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A spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz is angering publishers all over again
Meet accused hacker and copyright infringer Alexandra Elbakyan.
Open Science
Authors have, in general, a positive view on open access, but other factors are more important in choosing a place of publication for an academic article.
Fixed term and permanent: my two academic lives
Rejection hurts more when you don't have a long-term contract to fall back on, says Helen Lees.
Lessons from the startup world
Professor Matthew Wallenstein wants to bring what he has learned as an entrepreneur to his colleagues in academia.
Switzerland’s forgotten ‘Leonardo da Vinci’
For 16th century zoologists, it was like Google's arrival. Rather than punch a keyboard, they could thumb over Conrad Gessner’s sensational work.
Watch Albert Einstein jumpkick Isaac Newton in Science Kombat
A tribute to an old video game and to the greatest scientists in history.
Studying the science of science
Some scientists are taking it upon themselves to go beyond their core research areas to study where the scientific system can go wrong.
Universities Are Becoming Billion-Dollar Hedge Funds With Schools Attached
Have you heard the latest wisecrack about Harvard? People are calling it a hedge fund with a university attached.
A Cambridge professor on how to stop being so easily manipulated by misleading statistics
A Cambridge professor on how to stop being so easily manipulated by misleading statistics
On the many ways to say the same thing.
The Downside of Scale for Journal Publishers: Quality Control and Filtration
Scale can be achieved by broadly outsourcing the editorial process. Does this lead to a loss in quality control, and is this acceptable?
Academic Publishing is a Goddamned Exploitative Farce — Age of Awareness
Peer review and criticism is an essential part of academic discourse, and it is why journal articles are of such high quality and rigor. But you don’t get paid for it.
Failure Is Moving Science Forward
The replication crisis is a sign that science is working.
International Conference on Science 2.0
Putting Science 2.0 and Open Science into practice
"Is There a Future for In-Depth Science Journalism?"
Video, podcast and summary.
From Little Science to Big Science
The number of researchers doubles every ten to fifteen years. In his manuscript, Gottfried Schatz highlights the problems which growth creates for science. He explains the difference between knowledge and science and the reason why less knowledge and more science should be taught in our kindergartens, schools and universities.
Weaving the Internet of Data
High level European policy meeting on funding research data to support open innovation, 6 April 2016, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
On pastrami and the business of PLOS
Last week my friend Andy Kern (a population geneticist at Rutgers) went on a bit of a bender on Twitter prompted by his discovery of PLOS’s IRS Form 990 – the annual required financial filing of non-profit corporations in the United States.
Announcing the ORCID GERMANY project
We're delighted to announce a new project - ORCID DE - launched recently to foster and support ORCID adoption in Germany.
The Signal and the Noise
Once again, reproducibility is in the news. Most recently we hear that irreproducibility is irreproducible and thus everything is actually fine...
The selfish scientist’s guide to preprint posting
Benefits and costs to the authors of posting preprints as a function of the time of posting.
Be part of the European Commission Expert Group on Open Science!
Be part of the European Commission Expert Group on Open Science! - Digital Economy & Society
Would the preprint movement revolutionize the life sciences for better or worse?
Many in the scientific community praise preprints as a means of overcoming the high costs and lengthy peer review process of elite journals, which some argue thwart progress.
Many scientific studies you read about are hinged on the wrong metric
The problem with p-values.
Collaboration with IBM Watson Supports the Value Add of Open Access | The Official PLOS Blog
Collaboration with IBM Watson Supports the Value Add of Open Access | The Official PLOS Blog
In this massively data rich world, the equilibrium between information and knowledge has increasingly shifted from knowledge toward information. Advanced text and data mining (TDM) is not yet ubiquitous and even if it were, not all content is structured enough to leverage TDM potential. In developing the supercomputer Watson with the ability to process, analyze and extract information from natural language such as PLOS article text, IBM is beginning to shift the equilibrium back to knowledge. Understanding Relationships PLOS and IBM Watson are collaborating to bring quality Open Access biomedical literature to healthcare entrepreneurs and innovators, and to do so in a way that provides full article content and context including PubMed citation information from the National Library of Medicine. The collaboration is “not just about PLOS or Open Access,” says PLOS Chief Technology Officer CJ Rayhill, “it’s about improved healthcare through immediate access to relevant clinical,