For past and future authors of Nature Publishing Group Journals
When the community is overburdened by peer review, it's everybody's problem. As of today, Nature Neuroscience has become part of the solution by joining the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium, a flexible system that allows voluntary participation by authors, referees and editors. Here are more details, from our April editorial:
Continue reading "NN Joins Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium" »
Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist Linda Buck has retracted a 2001 Nature paper. In the retraction in this week's Nature, the authors report difficulty replicating the data and 'inconsistencies' between the original data and figures and data printed in the paper. Buck told Nature reporter Heidi Ledford that the figures and data in question were contributed by the first author, Zhihua Zou, who was unavailable for comment.
This is the highest profile retraction that I can recall in neuroscience, but so far, there has been little fallout. Perhaps that's because the original findings were notable only in the neuroscience community rather than in the general public. Regardless, it indicates that neuroscience and its well known labs are not immune from fraudulent data. Although I admire Buck's swift and direct action, it concerns me that the first author has been assigned the lion's share of the blame. This seems like a familiar refrain, and I find it troubling.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University voted Tuesday to adopt an open-access policy, providing a free repository for finished papers, according to a recent press release. This move will allow for greater dissemination of scholarly work conducted at Harvard, says Stuart Shieber, a professor at FAS. Shieber states that a combination of a restrictive publishing system and the “astronomical” cost of journals have led the Harvard professors to support such a venture. An official description of the proposal that was actually discussed by the FAS on Tuesday is here.
As my colleague from Nature Precedings, Hilary Spencer, points out in a recent Nature Network forum, this entire policy is very vague with regards to what is meant by the scholarly article or the "final version." Is that the final, journal-produced PDF? The peer-reviewed, unpublished, non-copy-edited version? The non-peer-reviewed pre-print? According to an analysis written up on TheScientist.com, this mandate would require that published articles be submitted. However, go back and re-read the original proposal and tell me where it says that explicitly.
Continue reading "Harvard open-access policy – can you please be more specific?" »
Answers in Genesis, a self-described Christianity-defending ministry dedicated to enabling Christians to defend their faith and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively, recently launched a new publication, Answers Research Journal. Their mission:
Addressing the need to disseminate the vast fields of research conducted by creationist experts in theology, history, archaeology, anthropology, biology, geology, astronomy, and other disciplines of science, Answers Research Journal will provide scientists and students the results of cutting-edge research that demonstrates the validity of the young-earth model, the global Flood, the non-evolutionary origin of “created kinds,” and other evidences that are consistent with the biblical account of origins.
As their parental organization teaches, "facts" don't speak for themselves, but must be interpreted. All I can say is..........Wow.
Continue reading "CALL FOR CREATIONIST PAPERS: at the Answers Research Journal" »
A new policy in the Journal of Neuroscience demonstrates the current push towards open access publication. Researchers can pay to have their article freely available immediately upon publication, starting with all articles submitted as of January 1, 2008. It is interesting, because J Neurosci words the new policy a bit like an experiment, essentially telling the authors and funding agencies to put their money where their mouth is. If they want open access, as many are calling for, they can help support it. Hopefully we can return to this policy in 6 months or so to see how many authors took this option, and who funded those choosing to "pay for play."
Since the recent fall-out of the recent NY Times OP-Ed piece discussing the use of fMRI to predict the inclinations and feelings of swing voters is still fresh in our minds, I wanted to simply provide the link to a recent PLoS ONE paper that touches on the general concept of the media reporting on science.
A tangent related to the primate cloning paper has understandably received less attention, but deserves its own thread. In the same issue of Nature containing that paper, an accompanying editorial described how Nature, for the first time, implemented a relatively new policy by seeking the independent confirmation of this particular "high-risk" finding (or "strong claim") during the review process.
Continue reading "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" »
Discussion is heating up regarding a new proposal that could change the face of peer review in neuroscience. At the PubMed Plus leadership conference this past June, sponsored by the Society for Neuroscience, the creation of a Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium was proposed.
This is an entry that should have been written back in June, a time that pre-dates my involvement with Action Potential! Back then, nature.com incorporated and launched a new free service called Scintilla that collects data from hundreds of news outlets, scientific blogs, journals and databases and then makes it easy for the user to organize, share and discover exactly the type of information in which he or she is interested.
Scintilla incorporates interesting features from several different Web 2.0 technologies including The Hype Machine (aggregation), Google Reader (checking selected sources), last.fm (recommendation engine based on other users’ activities), and del.icio.us (social network based around content). It is pretty slick and easy to use. For the content producers, here is a statement from NPG. They even have an interesting solution for science bloggers concerned about losing advertising revenue to those reading through this service.
Give it a try and tell me what you think.
If one comments on the merits or an aspect of a manuscript in a public forum, but nobody ever reads it, does your opinion exist? That is the question I asked myself today after seeing that Neuron has added a feature to its website designed to provide the readers of selected papers the opportunity to comment on the findings. They say that this was in response to community feedback. I don’t doubt that such feedback exists, as I have heard similar things in my travels, but at this point in scientific publishing (at least in neuroscience), it seems that the idea may still be well ahead of its time.
Neuron’s forum is not the first for this sort of thing, as PLoS and PLoS ONE have had such an entity from their respective beginnings. Now, admittedly, I have not done a careful analysis of how many articles can actually boast even one comment made by the public, but I have made it a habit to always click on that little link imploring me to read comments made by my colleagues whenever I navigate over to a paper that has such a feature. I have seen very few postings, and those that I have seen (on PLoS ONE in my case), were actually posted by the authors themselves.
I am enthusiastic about the idea of a place for the community to provide feedback on publications, as such forums give a voice to anyone willing to speak their mind. This is unlike the website Faculty of 1000, in which only selected scientists are invited and required to provide opinions about the work of their colleagues.
But it seems that either too few are confident enough to make any statements (good or bad) on the record regarding a paper, in case their opinion ends up being short-sighted, or too few care enough to spend the time required to construct a succinct, insightful comment that is unlikely to yield them any benefits. And, to return to my question at the beginning, for those few that dare to comment, is anybody reading these opinions?
Neuron is taking the right approach and has commissioned top scientists to “get the ball rolling” and make comments on the featured manuscripts, but after that initial windfall subsides, we will see how many more postings are made. Let’s just give it some more time to sink in. With everyone beginning to use the web more and more for almost everything, I’m sure that this initial drought of forum comments will give way to a more robust dialogue, making public opinion forums a fundamental part of scientific research participation.
The physics community already has theirs. Now biology has its own site dedicated to the informal discussion of unpublished results. A new site launched this week, Nature Precedings, allows scientists to upload unpublished manuscripts while they are under consideration at a journal, perhaps inciting conversation and feedback regarding the work even before the article is accepted. In this day and age of caution and paranoia surrounding results (go to any scientific meeting these days and count the number of presentations that focus on published results vs. those that highlight unpublished ones), how do you think this will impact the neuroscience and publishing communities?
I see a definite place for this type of resource, providing a repository of additional data and user comments regarding techniques and discoveries, as a complement to the volumes of published papers that have undergone reviewer-mandated quality-control measures. But change comes slowly, especially when change involves freely releasing one's precious data that have taken years to amass. I am skeptical as to how quickly this concept will integrate into the world of neuroscience. With the ease at which data can be anonymously reproduced and subsequently submitted, I feel that many neuroscientists will be cautious about what data they are willing to let go for free.
However, as a counter, this type of system works well for the physics and mathematics community (plenty of discussion fodder here)...
This is an experiment that should be interesting regardless of its outcome, my favorite kind.