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.

Do you remember the RWA? It was a no-brainer already back then that the 40k that Elsevier spent was well-invested: for months, Open Access activists were busy derailing this legislation, leading a virtual standstill on all other fronts. now, just over two years later, two Republican representatives introduced the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology (FIRST) Act.

Talk about egg on face! Nature “the world’s best science” Magazine sets out to publish back-to-back papers on – of all topics – stem cell science. The same field that brought Science Magazine Who-Suk Hwang and Elsevier’s Cell Mitalipov’s ‘errors’. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

I can now announce the first closed beta testing phase of an RSS reader intended for scientists. So far, we have something like a Feedly clone with a few extras built in, such as collecting the most tweeted articles of the last 24h, some rudimentary ability to sort/filter either feeds or groups of feeds. It’s not a whole lot, yet, so keep your expectations low We’re just getting started.

tl;dr: So far, I can’t see any principal difference between our three kinds of intellectual output: software, data and texts.   I admit I’m somewhat surprised that there appears to be a need to write this post in 2014. After all, this is not really the dawn of the digital age any more.

In what area of scholarship are repeated replications of always the same experiment every time published and then received with surprise, only to immediately be completely ignored until the next study? Point in case from an area that ought to be relevant to almost every single scientist on the planet: research evaluation.

At this year’s Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behavior, I was invited to give the keynote presentation on the relationship between classical and operant conditioning. Using the slides below, I argued that Skinner already had identified a weakness in […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

“Standing on the shoulders of giants” is what scientists say to acknowledge the work they are building on. It is a statement of humility and mostly accompanied by citations to the primary literature preceding the current work. In today’s competitive scientific enterprise, however, such humility appears completely misplaced.

The recent call for a GlamMag boycott by Nobel laureate Randy Shekman made a lot of headlines, but will likely have no effect whatsoever. For one, the call for boycott isn’t even close in scale to “the cost of knowledge” boycott against Elsevier and even that drew less than 15,000 measly signatures, a drop in the bucket with 970,000 board members, reviewers and authors working for Elsevier largely for free.

The other day I was alerted to an interesting evaluation of international citation data. The author, Curt Rice, mentions a particular aspect of the data: The context here is that the “bottom” refers to scientific articles that aren’t cited, assuming that no citations mean low scientific quality of that article.

UPDATE : I’m still not completely sure I understood Churchland accurately, but there are comments suggesting I may just have completely misunderstood her replies to the interviewer. Read the interview and judge for yourself! I really like Patricia Churchland.