Scientists ask, peer review on fast track at what price?
A fast-track peer-review trial is in the news. A Nature Publishing Group (NPG) -owned journal's editorial board member has resigned in protest over a pilot project where researchers pay for faster peer...
View ArticleHow journals shape science and academia
No matter whether you study medicine or biology, law or art, neuroscience or history—there is one instrument that we all share: the journal. Learned journals play a pivotal role in science and...
View ArticleThe review of scientific studies in journals is subjective and the quality is...
Peer reviews in science, in which independent scientists who are experts on the subject assess the paper, is the current strategy for ensuring quality and control in scientific research and, therefore,...
View ArticleCrowdfunding could be a simple way to pay for science research
The outcome of science research benefits us all, but knowledge doesn't come cheap. Crowdfunding – promoted by government incentives – may be the best way to meet these costs and garner greater...
View ArticleTaming polluters: Ratings have spillover effects, leading to reduced toxic...
A new study by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business Assistant Professor Amanda Sharkey and University of Utah Assistant Professor Patricia Bromley found that environmental ratings have...
View ArticleVanity and predatory academic publishers are corrupting the pursuit of knowledge
Radio National's Background Briefing recently presented a grim academic tale of identity theft, shambolic conferences, exploitation, sham peer review and pseudoscience.
View ArticlePublisher retracts 64 articles for fake peer reviews
(Phys.org)—German based publishing company Springer has announced on its website that 64 articles published on ten of its journals are being retracted due to editorial staff finding evidence of fake...
View ArticlePublish or perish culture encourages scientists to cut corners
Last week there was another very public case of a journal article being retracted as a result of academic misconduct. This time it was in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), with...
View ArticleMen and women biased about studies of STEM gender bias – in opposite directions
In 2012, an experiment on gender bias shook the scientific community by showing that science faculty favor male college graduates over equally qualified women applying for lab manager positions. Though...
View ArticleCulture-shifting new initiative to make 'open science' a reality
Renowned microbiologist Louis Pasteur famously declared that "knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch that illuminates the world". It is perhaps ironic, then, that the fruits of scientific...
View ArticleThe ins and outs of peer review
If you are at all familiar with the operation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) you will know that, while the various authors are (unpaid) professionals of one sort or another...
View ArticleHow did that make it through peer review?
How did that make it through peer review? I've heard that asked many times over the years. It has been uttered by senior colleagues, grad students, amateurs, and just about everyone else, too. The...
View ArticleThe logic of journal embargoes—why we have to wait for scientific news
Rumors were flying through the blogosphere this winter: physicists at the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) may finally have directly detected gravitational waves,...
View ArticlePeer review system for awarding NIH grants is flawed, researchers say
The mechanism used by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to allocate government research funds to scientists whose grants receive its top scores works essentially no better than distributing those...
View ArticleNASA response to recent paper on NEOWISE asteroid size results
A paper posted Sunday by Nathan Myhrvold to ArXiv.org and described in an article by reporter Ken Chang in the May 23 New York Times discusses interpretations of data on asteroids from NASA's NEOWISE...
View ArticlePersonal beliefs versus scientific innovation: getting past a flat Earth...
The history of science is also a history of people resisting new discoveries that conflict with conventional wisdom.
View ArticleOver two thirds of researchers who've never peer reviewed would like to, new...
Published today is Peer review: a global view, bringing together primary research on researchers' motivations behind publishing in peer reviewed journals and in undertaking peer review, and their...
View ArticleBetween science's secretive, elitist past and open, accessible future
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their...
View ArticlePeer review is in crisis, but should be fixed, not abolished
This year three Nobel Prize-winning biologists broke with tradition and published their research directly on the internet as so-called preprints. Their motivation? Saving time.
View ArticleTeaching excellence framework risks 'driving a wedge' between teaching and...
The Physiological Society has released a report following a series of high profile roundtable sessions with senior politicians and academics. The report makes recommendations to the Government on the...
View ArticleTo Mars in 70 days: Expert discusses NASA's study of paradoxical EM...
After months of speculation and rumor, NASA has finally released its long-awaited research paper on the controversial EM Drive propulsion system. The paper was recently published in the American...
View ArticleFrom public outreach to peer review, scientists find value in social media
Social media has erased many of the boundaries between leaders and the people they represent, between experts and the lay public, between scientists and nonscientists. It has enabled people to...
View ArticleWho will keep predatory science journals at bay now that Jeffrey Beall's blog...
For aficionados of bad science, the blog of University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall was essential reading. Beall's blog charted the murky world of predatory and vanity academic publishers, many...
View ArticleNew study highlights need to increase female peer reviewers
Publishers of scholarly journals should take additional steps to get more women to serve as peer reviewers of manuscripts, according to a new analysis by the American Geophysical Union showing women...
View ArticleInefficient scientific peer review process takes 4 months on average
Checking the research of colleagues is one of the most important pillars of academic practice. However, this so-called peer review has several weak points. Academics often complain about how long it...
View ArticleStudy examines gender discrimination in science
Gender discrimination can be found in the most unexpected fields. An international team, involving Demian Battaglia, a CNRS researcher at the Institut de neurosciences des systèmes, as well as...
View ArticleIntelligent crowd reviewing of scientific papers tested
(Phys.org)—Online chemistry journal Synlett, which is published by Thieme, has tested the idea of intelligent crowd reviewing of scientific papers. The project was the brainchild of Benjamin List, a...
View ArticleBringing a 'trust but verify' model to journal peer review
Academic journals are increasingly asking authors to use transparent reporting practices to "trust, but verify" that outcomes are not being reported in a biased way and to enable other researchers to...
View ArticleTransparency in peer review
In 1832, the Royal Society moved from using committee minutes to written peer review reports for determining what was published in Philosophical Transactions. This was conveyed by Frederick Augustus,...
View ArticleChance discovery of forgotten 1960s 'preprint' experiment
For years, scientists have complained that it can take months or even years for a scientific discovery to be published, because of the slowness of peer review. To cut through this problem, researchers...
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