Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as Nature or Science . After all, in this competitive and highly specialized days, where a scientist is published all too often is more important than what they have published.

Last week, Elizabeth Pennisi asked me to comment on the recent paper from Schreiweis et al. entitled “Humanized FoxP2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural performance”. Since I don’t know how much, if anything, of my answers to her questions will end up in her article, I thought I might expand my answer into a post about this very interesting work.

This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in publisher profits, the remaining difference between legacy and SciELO costs amount to US$3160 per article.

Today, our most recent paper got published, before traditional peer-review, at F1000 Research . The research is about how nominally identical fly stocks can behave completely differently even if tested by the same person in the same lab in the same test.

This is the story behind our work on the function of the FoxP gene in the fruit fly Drosophila (more background info). As so many good things, it started with beer. Troy Zars and I were having a beer on one of the ICN evenings, I think it was in Vancouver in 2007. I had recently learned about the conserved role of FoxP2 in songbirds, out of one of the labs in Berlin, where I was based at the time.

See this post with the associated press releases on brembs.net. The Forkhead Box P2 (FOXP2) gene is well-known for its involvement in language disorders. We have discovered that a relative of this gene in fruit flies, dFoxP, is necessary for […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

The data clearly show that publications in Cell, Nature or Science (CNS for short), on average, cannot be distinguished from other publications, be it by methodology, reproducibility or other measures of quality. Even their citation advantage, while statistically significant, is […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

There is an interesting study out in the journal PNAS: “Evaluating big deal journal bundles”. The study details the disparity in negotiation skills between different US institutions when haggling with publishers about subscription pricing.

Apparently, the outrage of science denialists over their exposure in a recent psychological paper shows no signs of abating. It was denialists’ complaints and legal threats of libel/defamation suits that started the investigation of the paper and also in the comments to my post announcing my resignation as editor for Frontiers , the denialists complained that their public blog comments were used in a scientific paper.

Thinking more generally about the “Recursive Fury” debacle, something struck me as somewhat of an eye opener: the lack of support for the authors by Frontiers and the demonstrative support by their institution, UWA (posting the retracted article). Even though this might be the first time a scholarly journal caved in to legal pressure from anti-science groups, it should perhaps come as no surprise.

Last month, I was alerted to an outrageous act of a scientific journal caving in to pressure from delusionals demanding the science about their publicly displayed delusions be hidden from the world: the NPG-owned publisher Frontiers retracted a scientific article, with which they could not find anything wrong: The article Essentially, this puts large sections of science at risk.