JSTOR Daily: An Epidemic of Retractions. “Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis’s new book, Fraud in the Lab: The High Stakes of Scientific Research (translated by Nicholas Elliott) tackles the issue of scientific fraud head-on, with some tough love for the scientific community. The book should be read by everyone interested in the sciences. Chevassus-au-Louis offers a welcome reminder that scientists are human, too, subject to the temptations of ambition, to career pressures, and to plain old greed.”
research
Interesting Engineering: Internet Archivists Working Hard to Keep a “Pirate Bay of Science” Available Online
Interesting Engineering: Internet Archivists Working Hard to Keep a “Pirate Bay of Science” Available Online. “Scientific material is hard to come by online unless you’re ready to pay a pretty penny to access it. Many scientific papers and books are indeed available in an online format, however, they typically hide behind paywalls, leaving them unread by many. Two sites have been trying to remedy the situation by pirating scientific papers: Library Genesis (LibGen) and Sci-Hub. The issue is that sites like these have real problems staying online for legal and logistical hosting purposes. Now, a new project by data hoarders and freedom of information activists is trying to bring long-term stability to LibGen.”
Popular Science: Government workers with autism may go unpaid, despite their valuable contributions to science
Popular Science: Government workers with autism may go unpaid, despite their valuable contributions to science. “The fact that we can learn the story of a 22-year-old goose today is due to a large effort to digitize millions of avian profiles from paper and microfilm. Contractors did much of the labor, but a group of college-aged students also played a significant role by uploading 500,000 Bird Banding Laboratory records. The contractors made $1 per record. The students, who were autistic, earned nothing.”
Chemistry World: Open access Atlas maps out microbial natural products
Chemistry World: Open access Atlas maps out microbial natural products. “A new open access database of microbial natural products has launched online. The Natural Products Atlas (NPAtlas) is free to use and contains more than 24,000 chemical structures. The tool is based on Fair data principles, making the information within it easier to search and use in secondary analysis.” I don’t put anything in RB unless I can get a basic understanding of what the resource is about. (I have skipped including items because I just didn’t get the underlying discipline or presentation.) In this case I had no idea what microbial natural products are, but I now understand better thanks to PubMed.
US Government Accountability Office: Additional Actions Needed to Improve Public Access to Research Results
US Government Accountability Office: Additional Actions Needed to Improve Public Access to Research Results . “Public access to the results of federally funded research can accelerate scientific breakthroughs. In 2013, certain federal agencies were directed to create plans for increasing access to publications and data they funded. The 19 agencies we reviewed made progress, but some have not fully implemented their plans…. We made 37 recommendations to 16 agencies to address these and other issues.”
Carnegie Mellon University: Carnegie Mellon Publishing Agreement Marks Open Access Milestone
Carnegie Mellon University: Carnegie Mellon Publishing Agreement Marks Open Access Milestone. “The university recently reached a transformative agreement with the scientific publishing giant Elsevier that prioritizes free and public access to the university’s research. This comes at a time when universities around the world are working to transition the current subscription system of scientific journal publishing to new open access business models. Under the terms of the agreement, which is the first of its kind between Elsevier and a university in the United States, Carnegie Mellon scholars will have access to all Elsevier academic journals. Beginning Jan. 1, 2020, articles with a corresponding CMU author published through Elsevier also will be open access.”
EurekAlert: In its 15th year, INCITE advances open science with supercomputer grants to 47 projects
EurekAlert: In its 15th year, INCITE advances open science with supercomputer grants to 47 projects. “The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science announced allocations of supercomputer access to 47 science projects for 2020–awarding 60 percent of the available time on some of the nation’s most powerful supercomputers, with the ultimate goal of accelerating discovery and innovation.”
