faculty of 1000

Post-publication peer review

On a new publishing model

Posted by rpg on 9 February, 2010

Twitter, what is it good for? Hunh.

There’s been rather an interesting couple of posts over at the Scholarly Kitchen, recently. What am I saying? They’re all interesting. Anyway, Kent Anderson says that blogs are for fogies and David Crotty talks about ‘talking’ vs ‘doing’. Elsewhere on Nature Network we’re re-visiting the meme of why do we blog anyway? (to which I’m not going to contribute, myself having decided to do rather than talk about). You can look up the links yourself if you can be bothered.

Anyway, in the middle of a rather long and involved conversation, Eva made a throwaway comment on David Crotty’s post. Then I thought it might be fun to see if I could write a scientific paper in 140 characters.

“Clned gene _cancer_. KO in Ms. Ms dead. Cure cancer.”

But why stop there? Here’s a challenge for you.

Your task is to re-write a scientific paper, a real, peer-reviewed and published one, in 140 characters. Twitter it with the hashtag #sci140 so we can track them (OK, so that’s 7 characters you’ve just lost but no one said it would be easy). You can do this as many times as you like, as many papers as you like, and it would be nice if they were your own, but they don’t have to be. I’ll see if I can get some f1000 swag for what I deem to be the best entry.

Go for it.
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Posted in Friday afternoon, Literature | Tagged: , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Worthless lie

Posted by rpg on 9 February, 2010

I’m on record as defending PR in the scientific sphere (and featured in Nature’s From the Blogosphere, so it must have touched a nerve somewhere). I maintain that we will continue to require good public relations, perhaps even more so with the looming spectre of swingeing cuts in publicly-funded science. (I’m a little less enamoured of paying PR managers at a research council double the average professorial salary, but that’s a story for another day.)

Although f1000 (obviously) isn’t associated with any particular institution or scientist, we do like to put out the occasional release covering interesting science that’s been picked up by the Faculty. This is an interesting exercise as a lot of newsworthy stories have usually already been released by the journal of the original article, or the author’s home press office, by the time our evaluations come in. But we do find a lot of important (or, let’s be honest, slightly quirky) work that hasn’t got much further than a couple of interested specialists, and we like to bring it to a wider audience. (Sometimes this attracts criticism from talentless hacks, but hey, it’s all good). Besides, if six month-old ‘news’ is good enough for the Beeb, it’s good enough for us.

Anyway, we’ve been reasonably successful in our forays into PR, getting quite a bit of attention from all sorts of places, including the national press. Some of our more popular topics have included cartilage repair, cocaine addiction and seasonal effects on multiple sclerosis (rather than deluge you with links, all our releases are archived at EurekAlert.) SP has made a glossy brochure of media coverage, which you can have a look at if ever you care to visit me in the shadow of the BT Tower.

Interestingly, the Royal Society of Chemistry has also been experimenting with PR. Brian Emsley recounts how ‘light’ news stories—such as the importance of adding soy sauce to your gravy— raise the profile of an organization (in this case the RSC), and basically prepare the ground for the ’serious’ stuff. Like ground bait, or artillery barrages to soften the enemy before sending in the infantry. We’re trying to do a similar thing to the RSC; raising our own profile and that of science more generally. It’s all part of the science communication bug I have, and a way of getting people in general more ‘comfortable’ with the scientific process in general (as well as getting our content out to professionals—practice nurses perhaps—who might not have seen it).

So, we’re still experimenting, and we’ll probably get some things wrong, and hopefully we’ll get other things right, but I’d really like to know what you think about PR and the direction we should be taking it.

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Posted in Communication, Journalism, Press Releases, Science | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

On the run-04Feb10

Posted by rpg on 5 February, 2010

What was that? I think it was the sound of a week flashing past.

I keep saying things like “We’ve got a brand new website… but you can’t see it yet.” This must be quite frustrating. Truth is, the dev team are working very hard (and specs have changed and changed again—but let’s not go there now) and a lot of stuff has to come together all at once. There’s actually no point showing you what we have at the moment because it’d all “ignore that, we’re changing it” and “the design is going to be different than this” and “oh, yeah, we know about that bug”.

But I can tell you that the new search is very funky and we all like it, and that the new design is very spiffy (hang on, I did that already). On Monday we’re going to work out once and for all what we can deliver and work to that. So far, the ‘definite’ list contains the new design (both what it looks like and functionally), the improved search, comments on evaluated articles and RSS. There are a heap of other behind-the-scenes changes too. Then after we go live we can add on all the other things that are on the backlog, so you will see new things appear as we keep building and tweaking and rolling out new features.

