We probably all agree that a publication bias against negative studies will severely distorts our opinion. To repeat an earlier Nature letter

Why negatives should be viewed as positives … This filtering of results undoubtedly biases the information available to scientists (see, for example “Null and void” Nature 422, 554–555; 2003). And communication is at the heart of science.

Here is an email that I received from the editor (Show me more…)

Science reports that the NEJM is being sued by Pfizer

in various jurisdictions on product liability grounds. Plaintiffs are claiming that its products Celebrex and Bextra cause cardiovascular and other injuries. Pfizer asserts that in some cases plaintiffs are making use of published papers from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). So it wants to dig though the confidential reviews of those papers in search of something to strengthen its defense.

Two giants fighting each other… (Show me more…)

A comment on the online Nature website says it all

Phantastic. Moreover, the peer-review system is broken with top PI’s getting away with publishing high impact poorly reviewed rubbish. If more non-peer-reviewed research becomes more prominent it will hardly make a difference to quality and can overall only be a good thing.

commenting on the recent decision at Harvard to automatically publish all papers by its Faculty of Arts and Sciences on the university’s website (except there is a waiver). I am waiting for the first German university to follow; effectively since January 2008 we get all our ordered documents on paper again for copyright reasons.

Current RNA chip technology, although quite advanced, is usually limited to known transcripts. As rare transcripts (N=1 to 5) usually cannot be quantified, current chip technology is probably useless for building realistic virtual cells. Maybe there are there are other options? SAGE – serial analysis of gene expression – has been also around (Show me more…)