Category Archives: publishing

Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research

In 2008, under bipartisan pressure from Congress to ensure that all Americans would be able to access the results of taxpayer-funded biomedical research, the US National Institutes of Health instituted a Public Access Policy: The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to […]

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Stop the presses! H5N1 Frankenflu is going to kill us all!

I have watched the escalating hysteria about recent NIH-funded experiments to humanize H5N1 influenze (aka bird flu) with a mixture of amusement, horror and confusion. The amusement is born of the predictable hysteria that always infuses media coverage of research on lethal virus. The horror comes from the largely unchallenged move to censor publication of the […]

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Peer review is f***ed up – let’s fix it

Peer review is ostensibly one of the central pillars of modern science. A paper is not taken seriously by other scientists unless it is published in a “peer reviewed” journal. Jobs, grants and tenure are parceled out, in no small part, on the basis of lists of “peer reviewed” papers. The public has been trained […]

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The HHMI/Wellcome/MPI super journal and the triumph of open access

On Monday the world’s three most prominent private funders of scientific research – the US’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the UK’s Wellcome Trust and Germany’s Max Planck Society – announced plans for a new “top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research”. Basic features of the as of yet unnamed journal (I suggest […]

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Interesting comments from Dennis Overbye about press releases

Marketing for scientists has an interview with NYT science reporter Dennis Overbye. In response to a question about whether science reporters can be manipulated, Overbye responded: The easiest way to manipulate the press is to embargo some result and then send a press release about it to a thousand different news organizations.  They will cover it […]

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