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Is the peer-review system broken?

Is the peer-review system broken?

A look at the PLoS ONE paper on a hand designed by “the Creator”

This renowned mathematician is bent on proving academic journals can cost nothing

This renowned mathematician is bent on proving academic journals can cost nothing

New startups like this one are trying to disrupt traditional academic publishing.

Paper that says human hand was 'designed by Creator' sparks concern

Paper that says human hand was 'designed by Creator' sparks concern

Apparently creationist research prompts soul searching over process of editing and peer review.

Utilization of the Crowd for Medical Research

Utilization of the Crowd for Medical Research

Recently, some have begun to explore the utilization of the crowd for various purposes in medical research, including fundraising as well as crowdsourcing for intellectual analyses and insights.

Benefits and Implications of EU and Global Collaboration by UK Universities - Digital Science

Benefits and Implications of EU and Global Collaboration by UK Universities - Digital Science

A report on international academic collaboration across the UK research base and on the implications of EU and global collaboration for universities, research assessment and the economy.

Italian scientists protest ’serious neglect’ of research

Italian scientists protest ’serious neglect’ of research

Researchers gathered at Sapienza University of Rome last week to discuss the cuts in Italy's research budget.

Women under-represented in world’s science academies

Women under-represented in world’s science academies

Fewer than half of academies have policies in place to boost gender equality in membership.

A Bayesian Perspective on the Reproducibility Project: Psychology

A Bayesian Perspective on the Reproducibility Project: Psychology

We revisit the results of the recent Reproducibility Project: Psychology by the Open Science Collaboration. We compute Bayes factors—a quantity that can be used to express comparative evidence for an hypothesis but also for the null hypothesis—for a large subset ( N = 72) of the original papers and their corresponding replication attempts. In our computation, we take into account the likely scenario that publication bias had distorted the originally published results. Overall, 75% of studies gave qualitatively similar results in terms of the amount of evidence provided. However, the evidence was often weak (i.e., Bayes factor < 10). The majority of the studies (64%) did not provide strong evidence for either the null or the alternative hypothesis in either the original or the replication, and no replication attempts provided strong evidence in favor of the null. In all cases where the original paper provided strong evidence but the replication did not (15%), the sample size in the replication was smaller than the original. Where the replication provided strong evidence but the original did not (10%), the replication sample size was larger. We conclude that the apparent failure of the Reproducibility Project to replicate many target effects can be adequately explained by overestimation of effect sizes (or overestimation of evidence against the null hypothesis) due to small sample sizes and publication bias in the psychological literature. We further conclude that traditional sample sizes are insufficient and that a more widespread adoption of Bayesian methods is desirable.

Increasing access to the results of federally funded science

Increasing access to the results of federally funded science

Three years after the OSTP directive, policies to make data and publications resulting from federally funded research publicly accessible are becoming the norm.

The relative impact factor of glamour journals is 2.166

The relative impact factor of glamour journals is 2.166

Tweets of articles from Cell, Nature and Science journals all resulted in 2.166 more times clicks on the journal title rather than the anonymized links.