Comments for Naturally Selected

Comment on I’m not dead yet by Deborah Verran

Deborah Verran — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:07:24 +0000

Donation after cardiac death has now become an established second pathway for deceased donor organ donation in many countries. There are now published guidelines which underpin practice, the most recent of which comes from the United Kingdom, the NICE guideline-http://guidance.nice.org.uk/CG135 which is also now published in summary form -Donor identification and consent for deceased organ donation:summary of NICE guidance. British Medical Journal 2012;344:e341.

Many patients are receiving via transplantation valuable organs from DCD donors, hence any call for a moratorium would have major consequences, and these consequences do not seem to be mentioned.

Comment on How to overhaul peer review and scientific publishing by Mahboob Imityaz

Mahboob Imityaz — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:52:06 +0000

Agree with Kravitz and Baker. We are trying to create such a system for the Journal of Errology, still in its nascent and experimental stages.

Comment on Random gene sets can predict breast cancer survival better than cancer-related signatures by DaveR

DaveR — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:33:07 +0000

As a doctoral student in a genetics program that is highly-reliant on funding that results from GWA studies, you would think that this type of article would have made a bigger splash than it did. The fact that it was more or less ignored reminds me of Thomas Kuhn and of how so clearly saw that the path to scientific truth is often blocked by entrenched dogmas which are rooted in nothing more-substantial than the personal reputations (and money) of the established scientific community.

Comment on Figshare: a carrot for sharing by Figshare: a carrot for sharing – Helping researchers share their research more quickly. | | LogicampLogicamp

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:34:37 +0000

[...] models. Files that aren’t ready for publication can be stored privately for free in the cloud.Via blog.f1000.com Partager :Facebook Ce contenu a été publié dans Non classé. Vous pouvez le mettre en favoris [...]

Comment on Is there any good time to get a sunburn? by Goodmorning, sunburn… the earth says hello? « Rose M. Reynolds, Ph.D.

Goodmorning, sunburn… the earth says hello? « Rose M. Reynolds, Ph.D. — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:59:50 +0000

[...] cellular components, and the morning is when our structural repair capacity is at its best. Read a summary written up for F1000, or get the primary research article from the Proceedings of the National [...]

Comment on Burdens of the brilliant by ferdinando boero

ferdinando boero — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:06:18 +0000

Sorry, I have something more to say. Of course what I wrote above does not mean that if your papers are rejected by the editorial boards of leading journals then you are a creative scientist. You might simply be a producer of silly ideas. Mainstream scientists safely remain in their domain, learn a technique, produce clean experiments and data and journals like their papers. They are cited for some time (enough to push up the IF of the journal) and then they are rapidly forgotten. But who cares about the scores of Cited Half Life of a journal? There is no space for complains about the way the world is. This is the life. Borrowing a nice definition of evolutionary innovations, creative persons are the hopeful monsters of culture and science.

Comment on Burdens of the brilliant by ferdinando boero

ferdinando boero — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 07:56:22 +0000

In my opinion the question is not well posed. Put it this way:
Creativity is usually perceived as:
good
bad
and then think about it. Think about how avant-gardes are considered by the majority of the population. The most creative person I met in my life so far was Frank Zappa. His favorite sentence (and mine too) was: without deviation from the norm progress is not possible. Creativity is deviation from the norm. The norm is what most people think and do. Deviations from norms are perceived as bad by these guys. And they are the majority. So, sorry folks, but I am not impressed if somebody makes and experiment and finds that creativity is perceived as bad.
Of course nobody would label him or herself as being biased against creativity. They are just against silly ideas! Which is the way creativity is perceived in the first place.
Once perceived as good, creativity has lost much of its appeal, it has become a norm. Creativity breaks dogmas and sparks cultural and scientific revolutions (sometimes). Ask Galileo Galilei if creativity is perceived as good or bad. I am not saying that the scientific community at large is like the Inquisition, but read just some posts below and see how many problems the authors of a paper showing that, when dealing with cancer and molecular signatures, correlation might not mean causation. The Inquisition (i.e. the editorial board of leading journals) rejected their creative idea that it might not be the case that genetic markers are the signature of cancer. And they had a lot of trouble in publishing their stuff. Very interesting story. This one, I am sorry to say it, is not creative enough, it just identifies a norm.

