The legal disputes following the withdrawal from the market of two drugs for the treatment of pain (the COX-2 inhibitors rofecoxib and valdecoxib) have led to another critical examination of the paper publishing process. I have written in February about the drug company Pfizer trying to obtain confidential peer review documents from the journals JAMA and NEJM. Courts in Chicago and Boston have denied such requests.
The new NIH Public Access policy started this past Monday. Fellow Nature Networker Graham Steel has summarized this week's reaction of the blogosphere. I would like to highlight some of the discussions we had here on Nature Network. Bob O'Hara wonders about the cost of publishing in Open Access: Show us the Money!. He argues that shifting the costs from reader to author can create problems.
I did a little experiment to figure out whether the full-text versions of my last 15 papers (published between 1997-2008) are available online. The result:3 papers available for everybody10 papers only available from within my institution (Journal subscription required)2 papers only available for purchase Interestingly, the papers in the two journals with the highest impact factor are both available as full-text.
Starting this week, papers submitted from NIH-funded research have to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication. But what is the current situation in Germany, especially mandatory Open Access?
Around Christmas, mandatory open access for NIH-funded research was signed into law: Starting April 7, the new NIH Public Access Policy implementing this law will take effect for most NIH grantees. The NIH is soliciting comments until May 1st for this new policy. Open Access and this new policy are complicated topics that simply can't be covered in a single blog post.
Erythropoietin is an effective drug to increase your number of red blood cells. It is primarily used in anemic patients with cancer and on dialysis, but it is also popular with athletes that want to (illegally) increase their endurance performance, most notably cyclists and cross country skiers.
Anna's recent post about her struggles with Pubmed searches reminded me that there is still a lot that could and should be done to improve the paper (or thesis) writing process.
Participation in a social network can have it's perks. Thanks to the O'Reilly Group on Facebook (that other social network), I received a review copy of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. But why would a scientist want to know how to write and edit articles on Wikipedia? Wikipedia has become a respectable source of information that rivals the more traditional encylopedias such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
A March 13 Nature News article (Six degrees of messaging) talks about a study on Microsoft Messenger chat users. Any random two Microsoft Messenger users (out of about 240 million) could be connected two each other via an average of 6 users that have chatted with each other. This study is just another confirmation of the six degrees of separation concept.
David Crotty, the Executive Editor from CSH Protocols, last month wrote a provocative blog post called Why Web 2.0 is failing in Biology. He did an informal poll among scientists and found that none of them read science blogs or use social networking sites for scientists.