I spent some more time on our journal rankings this week. The critical thing appears to be the timing: as I’ve said before, most of our evaluations are published quite quickly after the original article appears. We get around 90% of all evaluations within about three months of the publication date. So what we want to do, for yearly journal league tables, is capture as many as possible while making our stats as up-to-date and relevant as possible. The issue is that if we took April, say, as the cut-off for the previous year we’d end up giving the journals that publish more stuff towards the beginning of the year an unfair advantage. So we’re going to implement a rolling cut-off, with a provisional ‘current’ ranking and publish the official f1000 stats somewhere around May each year, which gives us four months to collect evaluations for each original article.

However, the big news this week is that we welcomed Sarah Greene into the office. This is part of the move to bring f1000 and The Scientist closer together: f1000 is going to start seeding The Scientist’s scientific content, and use it to help build a community around the service.

As part of this, my own role is changing. I’m going to move away from web development (although I’ll still have input into the design and user experience), which will free me up to be more editorial/journalistic. I’ll still be running the Twitter feed and Facebook page and wittering about things that catch my eye in f1000 (perhaps even more so). There’ll also be the ’special projects’, such as the rankings, federated comments and various research collaborations. I guess Eva will still be wanting me to make logos for her too.

And finally

The late pick-up of the disenchantment of a small number of researchers with the peer review process is still making waves this week. Cameron Neylon gives his own take on the matter at his blog. I’m not at all sure that I agree with his analysis, having had my own manuscripts subject to both what I might call ‘good’ and ‘bad’ review. I think that too many people view peer review as a stamp on the ‘rightness’ of the paper, rather than a technical check that the experiments and controls are done correctly and that the literature has been read.

Cameron has also been having a go at Nature Communications. The argument hinges on the Creative Commons licences they ask authors to choose. You can sign up and join the conversation at Nature Network.

With that, have a great weekend. And sorry, no cytoskeletal porn this week. Maybe next time.

Richard

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I’m a believer

Posted by rpg on 3 February, 2010

I took my daughters round the new Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum last year. Because we happen to be friends, I managed to persuade the incomparable Karen James, of The Beagle Project fame, to show us behind the scenes.

Calamari at the NHM After that I took the girls into the ‘Cocoon‘, a huge butterfly egg-type structure that contains 20 million or more specimens, with superbly-done exhibits and displays. The Cocoon lets visitors see into the workings of the Museum; quite literally, because one side of the egg cuts away into the research labs (where Karen works). As we walked around we came across a video display of Karen herself, talking about the process of publishing science, how you write and revise a manuscript and send it off to the dreaded ‘peer review’.

Karen did a splendid job explaining the process: how other scientists in your field look at your work and—in an ideal world—check that you’ve done the work right and that you’ve cited all the relevant literature; that the manuscript is sound. She also conveyed, far too convincingly, the heartbreak of having a treasured manuscript rejected!

The process of science for the last three hundred and more years is based on peer review. Other scientists check your work and say yup, that looks OK or no, you need to do this other experiment or read these papers. Unfortunately some reviewers (and I stress, these people are peers, that is they are your equals; not some shadowy cabal curating or judging Science from on high) do seem to hold personal grudges, or have strange agendas, or simply not be very good. (And yes, sometimes your own work is pants and should be rejected. Deal with it.)

This leads to people making wide-ranging and inflammatory statements such as “peer review is broken.” Some of them even write letters about it (as reported by the Beeb, six months later). This leads to calls for making the peer review process ‘open‘; i.e. publishing the correspondence between the reviewers and the editors, and maybe even removing the anonymity part.

We’ve been here before (haven’t we always?):

All editors have seen curt, abusive, destructive reviews and assumed that the reviewer would not have written in that way if he or she were identifiable. Openness also links accountability with credit. One important defect of closed review is that reviewers don’t receive academic credit. Finally, openness should eliminate some of the worst abuses of peer review, where reviewersunder the cloak of anonymitysteal ideas or procrastinate

BMJ, 1999

but it’s not clear to me, and indeed the results of those BMJ studies tend to bear me out, whether this is really a problem, or whether the perception is far worse than the reality. And I’ve had a paper that took nearly two years to get published.