Comment on Burdens of the brilliant by Nathaniel Comfort

Nathaniel Comfort — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 01:20:48 +0000

McClintock’s jumping genes are NOT an example of bias against creativity. No one doubted that she had found movable genetic elements. What they doubted was her interpretation of those elements’ evolutionary significance–an interpretation that remains unsupported today. See my book, The Tangled Field Harvard, 2001).

Comment on Open letter on open access by Mr. Gunn

Mr. Gunn — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:13:43 +0000

I think F1000 is a fabulous service and one of the only places where real, substantial post-publication peer review is happening. I wish all online commentary on scientific articles were of the caliber of F1000 reviews. Given that quality post-publication review is essential for the success of the next phase of open access, I think there’s a lot other publishers could learn from what and how they’ve done it.

I also think there’s a greater diversity of funding models than just author pays/publisher pays/subscribing institution pays. Certainly publishers would leap at the chance to pay for F1000 exposure if it drove significant traffic. Subscribers would also pay for a service that helped them find the best material if it integrated nicely with their workflow (i.e., paper recommendations surfacing in Mendeley, one click addition to their library, etc). But looking beyond that, trade associations and companies, just as one example, might also be interested in contributing in order to get a better view to how their content is being used.

Comment on Open letter on open access by ferdinando boero

ferdinando boero — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:43:18 +0000

Surely there is no such thing as a free lunch. I work for free for F of 1000 but, in return, I have fun and I have access to the evaluations of the other Faculty members. I concur that, having the choice of subscribing to a journal OR to F of 1000, I fear that the choice would go to the journal. There is already a great fight between Web of Science and Scopus to sell scientific information, and these are used “a priori”, in respect to F of 1000. It might be a fine commercial strategy both for F of 1000 and for the publishers if the evaluated articles might be available directly in PDF. It happens to me that reviewed papers are not available: if I want to see a paper and I am not connected through my departmental server, then the paper is not visible.
I see that journals are praising the fact that their articles are reviewed by F of 1000. And also authors are putting F of 1000 reviews of their products in their curricula.
Knowing that having a F of 1000 subscription gives access to all the reviewed articles is an incentive to pay for the subscription.
Publishers are selling their stuff in bundles now, and Departments subscribe to all the titles of a given publisher. Especially if the subscriptions are online. Maybe F of 1000 should enter in one of these bundles, but then it would lose its independence.
In economics, they say that the value of something is linked to the willingness to pay for it by those who want it. Apparently, everything is free in the internet, but then we pay by giving up information about ourselves, in reading advertisement and the like. Nothing is free. And the salary of the people who are running F of 1000 must be paid by somebody, because I have the feeling that it is a full time job!
By the way, the free subscriptions to the colleagues of the Faculty members are a very nice gift.
You might make older evaluations (e.g. one year and more) freely available. Many journals do so. You pay to be up to date, but you do not pay to see the older stuff.

Comment on Open letter on open access by Jim Woodgett

Jim Woodgett — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:16:02 +0000

In an era of decreasing scientific funding, shrinking library budgets and massive expansion of published articles, the “value” of curation is increasingly difficult to pin down. On the one hand, libraries are trying to focus their depleting resources on primary subscription-based journals and, ironically, don’t benefit from Open Source since they are effectively cut out of the equation (access via the Internet). On the other, researchers are increasingly looking for filters to help concentrate relevant information and to avoid missing important papers. How might curation be supported yet be accessible? People will pay for what they perceive has value to them. Increasing the quality of curation without increasing costs (an on-going process) and allowing micro payments so that individuals at institutions that do not provide library-paid access, might help – as might providing free weeks every so often (not necessarily over the Ho-Ho-Holiday period….).

Comment on When is a bird not a bird… and then a bird again? by ferdinando boero

ferdinando boero — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:16:33 +0000

Nice stuff, but let me add a simple statement: in evolutionary biology, the Popperian method sucks! When Eldredege and Gould proposed the punctuated equilibria, some Popperian fundamentalist said that they had falsified Darwinian gradualism. Gradualists found some instances of gradual evolution and said that they had falsified saltationism. Creationists said “hurray!”, you see? evolutionary biologists have falsified each other: evolution is false. What had been falsified was the universality of both gradualism and saltationism. Both exist, but the fact that one is true does not mean that the other is false. Sometimes one “theory” is right and at other times it is wrong. Popper asks scientists to produce universal statements, but biology is full of existential statements and of ad hoc explanations. Biology is not physics, thanks god! And there is multiple causality.

Comment on Beat the Christmas stress: exercise! by Nick Outlaw

Nick Outlaw — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 02:22:32 +0000

That’s fascinating to see exactly how exercise relieves stress. We’ve known intuitively forever, but now we can see why! Thanks fot the great post!

