Tag Archives: science publishing

Open Access vs. Local Politics

Someone just asked me what I thought of Michael Eisen’s op-ed piece that came out in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. Eisen wrote about a new bill in Congress that would roll back a NIH policy … Continue reading

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Who’s More Productive? No, How.

There’s a common belief that science shouldn’t try to answer “why” questions. Instead, it should focus on what it’s good at: answering “how” questions. I wondered whether that was really true, so I compared the relative productivity of Who, What, … Continue reading

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Middlemen, Marketing, and a Modest Proposal

During the heady days of the dot-com bubble, “disintermediation” was one of the hot buzzwords. E-commerce proponents proclaimed the death of stores, the shortening of supply chains, and the impending arrival of a new world in which producers sold their … Continue reading

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Readbacks and Researchers

Recently, there’s been a major debate in the online science journalism community about a common but little-discussed practice in the news business: readbacks. That’s what we call the article excerpts journalists sometimes send to sources ahead of publication, during the … Continue reading

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Accentuate the Negative

When a clinical trial fails, everybody loses: the patients who participated hoping to benefit, the patients who didn’t participate but hoped to get the promising new drug once it hit the market, the researchers who dedicated thousands of hours of … Continue reading

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Elsevier Makes Good: Original Wakefield Takedown Now Free

Awhile back, I blogged about a particularly insidious glitch in the biomedical literature, in which a fraudulent study that caused enormous harm was available for free, while a contemporary – and strikingly prescient – commentary that eviscerated that study was … Continue reading

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How about Walking the Walk?

From the inbox: Below is information about articles being published in the April 19 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The information is not intended to substitute for the full articles as sources of information. Annals of Internal Medicine attribution … Continue reading

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The Press Release Revision Cycle

First, let’s read the paper, see how much we can understand, and quote the authors from their peer-reviewed text. That will ensure we have the facts right, but it will give us a caveat-filled press release with this rather uninspiring … Continue reading

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This is A Link to Something I Wish I Had Written

This is a sentence trying to claim credit for discovering this article, which in fact most interested people would have found on their own. This is a sentence fragment setting up the link, which is here. This sentence tries to … Continue reading

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Probing the Proteome

My most recent piece for Science/AAAS is now online. I talked to several researchers who are using very cool techniques to find new biomarkers for diseases, and it was a fun piece to write. It appeared in the “AAAS Business … Continue reading

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