I remain to be convinced that peer review is broken. The idea of some sort of clique quashing acceptance of manuscripts isn’t that far-fetched, pace Philip Campbell. Strong editors will get round it, but in some fields it’s quite possible for one or two individuals to make it really difficult to get anything published. This tends to be self-limiting though: in the extreme case, the field simply dies. In my experience of this, the community know who those people were, so open peer review probably wouldn’t improve matters. Double-blind will not work because it’s going to be reasonably trivial to figure out is the author. People will still sit on manuscripts, and we already know who does this when it happens.

Making the reviewers’ comments, signed or not, public might not ‘improve’ peer review: however I do believe it has value. There is virtually no training in reviewing papers, and if young post-docs and grad students could see a wide range of reviews of many different papers, surely that can only improve their reviewing skills? Maybe it would even serve to make the first submission better if nascent authors were to look at reviews in their field, and discover the common mistakes?

Having said that, I am keen to see greater accountability. On a personal level, I wouldn’t write anything I wouldn’t put my name next to, and I don’t actually see why peer review should be any different. At f1000, for example, we already put our Faculty Members’ names on their evaluations, and we call this ‘post-publication peer review’. (Our motives are slightly different of course: we’re saying that you should take notice because of who’s writing them.)
Interacting
The EMBO Journal has been experimenting with publishing reviews of accepted manuscripts for a year now. I was amused to find that when I clicked on one of the reviews at random, it was a paper about my old friend talin. And it’s from Mark Ginsberg and Iain Campbell, FRS, with both of whom have I coauthored papers.

Small world.

Posted in Literature | Tagged: , , | 6 Comments »

On the run-29Jan10

Posted by rpg on 29 January, 2010

Vitek quotes a Polish proverb,

If you’re going to fall off a horse, make it a big one.

In that vein, take a look at this graph (don’t look too closely; it’s deliberately a tiny bit obscure):Graph of ffJ and Journal Impact factor

What I’ve been doing this week is mostly hacking away in Perl at some of the information in our database. As you may know, each evaluation in f1000 has a score associated with it, based on the rating given an article by Faculty Members. We’ve redone the scoring and I’ve worked out a way of combining those scores, or ‘article factors’ as we’ve taken to calling them, for each journal that is represented at f1000. This gives us a ‘journal factor’, ffJ. It’s our answer to the journal Impact Factor, in fact; and the graph above is the top 250 journals according to our ratings (in blue) with the appropriate Impact Factor in red.

You’ll notice right away that there isn’t a one-to-one correlation, and of course we’d expect that (the Impact Factor has serious problems, which I’ve talked about previously). I’m currently analysing our data a bit more deeply, and I’ll be writing a paper with that analysis, as well as talking about it at the March ACS conference in San Francisco.

Last Friday evening I went down the Driver with a couple of the dev team and a bunch of people from places as varied as BioMed Central, Nature Publishing Group, Mendeley and Mekentosj. We talked about what we’re variously calling cross- or federate-commenting. On the whole we’ve decided it’s a good idea, and we simply have to figure out how to do it. What this implies of course is that we’re actually going to allow user comments at f1000—and indeed that’s the plan. I’m looking forward to rolling out this functionality to you, not least because when people want to raise questions about articles evaluated on f1000, they’ll be able to.

While we’re on the mythical new site, we asked another web designer what they could come up with for us. And for the first time, all of us who saw the design liked it. So hopefully we’ll be able to get that implemented real soon now and I’ll be able to start showing you what you’re going to get, you lucky people. (Rumours that someone said “It looks like a proper website!” are completely unfounded.)

Interesting reviews

A couple of things you may have missed.

First, the (possible) mechanism behind photophobia in migraines. Turns out that people who are functionally blind, but sensitive to circadian input and pupillary light reflexes are susceptible to photophobia. Work in rats published in Nature Neuroscience implicates a (previously uncharacterized) multisynaptic or heavily networked retinal path.

In Biology, the problem of de novo assembly of DNA sequence reads into sensible contigs from massively parallel sequencing technologies has been addressed. This, if it works, would bring exciting concepts such as personal genomics that little bit closer. The paper is in Genome Research (subscription required) and you can read the evaluation for free.

And finally

Faculty of 1000  is big in Italy—or at least on Facebook. My post on the recycling of integrins drew an excited response from one Grazia Tamma, who was then mocked mercilessly by her brother!

Hang in there, Grazia; science is great and the cytoskeleton rocks.

Posted in Friday afternoon, Indicators, Metrics | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

Denying evolution, denying climate change: how does ‘belief’ fit in with science?