Comment on IVF and ovarian cancer – what are the risks? by Andrew K

Andrew K — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 07:16:35 +0000

The question is what is the cause for the effect?

Those who are unable to get pregnant by means other than IVF are likely already at risk. So it might not be the use of the IVF procedure itself that is contributing to the increased rate of tumours.

Comment on What’s light got to do with it? by Tom Hendricks

Tom Hendricks — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:52:31 +0000

Most of the melatonin comes from the enteric nervous system. “The pineal gland produces a spike in melatonin at night in the dark, but during the day, the gut maintains the baseline levels of melatonin. There is a lot more melatonin in the GIT than in the blood. Melatonin concentrations in the GIT tissues are 10 to 100 times higher than in blood. According to Huether’s 1994 calculations the GIT contains 400 to 500 times more melatonin than the pineal gland.”

Comment on iPad: the next essential lab apparatus? by Gillilans

Gillilans — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:27:45 +0000

I think this article is very well written, is in place! Very nice.Thanks for you sharing

Comment on Anti-addiction vaccines and personalized medicine: the ethical debate by Vaccines against Cocaine? Very Likely in Near Future, Says Scientists

Vaccines against Cocaine? Very Likely in Near Future, Says Scientists — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 00:10:42 +0000

[...] place. Here is the link to the original article: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/751594?src=rssScientists today are developing vaccines that could be used to treat those who are addicted to cocai…they are craving for nicotine. But when nicotine does not arrive at the brain, the person does not [...]

Comment on How to evaluate science? The impact factor vs. cited half life by ferdinando boero

ferdinando boero — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 12:45:31 +0000

For those who are interested in why taxonomy is in bad shape in the era of biodiversity, I suggest reading a semi-serious paper that I wrote for an obscure journal with no IF: The study of species in the era of biodiversity: a tale of stupidity.
You can download it here, for free:
http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/1/115/

Comment on How to evaluate science? The impact factor vs. cited half life by ferdinando boero

ferdinando boero — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:23:20 +0000

I can only agree: reading papers and monographs is the only serious thing to do to evaluate the performances of a researchers. In my experience, however, I see that people are weighted with numerical measures that are related to the IF of their tribunes and to the citations they have (H index). This does not select scientists, this selects disciplines! Young scientists do not dare attempting a career in taxonomy because they are sure that they will not have a chance.

Comment on How to evaluate science? The impact factor vs. cited half life by Daniel Chamovitz

Daniel Chamovitz — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:38:41 +0000

While I appreciate the author’s complaints about IF-weighted funding or promotion, using CHL as the alternative is definitely not the answer. What is needed, and this maybe is asking too much of administrators and politicians, is a clear understanding of how Ifs can be used and compared and the importance of journal ranking within a discipline. Of course a neuroscientist who publishes in journals with an IF of 3.5 is having much less impact than a zoologist or plant scientist who publishes at the same IF. But in the end, nothing substitutes for actually looking at what a scientist is publishing and how it has influenced other scientists. But that necessitates actually reading the papers.

Comment on Anti-addiction vaccines and personalized medicine: the ethical debate by thomas Kosten

thomas Kosten — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 04:34:47 +0000

These are most important ethical issues with these new long acting medications for addictions and were well explored in a book from the National Academy of Sciences:
Harwood HJ, Myers TG, eds. New Treatments for Addiction: Behavioral, Ethical, Legal and Social Questions. Committee on Immunotherapies and Sustained-Release Formulations for Treating Drug Addiction. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; 2004

Comment on So long, and thanks… by rwintle

rwintle — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 15:42:19 +0000

Some tasty fish in this post, thanks.

Good luck in your “pastures new”. I’ll be keeping up at OT and on Twitter (but you know that already).

Comment on So long, and thanks… by Jon D. Moulton

Jon D. Moulton — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 21:47:23 +0000

I’ll miss seeing your stuff here RPG, though I know I’ll see you about the web. Nice choice on the review by Michael Brand. But please, “Morpholino siRNA” is like fingernails on the blackboard — Morpholino oligos and siRNA are entirely different in structure and function and I’m too close to the topic not to squawk. This was a review of Morpholino work.

Comment on So long, and thanks… by Richard P. Grant

Richard P. Grant — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:22:13 +0000

Thank you, Nando. I really appreciated our chats–and yes, I’ll stay in touch.