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…
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
I got a very strong sense of deja vu when leafing through PLoS Biol recently. I was sure I had seen something very similar to Jeffrey Shaman’s paper Absolute Humidity and the Seasonal Onset of Influenza in the Continental United States before. A quick check on PubMed proved me right. I found the following, published…
Ladles and gentlespoons, the results are in. We had an amazing response, and after sifting through a mass of #sci140-tagged tweets, discarding all the retweets and publicity (and a huge thank-you to everyone who spread the word), we had 197 unique entries (grep saved my life). Many of you posted very witty ‘historical’ paper summaries,…
And… here’s the next batch of #sci140 entries, since 10.40 today. If you think yours should be on the list, then please let me know (with the twitter URL if possible). Keep ’em coming…
Wow. I created a twitter storm yesterday, as people leapt on the #sci140 meme like kangaroos. Thanks to everyone who picked up on it, RTed and entered. Some of you made me laugh out loud. Below the fold you’ll find all the entries as at 10.24 UTC today (I’ve spent much of the morning stripping…
UPDATE: Entries so far 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…
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…
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. After that I took the girls into the ‘Cocoon‘, a huge butterfly egg-type structure…
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!…
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