CWRU philosopher examines the hypothesis vs. exploratory funding divide
A Case Western Reserve University professor wondered why some types of research were more apt to secure federal grants, while others—especially exploratory science—often didn't.
View ArticleRewarding inventions and inventors
"Would Thomas Edison Receive Tenure?" This was the provocative title for a panel at the 2013 Annual Conference of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), an organization founded in 2010 in partnership...
View ArticlePeer review could reject breakthrough manuscripts, study shows
(Phys.org)—A study by Kyle Siler of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and colleagues has found that well respected peer reviewed journals have rejected manuscripts that could...
View ArticleJournal team adds reviewer pay to open-access model
A new open-access journal called Collabra plans to pay reviewers, and that's a twist in the world of scientific publishing. The reviewers get to exercise some options. They can keep the cash (generally...
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.
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