At first, I was underwhelmed by this one. But what it does is demonstrate the existence of stretch receptors in our system for the sensation of touch. Running an object (like a stick, or a pen) along the fine teeth of a comb, causes successive teeth of the comb to deflect laterally. There is no appreciable up-and-down component to the teeth’s movement, just the side-to-side movement.

Science is broken; let’s fix it. This has been my mantra for some years now, and today we are launching an initiative aimed squarely at one of science’s biggest problems. The problem is called publication bias or the file-drawer problem and it’s resulted in what some have called a replicability crisis.

I recently published the below chart to document the outrageous profit margins of scholarly publishers in the sciences. This post is to provide the sources for the numbers in the chart.

Scientists of all sorts increasingly recognize the existence of systemic problems in science, and that as a consequence of these problems we cannot trust the results we read in journal articles. One of the biggest problems is the file-drawer problem. Indeed, it is mostly as a consequence of the file-drawer problem that in many areas most published findings are false. Consider cancer preclinical bench research, just as an example.

Below are research presentations I’m involved in for Vision Sciences Society in May. If you’re attending VSS, don’t forget about the Publishing, Open Access, and Open Science satellite which will be Friday at 11am.

I’ve started blogging at PsychFileDrawer. One of our first posts is addressed to the Association for Research in Personality newsletter: Regarding your article entitled “Personality Psychology Has a Serious Problem (And so Do Many Other Areas of Psychology)”, We agree wholeheartedly with your diagnosis of a major problem in publication practices in psychology.

How many of these laws do you know? The top 15, listed below, are based on psychology journal articles 1900-1999, as calculated by Teigen (2002): LAW  (REFERENCE)

Most academics agree that most scientific articles should be freely available, but we’re stuck in a system where scientific articles still tend to be submitted to journals that one needs a subscription to read. One way we researchers perpetuate this system is by donating our labor to provide “peer review” of manuscripts that will require others to pay hefty subscription fees to read.

For Open Access Week 2011, which starts today, I’ve made a video, a draft pledging website, an inspirational website, am giving a talk, and co-written a group letter. This post is about the letter. As discussed in my last post, there’s a web-based course called “Responsible Conduct of Research” that many thousands of researchers are required to complete each year.

Bradley Voytek spotted a disturbing question in an official “Responsible Conduct of Research” training program: This defense of the status quo has no place in a “Responsible Conduct of Research” training program. It reads like the old guard self-interestedly maintaining the current system by foisting unjustified beliefs onto young researchers!

Academic publishing is stuck in an outmoded system. Most scientific research is paid for by government and non-profit university funds, but high-profit corporate publishers often control access to the results of the research. In this video, we showcased the absurdity of the situation and also pointed towards how to get ourselves un-stuck. There are significant costs associated with what journal publishers do, so we need publishers in some form.