Scientific Publishing
revere | August 30, 2007I don't suppose I can sue somebody for negligence resulting in impairment of my mental health. But if I could, I would surely go after the assholes at the PRISM coalition, an alleged grassroots group (such front groups for industry are often called astroturf groups) whose task in life is to lock up tax payer financed research under copyright laws they and their cronies wrote for their own benefit. And THEY ARE MAKING ME CRAZY! So there was at least some therapeutic benefit to the discovery of my SciBling Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily that these hypocrites were violating copyright on their…
revere | June 25, 2007It is infuriating how stodgy biomedical sciences are in terms of information sharing. It's not clear how much of this is bred of inherent conservatism, the pressures of a very competitive field or just plain technobackwardness. But while mathematics and physics have had preprint servers for years, biomedicine has had nothing or virtually nothing (that last to cover myself in case I am forgetting something or just didn't know about it). What's a preprint server?
A preprint is a version of your scientific paper prior to its publication. Maybe it hasn't been submitted yet and you are circulating…
terrasig | April 26, 2007By now you have already heard that my ScienceBlogs colleague, Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle, has been threatened with legal action if she did not remove published figures from a blog post. Shelley had a nifty post on a recent paper in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture detailing how treatment with naturally-occuring volatile compounds (including ethanol and methyl jasmonate) increased the production of antioxidant compounds present in blueberries and strawberries. It was an interesting story but the results didn't mean that mixing alcohol with fruit mixers was good for you…