuelled by… Read more
ST. LOUIS — Deanna Barch talks fast, as if she doesn’t want to waste any time getting to the task at hand, which is substantial. She is one of the researchers here at Washington University working on the first interactive wiring diagram of the living, working human brain.
To build this diagram she and her colleagues are doing brain scans and cognitive, psychological, physical and genetic assessments of 1,200 volunteers. They are more than a third of the way through collecting information. Then comes the processing of data, incorporating it into a three-dimensional, interactive map of the healthy human brain showing structure and function, with detail to one and a half cubic millimeters, or less than 0.0001 cubic inches.
Dr.… Read more
Derek Streat, father of a 6-year-old girl who had a kidney transplant in 2010, has a very personal reason to help Seattle Children’s connect with other pediatric hospitals around the country.
He sees a day when doctors looking for the best treatment for a patient could study medical records for hundreds or thousands of similar patients at hospitals across the country.
That could help identify ideal levels of anti-rejection medications for kids such as his daughter — crucial because too little and her kidney is rejected, but too much and the medication becomes toxic to her kidney.
Streat’s wish has just received a $7 million kick-start. Over the next 18 months, a grant from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI),… Read more
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