Posted by stevepog on 28 January, 2010

Denialism by Michael Specter

One of the more interesting speakers at the recent Science Online conference in North Carolina was the author of Denialism and lover of controversy, Michael Specter.

The New Yorker staff writer gave an impassioned speech at the conference’s opening gala on the current blight of denialism, which he defines as what happens, “when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.”

Specter’s  targets included US-centric personalities and companies such as anti-MMR activist Jenny McCarthy, vitamin supplement king Dr Andrew Weil and basically the whole organic food community, which no doubt alienated some Wholefoods-loving audience members.

He also spoke about the media’s culpability in prominently running stories  that influence the demise of useful drugs and often lead people to lose trust in science. If Specter was aware of the UK’s Daily Mail, he could have added that paper to the blacklist (an excellent Facebook group has been set up listing the Mail’s scare stories about cancer, here).

At conferences and presentations I’ve attended, it’s a constant gripe that the public often associates belief with science and that people will choose to trust a homeopathic remedy or not believe in climate change despite all the unequivocal scientific evidence to hand proving the opposite. This is already an old theme among the science community but the rise in popularity of pro-science media advocates such as Specter and the UK’s Ben Goldacre and George Monbiot are hopefully a sign that people are tired of believing wonderdrug claims or gloomy scare stories and want to know the facts behind the hype.

Here is a short clip of Specter’s talk (apologies for the low sound and shaky recording):

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Come Home

Posted by rpg on 25 January, 2010

Back when I was an acolyte in the service of science, I worked on an interesting little big protein by the name of talin. This 270 kDa sucker is involved in focal adhesions: the ‘ankle’ of the cell, joining the actin cytoskeleton to the outside world. Focal adhesions are fascinating and complex, and if I had access to my thesis right now I’d draw you a picture. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

Talin is a molecule that back then was probably too big a problem for a grad student to tackle more or less single-handedly; the post-doc was was concentrating on some genetic analysis and my supervisor was taken up with the department’s computing services, which left very little lab time. I did manage to show that talin didn’t, as had been proposed, cap or nucleate actin polymerization (a negative result that was essentially unpublishable), and I also developed a long-term love of immunofluorescence microscopy. It appears we were ahead of our time: talin is closely involved with integrins (which see) and seems to be enjoying a (re-)surgence of interest lately.

Back to focal adhesions. Formation of these structures, completely essential to cell adhesion and migration, has been pretty thoroughly prodded. What’s interesting is how focal adhesions disassemble, so that the moving cell doesn’t get stuck. Again, this is something I had a professional interest in: one of my projects in Cambridge involved  the determination of how moving cells generate the required motile force, or how they put their ‘feet’ forward’. We used a model system and discovered that essentially it’s gel effects. You take a load of little rods (= actin filaments), grow them, and the space they fill is disproportionately large, driving protrusion. What we didn’t do was look at the trailing edge of the cell, how the ‘foot’ comes up again. That was something I would have dearly loved to work on, and if I’d stayed in Cambridge, or even in science, I might have worked on it.

Clathrin

Good job I didn’t, because we’ve just published an evaluation of a paper showing that focal adhesion disassembly is just as complex as assembly. It turns out that our old friend clathrin, along with two of its adaptors, gets directed to focal adhesions by microtubules, and, as you might expect seeing as clathrin is involved, the integrins are reincorporated into the cell by endocytosis, and recycled (rather than being left behind as the cell walks away. I don’t think any of us thought much of that hypothesis anyway, but I mention it for completeness.)

The researchers used total internal reflection fluorescence and watched individual molecules on the underside of migrating cells scooting around. The clathrin sidled up to focal adhesions, hooked up with integrin; and the two left the party together.

time series of leaving the partyGet your coat, you’ve pulled

Just as we don’t think that our spaghetti/copper wire/gel effects produce all the force required for forward motion, neither is it certain that all focal adhesion disassembly is driven this way (the paper says that depleting clathrin reduces disassembly by 60-80%) . Talin itself has a head domain and an extended domain, and there is a calpain protease recognition site at the join (this was an immense pain when purifying the native protein; I had to make sure everything was swimming in protease inhibitors). Similarly, it’s possible that calpain actively degrades one or more focal adhesion components to make sure the whole thing gets packed away nicely, even if that does seem expensive in energy terms.

