Jan 2012
The Other Side
30/01/12 14:41 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Mike Taylor of the University of Bristol wrote in the Guardian that the Research Works Act, a bill currently being considered by the US Congress, has been roundly disparaged by the research community as an attempt by publishers to make more money by restricting the public's access to research. Graham Taylor, director of academic, educational, and professional publishing at the UK Publishers Association, responded in the Guardian that publishers aren't anti-science or anti-publication, but in reality have made research available to more readers for less money. S. Pelech notes that the steady growth in the number of new journals supports the contention that scientific publication can still be lucrative, especially if advertising opportunities exist, and that it is markedly cheaper and faster to disseminate scientific knowledge today than before with improved technologies and the Internet. Read More...
Turn 'Oops' into 'Oooh'
18/01/12 15:16 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Ivan Oransky at Nature Retraction Watch notes that while positive publication bias is problematic phenomena, researchers should also recognize the value of having negative results in scientific publications. S. Pelech comments that negative results can arise from the testing of hypotheses that turn out to be incorrect and/or because there are problems with the methodologies used to test the hypotheses. If the methodologies are sound and properly executed, the resulting data remains invaluable, even if they do not support the original hypothesis. He notes that probably more than 90% of the scientific data that are generated by scientists are never published. Read More...
To the Committee
12/01/12 15:54 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Michael Eisen at the University of California, Berkeley wrote in the New York Times about his concerns about the proposed Research Works Act, which could result in most Americans having to buy access to individual articles containing the results of federally funded research at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. S. Pelech notes that the more restrictions that are placed on the publication of scientific research results, be they financial or prior acceptance by a couple of anonymous peers, the lower the value of that research endeavor with reduced dissemination of the findings. Open access journals have been a major step forward, but they don't have transparency in peer-review, the authors bear even higher publication costs and post-publication review is still problematic. Read More...
Now You See it, Now You Don't
12/01/12 15:21 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Jonathan Eisen at The Tree of Life blog asked New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and California Congressman Darrell Issa if they were serious about a new bill they've co-sponsored that would limit public access to NIH-funded research, and pointed out that both have received donations from the publisher Elsevier, which has come out against an open-access model of scientific publishing. S. Pelech speculates that if the Research Works Act goes forward in the US, and such attitudes are not embraced and adopted elsewhere, scientists in other countries as well as domestically in the US will become even less able to access the latest research findings from US labs. This could reduce the US influence in international biomedical research. Read More...