This is a response to Dorothy Bishop’s post “Who’s afraid of open data?“. After we had published a paper on how Drosophila strains that are referred to by the same name in the literature (Canton S), but came from different […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for science
On our final day (day 1, day 2), I was only able to hear Boris Kotchoubey‘s (author of “why are you free?“) talk, as I had to leave early to catch my flight. He made a great effort to slowly […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
While the first day (day 2, day 3) was dominated by philosophy, mathematics and other abstract discussions of chance, this day of our symposium started with a distinct biological focus. Martin Heisenberg, Chance in brain and behavior First speaker for […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Ulrich Herkenrath, a mathematician working on stochasticity, convened a tiny symposium of only about a dozen participants discussing the role of chance in living beings. Participants included mathematicians, philosophers and neurobiologists. Herkenrath: “Man as a source of randomness” Herkenrath kicked […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Over the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about so-called “predatory publishers”, i.e., those corporations which publish journals, some or all of which purport to peer-review submitted articles, but publish articles for a fee without actual […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Science has infected itself (voluntarily!) with a life-threatening parasite. It has given away its crown jewels, the scientific knowledge contained in the scholarly archives, to entities with orthogonal interests: corporate publishers whose fiduciary duty is not knowledge dissemination or scholarly communication, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Last week, I spent two days at a symposium entitled “Governance, Performance & Leadership of Research and Public Organizations“. The meeting gathered professionals from all walks of science and research: economists, psychologists, biologists, epidemiologists, engineers, jurists as well as politicians, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The recently discussed scenario of universal gold open access brought about by simply switching the subscriptions funds at libraries to have the libraries pay for author processing charges instead, seemed like a ghoulish nightmare. One of the few scenarios worse […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Lately, there has been some public dreaming going on about how one could just switch to open access publishing by converting subscription funds to author processing charges (APCs) and we’d have universal open access and the whole world would rejoice. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In the last “Science Weekly” podcast from the Guardian, the topic was retractions. At about 20:29 into the episode, Hannah Devlin asked, whether the reason ‘top’ journals retract more articles may be because of increased scrutiny there. The underlying assumption […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…