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N – Who does peer review?25 September 2008Ai Lin Chun, associate editor for Nature Nanotechnology, was asked how researchers become peer reviewers, in the Nature Network forum. She looks for referees with a good publication record. Most are established academics, but younger researchers recommended by their professors who do a good job might be asked again. “I enjoy referees who provide a […]
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N – Editing magazine indexed25 September 2008A complete index to Editing Matters, the magazine of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, and its predecessors CopyRight and SFEP Newsletter has been compiled by Christopher Phipps of the Society of Indexers. The index is online at www.sfep.org.uk/pub/mag/index/indexhome.asp.
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N – Director and students in journal row25 September 2008The director of the German Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics has claimed that the journal Human Brain Mapping acted incorrectly when it published data taken without permission by research students, Nature reports (2008;454:6-7). He says that the students’ interpretation is incorrect, that the paper could mislead the field, and that the journal has denied […]
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N – Publishers pay to deposit research25 September 2008Publishers, such as Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Oxford Journals, are meeting the costs of depositing research in open access repositories to help scientists meet the requirements of research funders. The US National Institutes of Health, for example, requires research that it funds to be made freely available no later than a year after publication. […]
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N – Calling writers on diabetes25 September 2008The Alliance for European Diabetes Research (www.euradia.org) wishes to draw attention of the media and freelance journalists to its next press conference, near Frankfurt on 26 November. In 2008 the alliance began a two year survey to identify gaps and highlight strengths to devise a strategy for diabetes research in Europe (DIAMAP, www.diamap.eu). The alliance […]
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N – The face of PubMed24 September 2008The Pubmed Faceoff site (www.postgenomic.com/faces) displays PubMed results using as a set of human faces, with features determined by the age, citation count, and journal impact factor associated with each paper. You can tell at a glance which papers are new, exciting, and high impact and which are languishing, uncited, and unread. The visualisation uses […]
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N – Get your scientific integrity calendar24 September 2008Justin Bilicki won this year’s Science Idol competition, an cartoon contest with the theme of scientific integrity. Twelve of the finalists’ cartoons are available as a 2009 calendar, available from the US Union of Concerned Scientists’ website. The union says, “Recent investigations and surveys show that political interference in science has harmed the ability of […]
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N – Dictionary threatens to drop words24 September 2008Collins is threatening to drop obscure words from its English dictionary this year because it can’t fit them all in. But its ruthlessness is tempered with a touch of clemency—and it’s great public relations: it will save any of the words that appear six times in the company’s database of recent word usage in the […]
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N – Researchers embrace journalists24 September 2008More than half of researchers questioned rated their contact with journalists as mostly good, and four out of 10 found media coverage beneficial to their career, a survey reported in Science has found (2008;321:204-5). More than two thirds of researchers had contact with the media during a period of three years, and researchers in Germany, […]
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N – On the Nature of PLoS24 September 2008A story in Nature about the finances of open access journal publisher the Public Library of Science (PLoS) has attracted criticism in the blogosphere. Nature Publishing Group publishes traditional subscription journals, and its news piece has been criticised for lacking objectivity. Declan Butler’s story began, “PLoS, the poster child of the open access publishing movement, […]
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N – Nature looks at big data24 September 2008Marking the 10th anniversary of Google, the 4 September issue of Nature focused on big data sets: “As an increasing number of research disciplines are discovering, the vast amounts of data are presenting fresh challenges that urgently need to be addressed.” Articles in the issue look at managing petabytes of data, analysis of complex datasets, […]
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N – “With credit comes responsibility”24 September 2008The Lancet has censured a lead author who claimed honorary authorship as a reason for not overseeing a paper that the journal had to retract. The author’s university has accepted this defence even though the author signed a statement before publication confirming substantial intellectual contribution. “Using gift authorship as an excuse for not taking responsibility […]