It doesn’t stop there, of course. Somehow these integrins have to get recycled to the front of the cell. It would makes sense for the little blighters to make their way through known endocytotic pathways and be ready for reassembly into focal adhesions at the business end of the cell, this hasn’t yet been demonstrated directly. It’s probably a mass effect. He said, airily.

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Posted in Literature, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

On the run-22Jan10

Posted by rpg on 22 January, 2010

Last week I met up with a Certain Editor from a Certain Journal. We had a nice chat about, among other things, the policy of Certain Journals as regards the wind direction in the publishing industry. From the research side of the fence it’s easy to assume that publishing houses are monolithic edifices intent on maintaining a monopoly; unchanging and unfeeling; not to mention dirty money-grabbing bastards. Certain Advocates (not all!) of Open Access/Open Science hold to this view.

Naturally, the truth is a bit more subtle. Publishing is a business, which means that publishers are actually going to drive change, because if they don’t they will wither and die. Cell’s Article of the Future is a case in point (you might not like it, but you can’t deny that Elsevier are innovating). Publishers that see their competitors doing stuff are going to adapt and respond as necessary. Because if there’s a new paradigm brewing and they’re not on board, things will turn out bad for them. (The trick, of course, is to figure out what is actually a new paradigm and what is simply a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.)

Not unrelated to this preamble, you may have noticed a slight addition to the type of things we evaluate. For example, we have something titled Endogenous Forces Exerted at E-cadherin Based Cell-Cell Contacts:

The authors first determine that the traction forces that a single cell exerts on the underlying substrate are balanced across the cell. However, for cell pairs, it was determined that the traction forces exerted on the substrate for an individual cell did not balance, with the force imbalance reflecting the force exerted on the cell-cell contact.

but it’s not a paper being evaluated, it’s a poster.

Poster preview

I have more—much more—to say about this initiative, so stay tuned for updates.

While we’re on f1000, an evaluation you might have missed. (I’ve been meaning to blog about it all week, but as you’ll see it’s not really my fault. Or perhaps it is?) The piece, by Lutz Jäncke at the University of Zurich, starts provocatively:

One of the most virulent disputes between neuroscience and philosophy is whether human beings are equipped with a free will.

The brain is thought to generate decisions before the conscious mind gets involved, based on electroencephalography measurements. The ‘Bereitschaftspotential’ starts up to 1.5 seconds before movement is executed. However, in an elegant but mind-bending experiment published in Neuropsychologia, a diverse group of researchers find that there is a final check that seems to be under the control of the individual, an ultimate ‘yes or no’ that appears to be freely willed:

Planned actions can be subjected to a final predictive check which either commits actions for execution or suspends and withholds them. The neural mechanism of intentional inhibition may play an important role in self-control.

There goes my excuse that the voices in my head made me do it. You can read the evaluation, free for three months, here.

In other news, the dev team have been working on the search mechanism for the new f1000.com website. One of the major criticisms of the current Biology and Medicine sites is that it’s actually quite difficult to find the search bar, probably because it’s never in the same place. The new site is based around search (very Web 3.0, yeah?) and so it’s something that’s essential to get right. I think you’ll like what we’ve done, and once we get the design right I’ll post some screen shots. What I can tell you now is that you’ll have no problems finding it!

Finally, don’t forget to check out our Facebook page. Steve has been busy updating it with press release and video links, and we’ve noticed that several of you are reading the blog through it. Please feel free to ping us either here or on Facebook if there’s anything you’d like to see.

Have a great weekend!

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Money

Posted by rpg on 21 January, 2010

The distribution and uptake of antivirals and vaccination was in the news quite a bit before Christmas. H1N1 swine flu didn’t turn out to be the Armageddon some commentators were forecasting, but I don’t think it’s overstating the case to say that we dodged a bullet there. In cases like this we might expect the government to give a clear message, based on the best possible epidemiology. No, please, stop laughing. After all, the UKian government was right about the MMR combined vaccine, even if they did handle the situation incredibly poorly.

And that’s a problem, isn’t it? In our culture we don’t trust what the government tell us anymore. That may or may not be a good thing, but it certainly creates problems for public health policy, especially in a potential epidemic situation. Sometimes it’s quite clear what the right thing to do is, but how do we get them to do it?

A paper just published in PNAS and reviewed on f1000 (link free for three months) sets out an economic framework for controlling transmissible and evolving diseases. Now, I’m not an epidemiologist (you should possibly go and talk to my mate Bill if you’re that interested), and the argument therein apply more to a healthcare system that is not free at point of care (Obama’s reforms notwithstanding), but it’s an interesting paper nonetheless.

