What Is the Problem for Which Interdisciplinarity Is the Solution?
The answer is what I call “epistemic rent-seeking,” namely, the tendency for disciplines to become increasingly proprietary in their relationship to organized inquiry.
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In effort to understand continuing racial disparities, NIH to test for bias in study sections
In effort to understand continuing racial disparities, NIH to test for bias in study sections
New data confirming lower success rates for African-Americans prompt pilot studies
Why Collaboration in Research Matters: An Interview with Mark Hahnel, Founder of figshare
Why Collaboration in Research Matters: An Interview with Mark Hahnel, Founder of figshare
We interviewed Mark Hahnel, founder of figshare to discuss Collections, a new, free resource developed by the figshare team, and how researchers can use this.
Science works best when it is open
The sharing of research results, the free circulation of knowledge, and transparency in methodology are key tenets to the scientific method.
The fool’s gold of Ph.D. employment data
Making proclamations about the scientific enterprise based on sparse employment and career data about junior scientists has become a common endeavor. But this approach is fundamentally flawed.
Senate Committee Passes $34B NIH Budget for Precision Medicine
A Senate subcommittee has passed a $34 billion budget for the NIH in 2017, which specifically allocates funds for advancing precision medicine research.
In praise of solitude in science
Solitude often holds negative connotations. Yet, solitude in science it is not necessarily a bad thing.
How should we treat science’s growing pains?
Jerome Ravetz has been one of the UK’s foremost philosophers of science for more than 50 years. Here, he reflects on the troubles facing contemporary science. He argues that the roots of science’s crisis have been ignored for too long. Quality control has failed to keep pace with the growth of science.
Lessons from researcher rehab
Common compliance situations can get good researchers into trouble, warn James M. DuBois and colleagues.
Scientists aren’t gods. They deserve the same scrutiny as anyone else
Experts preaching the ‘truth’ on healthy eating or cancer cures are not immune to the murky worlds of politics and commerce.
Gene editing can drive science to openness
The fast-moving field of gene-drive research provides an opportunity to rewrite the rules of the science, says Kevin Esvelt.
UK national negotiations with Elsevier: it seems we’re not messing around.
A confidential internal email has come into my hands, from Bristol University, regarding the UK’s national negotiations with Elsevier. I think it’s of general interest.
Lab Wars, a game of scientific sabotage
Two researchers today launch a game that captures this anarchic spirit. Board-game fans Caezar Al-Jassar, a postdoc at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and Kuly Heer, a clinical psychologist, have designed the card game Lab Wars to represent the scientific rat race, with extra sabotage.
Psychologists grow increasingly dependent on online research subjects
Psychologists grow increasingly dependent on online research subjects
Scientists make greater use of online workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk, but practice raises concerns
The Prevalence of Inappropriate Image Duplication in Biomedical Research Publications
The Prevalence of Inappropriate Image Duplication in Biomedical Research Publications
Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it?
Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it?
We paid for the research with taxes, and Internet sharing is easy. What's the hold-up?
Putting data management in the hands of researchers with Hivebench acquisition
Integration of lab notebook tool will help researchers enrich their data and make it more suitable for reuse
PrePubMed
PrePubMed indexes preprints from arXiv q-bio, PeerJ Preprints, Figshare, bioRxiv, and F1000Research.
University Research and the Fetishisation of Excellence
The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organisations, from art history to zoology. But what does “excellence” mean? Does it in fact mean anything at all? And is the pervasive narrative of excellence and competition a good thing?
Schrödinger’s panda
Fraud, bureaucracy and an obsession with quantity over quality still hold Chinese science back
Plan to synthesize human genome elicits mixed response
Some admire project's ambition; others say it hasn't justified its aims.
Let's talk about preprint servers
After ASAPbio, Cell Press CEO Emilie Marcus was left with many questions about preprint servers and her company's policy towards them.
A new complementary index for analyzing research performance
A researcher collaborating with many groups will normally have more papers (and thus higher citations and h-index) than a researcher spending all his/her time working alone or in a small group. While analyzing an author’s research merit, it is therefore not enough to consider only the collective impact of the published papers, it is also necessary to quantify his/her share in the impact. For this quantification, here I propose the I-index which is defined as an author’s percentage share in the total citations that his/her papers have attracted.
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