Price of peer review A new report estimates that peer review costs UK universities £165 million per year in terms of the time academics spend reviewing others’ manuscripts (roughly 3 million hours). The Value of UK HEIs’ Contribution to the Publishing Process: Summary Report further estimates that it costs another £30 million to employ editors…

Nature ran an editorial last week on what might to appear to be a retraction epidemic. There do seem to be more retractions recently, due to a number of potential reasons: More awareness of misconduct by journals and the community, an increased ability to create and to detect unduly manipulated images, and greater willingness by…

It’s not that I “don’t really care for music”—I do, very much—it’s more that I have a serious lack of talent, or indeed understanding. I can read music, and at a push tune up my lovely (but seriously underused) Tanglewood and crank out a recognizable tune, given some sheet music and a following wind. Music…

Open Access literature databases! There, that’s grabbed your attention, hasn’t it? No? Strangely, talking to most researchers about publication databases and repositories has them either nodding off or suddenly remembering an urgent meeting. In this guest post, Mohammed Tasab, Engagement Officer at UK PubMed Central explains why PIs should care about UK PubMed Central, the…

Bruce Cronstein is a Section Head in Immunopharmacology & Hematologic Pharmacology, in our Pharmacology and Drug Discovery faculty. Here he’s talking to Sarah Greene about his work on adenosine receptors. Like many things in science, it’s taken us off in odd directions Bruce is known for showing that anti-inflammatory drugs such as methotrexate work by…

The NSF just announced a new initiative to help women tackle obstacles in their science careers.  It’s focused on providing PhD students with inspiration and motivation, based on success stories of other women that have done it.  Good stuff, right? But that’s only my own interpretation.  I’m not actually sure if this is what the…

Genes not patent-able The US government announced on Friday (October 29) that researchers should not be able to patent genes because they are “products of nature.” This decision, which overturns the long-standing policy that genes are eligible for patents, could have a “huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry,” according to the New…

Biochemist Nick Lane has taken home this year’s Royal Society Prize for Science Books, it was announced at an event held last Thursday (21st October) in London. Lane’s 2009 book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, explores the key gifts bestowed upon biology over the sweep of evolutionary time. These crucial inventions include…

In this three minute video, Gordon Fishell at the New York University School of Medicine tells us how for the past ten years his lab has been trying to understand interneuron diversity in the cortex: how brains can expand from ten or so cardinal cell types to the >100 types that populate the mature cortex,…

Following the success (of a sort) of the Science is Vital campaign I have been co-organizing the last few weeks, I’m wondering what the response is in other countries. Specifically, are you pleased that the UK science budget has been ring-fenced, or are you (secretly, maybe) disappointed that we’re still competing with everyone else? In…