You’ve probably heard by now of the plan, cooked up between the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Wellcome Trust and the Max Planck Society, to launch a new, open access journal–as yet sans name, sans Editor-in-Chief and sans business plan. There seem to be more questions than answers surrounding the Journal With No Name, and…
Good biochemists should be good chefs, yes? After all, cooking–mixing together the right quantities of the right ingredients in the right order and heating (or cooling) at the right temperature for the right amount of time–is just edible chemistry, surely? If you can follow a recipe for extracting DNA from bacteria you should be able…
There was a rather wonderful paper in Cell in the middle of last year from Deepak Srivastava’s lab at UCSF: Direct Reprogramming of Fibroblasts into Functional Cardiomyocytes by Defined Factors1. It was picked up by two of our Faculty teams and has already garned more than 40 citations.
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…
One of my laments concerning the internet age is that not enough publishers use high quality metadata to identify their content. By metadata, I mean hidden parts of content which seek to describe that content. So metadata can be loosely defined as data which is explicitly concerned with data. In essence it tells us what…
My lesson for today: Don’t argue with an oceanographer over our responsibility for cleaning up the Great Garbage Patch. Actually, don’t argue with an oceanographer over anything marine-based and also don’t call someone (the inspirational Annie Crawley) an oceanographer who isn’t. I made the mistake of saying that an article in Slate by Nina Shen…
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!…
With most of the science media, green movement and world leader attention focused on Copenhagen and climate change right now, it would be remiss of us not to mention a new evaluation which looks at one of numerous papers promising new ways to tackle the greenhouse effect. The reviewer, Robie Macdonald, from the Institute of…
…what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause Thomson, in a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reckon there ain’t nowt wrong with the Journal Impact Factor: The impact factor has had success and utility as a journal metric due to its concentration on…
I’ve been struggling to get some ‘About’ pages in shape for the new site, and all of a sudden Broad has got four wickets, and things are looking a lot more exciting for England. But over the last few weeks we (that is F1000, not the England XI) have been getting some very flattering emails…
