This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors and communicators.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
Bibliometrics is big business at the moment, writes Brian Derby. So why hasn’t he optimized his strategy for playing the citation game by, for example, citing himself more often? Read his post to find out, and also discover his take on the algorithm used by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences research council (EPSRC) to determine whether it will fund a grant proposal, which he says takes “the number of times you have applied for funding over the past 2 years as PI and computes your success rate (% of funded applications). If this is below 25% then you are at risk. If, in addition to this, you have had 3 or more applications in the bottom half of the ranked list of proposals then you are deemed to be a danger to the EPSRC and you are excluded from applying for grants for 12 months.”
Whether or not obscure and incomprehensible, the EPSRC method of “peer review” is certainly confidential ; Stephen Curry discusses the opposite extreme in the case of journals – the pros and cons of the peer-reviewers’ comments and authors’ response being published alongside the final version of the paper. Stephen describes a particular case of a paper in the journal Biology Direct which reports errors in a previous paper published elsewhere. Fascinating in itself, but what impresses Stephen is the Biology Direct practice of publishing peer-review reports with the paper, so that the arguments leading up to eventual publication can be followed by readers. Eye-opening indeed, and for those interested in the topic, there are some useful links and remarks in the comments to the post.
Raf Aerts describes another case “where the peer-review process obviously failed”. He enumerates a list of specific technical problems about the paper, which is published in “a good journal” to which Raf would recommend colleagues to submit. So what went wrong?
It is increasingly hard for businesses at this time of global financial crisis. In the case of science publishing, how are journals coping? Noah Gray reports an abrupt change of pricing model for JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments. This decision caused a predictable storm on the Internet, not least because of confusion over the journal’s decision and how it affects authors and readers. Moishe Pritsker of JoVE provides clarification in an online comment to Noah’s post.
Ending this week’s report on a more upbeat note, Elizabeth Moritz is the latest blogger at Nature Network, with PhD to be. She writes in her first post: “I am a Microbiology PhD student in, what I hope, is my final year before heading to a postdoc. In this blog I plan to chronicle my experiences in completing a PhD and securing a postdoc in the life sciences. There are sure to be many ups and downs and probably some funny stories too.” Welcome, Elizabeth.
Further science-related blog reading and online discussion can be enjoyed at:
Nature.com’s science blogs index and tracker
Nature Network’s many blogs and forums