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N – Editorial boards lack women29 April 2008Women made up only a fifth (21%) of the editorial boards in 2005, although they were far worse represented in 1970, with just 1% of positions, a 35 year study of 16 prominent biomedical journals has shown (Arch Intern Med 2008;168:547-8). Seven per cent of the journals’ chief editors have been women, but having a […]
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N – Spanish portal opens access29 April 2008A national portal for Spanish open access scientific publications, Recolecta (www.recolecta.net), has been launched. The project is a collaboration between the Spanish network of libraries REBIUN and the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) to provide a national search service for open access publishing in science. Recolecta seeks to stimulate open access publishing in […]
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N – Publishers confirm authors’ rights29 April 2008Advocating authors to add copyright postscripts to journal publishing agreements is a call for needless bureaucracy, said the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers in March. The publishers’ group has issued a statement, which, it says, clarifies authors’ rights: “Standard journal agreements typically allow authors to use their published paper . . . […]
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N – Web ability declines with age29 April 2008People’s ability to use websites declines between the ages of 35 and 60 by 0.8% a year, says the web usability specialist Jakob Nielsen. This is because they spend more time per page, and they visit more pages to find what they are looking for. This age group represents half of the population of the […]
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N – Students plagiarise plagiarism code29 April 2008Students at the University of Texas at San Antonio drafted a code to discourage plagiarism, but they took sections from Brigham Young University’s plagiarism code, which they found online, a Nature blog reports. They even copied the definition of plagiarism. Both codes say, “Inadvertent plagiarism involves the inappropriate, but non-deliberate, use of another’s words, ideas, […]
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N – Blog till you drop29 April 2008Two fatal heart attacks in the United States may have been a result of stress caused by excessive blogging, an article in the New York Times suggests. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, and mental health problems. Bloggers are “toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock internet […]
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29 April 2008Giustini D. Web 3.0 and medicine. BMJ 2007;335:1273-1274 doi: 10.1136/bmj.39428.494236.BE Medical librarians believe that it is necessary to build better mechanisms for information retrieval, due to the current bulk of unorganised information “searchable” but not easely “findable” in web 2.0. That is why we need web 3.0, the new web, called the semanticweb. Information retrieval […]
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N – Email damages productivity29 April 2008The three billion emails sent a day in the United Kingdom are “leaving us tired, frustrated and unproductive.” A third of office workers suffer “email stress. ” And dealing with pointless messages may cost UK business £39m a year. These are the conclusions of a BBC2 Money Programme in March called “Email is ruining my […]
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N – Le bloc replaces the blog29 April 2008The English words “blog,” “email,” and “podcast” have been banned by French government, to be replaced by the more French sounding “bloc,” “courriel,” and “diffusion pour baladeur.” The French ministry of culture is worried about the anglicisation of the French language and has listed French replacements for 500 English words that are commonly used in […]
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N – Peer reviews stay private29 April 2008The New England Journal of Medicine has been told by a federal magistrate that it does not have to hand over peer reviews to the drug company Pfizer. The company recently issued subpoenas to try to force journals to disclose confidential peer reviews and other materials relating to studies of its painkillers Celebrex (celecoxib) and […]
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N – Save the semicolon?29 April 2008France is debating the future of the semicolon, according to a Guardian blog. The “point virgule,” the writer François Cavanna is reported as saying, is “a parasite, a timid, fainthearted, insipid thing, denoting merely uncertainty, a lack of audacity, a fuzziness of thought.” But defendants cite Hugo, Flaubert, and Voltaire as writers for whom the […]
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N – Vigilante copy edits America29 April 2008An illustrated blog (www.jeffdeck.com/teal/blog) has been started to document errors in public signage and their correction by the Typo Eradication Advancement League, in a three month trip across the United States, reports Andrew Mueller in the Guardian. Armed with marker pens and correction fluid, Jeff Deck aims to correct as many typos in signs, posters, […]
