In a very roundabout fashion, I found myself credited as an author in a letter published by Nature yesterday. Alongside the named authors – Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Adrien Treuille, Janos Barbero, Jeehyung Lee, Michael Beenen, Andrew Leaver-Fay, David Baker, Zoran Popovic – was me. Well, the paper didn’t quite refer to me by name,…

There’s nothing we like more here at The Scientist than when music moguls take time out of their hectic schedules to devote entire albums to scientific concepts. Sure, geek rock stalwarts like They Might be Giants, Man or Astroman, and Weezer are quite comfortable nuzzling up to science, and in fact bands like those made…

A new analysis suggests that making papers open access would pump $1 billion into the U.S. economy over the next few decades. That’s about five times the amount it costs to archive the papers, according to ScienceInsider.

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Last week, the Medical Research Council announced it was appointing John Savill as its new chief executive. Savill seems to have the right experience — he is now head of the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and the country’s chief scientific advisory for health. But it’s a tough gig…

Open access arguments The US House of Representatives subcommittee heard arguments on Thursday (July 29) from both sides of a new bill that would require federal agencies that fund more than $100 million of research to provide public access to the results and publications that result from that research.

A new report suggest a reason for why Japanese research continues to have less of an impact than research from other countries: a failure to collaborate. A new report from Thomson Reuters shows that Japan has relatively few international collaborations, and this may explain why its citation averages continue to lag behind those of other…

Artists who behave like scientists, or scientists dabbling in art seem to be increasingly common these days. Bacterial “paintings,” artistically rendered photographs of fluorescing cells, and even haute couture clothing made from microbially-produced cellulose are just some of the art forms blurring the line between science and art. But what exactly is BioArt? A session…

A US Senate panel gave its seal of approval to a $1 billion bump in the National Institutes of Health’s 2011 budget yesterday (27th July). The Senate’s Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies echoed the sentiment of its House of Representatives counterpart by OKing the billion dollar bump, which would…

A week in the life of post publication peer review: the changing landscape of scientific publishing, scientific spin doctors, the evolution of spite and public health concerns