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Newly Released AI Software Writes Papers for You
This week, we received a press release that caught our attention: A company is releasing software it claims will write manuscripts using researchers’ data.
The Appropriation of GitHub for Curation
We describe curation projects as a new category of GitHub project that collects, evaluates, and preserves resources for software developers.
"Who owns Digital Science" – That is the Question…
Digital Science continued independence is the best way to have the biggest impact in supporting research, researchers, publishers, funders and research institutions around the world.
17 Researchers Resign in Protest from Editorial Board at Nature Journal
More than a dozen members of the editorial board at Scientific Reports have resigned after the journal decided not to retract a 2016 paper that a researcher claims plagiarized his work. As of this morning, 19 people — mostly researchers based at Johns Hopkins — had stepped down from the board.
Science Is Broken
Perverse incentives and the misuse of quantitative metrics have undermined the integrity of scientific research.
7 Major Experiments That Still Haven’t Found What They’re Looking For
Nature seems to have a regular penchant for mocking scientists’ hopes and expectations.
Trends in Open Access Book Publishing
A survey on open access books, revealed that of the 99 authors, 55.5% self-archived their chapters.
Making Medicine, Not Money: How One U of T Researcher's Startup Is Rethinking Big Pharma's Business Model
Making Medicine, Not Money: How One U of T Researcher's Startup Is Rethinking Big Pharma's Business Model
The latest medical innovation to spring from Aled Edwards’s University of Toronto lab isn’t a new protein structure or potential drug target – it’s a business model.
Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability
Data from several lines of evidence suggest that the methodological quality of scientific experiments does not increase with increasing rank of the journal.
The Running Costs of eLife 2.0
Paul Shannon, Head of Technology, looks at the costs of running eLife’s own continuous publication platform four months after the launch of eLife 2.0.
The Fractured Logic of Blinded Peer Review in Journals
The case for “blinding” to make journal peer review fair seems less and less plausible to me for the long run. It even seems antithetical to ultimately reducing the problems it’s a bandaid solution for.
Forces of Nature
Recognize women who changed science with this free collection of print-at-home posters.
Academics and Copyright Ownership: Ignorant, Confused or Misled?
Elizabeth Gadd takes a look at the contradictions between scholarly culture and copyright culture, and the cognitive dissonance created.
Nightmares in the Lab: Chilling Tales for This Halloween
Have you ever crossed international borders with protein crystals in a big Styrofoam hand luggage, set your hair on fire, or forgotten to use the extractor and nearly gassed your co-workers?
It’s Time to Do Something About Predatory Publishers
Sure, it’s happened to all of us — the invitation to be keynote speaker at a conference you’ve never heard of or an invitation to sit on an editorial board for a journal with a name you don’t recognize.
Learning Networking by Reproducing Research Results
Students taking Stanford’s Advanced Topics in Networking class have to select a networking research paper and reproduce a result from it as part of a three-week pair project.
Scholia: Wikidata Scholarly Profile
Scholarly profile pages constructed from queries to information in Wikidata.
PREreview: A Preprint Journal Club
Encouraging researchers to post their outputs as preprints.
You Can Download Hawking's PhD For Free, but It Took 50 Years To Make It Happen
On the slow but steady rise of Open Access.
How Wikimedia Helped Authors Make over 3000 Articles Green Open Access
Michele Marchetto of Wikimedia Italia shares the story of how they helped authors to make their open access articles more widely available.
How Does Blogging Work as a Teaching Concept?
The opportunities and experiences of blogging as part of teaching.
Trashing Science in Government Grants Isn’t Normal
The Case of the EPA, John Konkus, and Climate Change.
Peer Review's Give-and-Take
Maybe there isn't a peer-review 'crisis,' at least in terms of quantity.
Authorship Revised: Alternatives to Traditional Authorship
The author line provides no adequate information on the qualitative contribution of the single persons listed.
Who Owns Digital Science?
In analyzing the marketplace of scholarly publishers and scientific workflow providers, a key strategic question is: Who owns Digital Science?
How A Data Visualization Of Sperm Led To A Scientific Breakthrough
Two scientists set out to animate how sperm moves. They ended up making a major discovery.
Transforming Research, in the Face of Uncertainty, Scarcity, and Bias
Last week's Transforming Research conference in Baltimore, MD, gathered a range of speakers across the academic and professional spectrum.