Two papers (this and this) and an editorial in the latest issue of Archives of Internal Medicine examine the cancer risks associated with the use of computed tomography (CT) examinations.1 Ionizing radiation increases the risk for developing cancer. There is direct evidence from atomic bomb survivors in Japan in 1945 and from nuclear accidents such as the one in Chernobyl in 1986.
Earlier this month I gave this talk in my department. It is basically a summary of two blog posts that I wrote in October during Open Access Week (Open Access Week: a researcher's perspective part I and part II), and I had given a similar talk in November in an Open Access workshop organized by the Helmholtz Association.
Nature Communications is a new journal that will launch in Spring 2010. The journal will publish papers in all areas of the physical, chemical and biological sciences and is open for submissions.
Last week the New England Journal of Medicine ( NEJM ) published a paper on selective outcome reporting in clinical trials (Vedula et al. 2009). The primary and secondary outcome(s) of a clinical trial could for example be survival in cancer patients or rate of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events in patients taking cholesterol-lowering drugs.
In September PLoS started to show usage data (downloads, citations, but also use of social bookmarking services and blog posts) for all their published papers (article-level metrics at PLoS: addition of usage data). PLoS is not the first publisher to do that, but certainly the largest to date.
PubMed Central was launched in February 2000 by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a free digital archive of journal articles. Just as PubMed, PubMed Central covers research in the life sciences, but not other areas of research, e.g. engineering, physical sciences or astronomy.
This week (October 19-23) is Open Access Week – a good opportunity to think and write about this topic. On Monday I wrote in a blog post: Open Access can be looked at from many different angles, including the researcher, the science library, the institution, the funding organization, the journal, the science journalist, and the general public. Most arguments for or against Open Access depend on that angle.
This week (October 19-23) is Open Access Week: The following video from SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing &
It was Anna Kushnir who started it all. Frustrated with the limitations of PubMed when finishing her PhD thesis, she wrote a blog post in March 2008 (I Am Not Yelling. Not Out Loud.) about her experience. The blog post created quite a stir in the blogosphere, especially among science librarians.
Blogging is a great way to report from a scientific conference. This could be done either with regular blog posts written in the evening or after the conference, and/or live-blogging using tools such as Friendfeed or Twitter.
The final guest post by Alex Knoll reporting from the German Genetics Society Meeting in Cologne. Session V Friday ended with two talks in session V, the first by Tony Hyman from the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. He looked at the ways that cells structure and organize their cytoplasm by comparison with non-biological systems.