Antibiotic treatment for otitis media

“public policies such as taxing and subsidizing goods are frequently used to correct (for public benefit) the private actions of individuals when externalities, or side effects, of these actions exist.”

By comparing four different scenarios and addressing negative externalities, the authors predict where financial dis/incentives should be applied for maximum public health benefit. The scenarios discussed here are

  1. Tetanus: infectious but not transmissible between humans, and no herd immunity
  2. Measles: infectious, effective vaccination that generates a herd effective by reducing transmission
  3. Otitis media: non-transmissible, but unnecessary antibiotic treatment can lead to the negative externality of antibiotic resistance
  4. Pandemic influenza: antiviral treatment generates negative (resistance) and positive (reduced transmission) externalities.

Antiviral treatment for pandemic flu

There’s a whole heap of math in this paper, and although (or perhaps because) I’m supposed to be coming up with robust formulae for our rankings on the main site, it makes my brain hurt.

I find the thesis that economic impact can be leveraged to get maximum public health benefits an interesting one. I’m not sure how that would apply to the UK, for example, where the cost of healthcare is more-or-less invisible.

Infectious diseases tend to evolve quite rapidly when we attempt to control them, whether we use antibiotics, other drugs or prophylactic vaccinations. The framework expounded in this paper should prove to be readily applicable to a wide range of such diseases. Assuming, of course, that the authorities responsible for public health have the appropriate fiscal executive power, and access to current and accurate scientific information…

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Private investigations

Posted by rpg on 20 January, 2010

One of the really great things about science is its potential for self-correction. If you have an hypothesis, a result (strange or otherwise), a set of data, it can be tested by anyone. This is encouraged, in fact: when you publish you’re not just saying ‘look how clever I am’ but also ‘here’s something new! Can you do it too?’. This philosophy is diametrically opposed to that behind Creationism, say; or homeopathy. In those belief systems whatever the High Priest says is of necessity true, and experiment must bend around them until the results fit.

This means that, in science, a finding or publication that people get very excited about at the time can be shown to be wrong—either through deliberate fraud, experimental sloppiness (although the boundary between the two can be fuzzy) or simply because we’re as scientists wiser now than we were then. This happens, and it’s normal and part of the process. We should welcome it; indeed, my friend Henry Gee has claimed that everything Nature publishes is wrong, or at least provisional.

So what we have to do is be completely open about this, no matter how embarrassing it is for the journal that published the work in the first place.

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?

It was Derek Lowe who first alerted me to a paper published in Science last year, with the ome-heavy title Reactome Array: Forging a Link Between Metabolome and Genome. This was flagged as a ‘Must Read‘ (free link) back in November, because according to our reviewer Ben Davis

If this worked it could be marvellous, superb.

However, as Ben said in his evaluation,

this work should be read with some caveats. Try as we might, my group, as well as many colleagues, and I have tried to determine the chemistry described [...] In my opinion, this is a work that deserves a “Must Read” rating and I strongly encourage the reader to read the source material and reach their own conclusions.

And as Derek points out, Science published an ‘Editorial expression of concern‘, noting a request for  evaluation of the original data and records by officials at the authors’ institutions, as well as mentioning it on their blog. Heavy. Immediately I saw this, I let our Editorial team know we might have a problem and we published a note to warn our readers that the work described in the paper was suspect.

Today we published a dissent to the evaluation from Michael Gelb, who says

There are many reactions shown that seem unusual and controversial [...] My colleagues and I have tried to decipher the chemistry shown in Figure 1 of the main text and in the supplemental material. Many of the indicated reactions seem highly unlikely to occur, and the NMR data showing that some of the structures that were made are confusing and controversial.

We’ve also published a follow-up from Ben:

I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed in the Dissenting Opinion. The chemistry presented in this paper and in the online SI has varied in its description and content worryingly over the last 2 months.

and, rather tellingly,

as yet no chemical samples or key reagents have yet been made generally available.

(One of the usual conditions of publishing in reputable journals is that you make reagents available to other scientists, so that they can repeat your work. Failing to honour this commitment is not playing to the rules.)

It’ll be interesting to see when, not if, the original paper is retracted; and by whom.

And this, people, is the self-correcting wonder of science. Remember this, next time someone starts rabbiting about scientific conspiracies, or sends you their new theory of general relativity, or anything else that sounds crazy. It probably is.

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Posted in Journals, Literature, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

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