badscience.net writes about at a formal review of a smoke associated effect that

found 43 [studies] in total, and overall, smoking significantly increases your risk of Alzheimers … 11 of the studies were written by people with affiliations to the tobacco industry. This wasn’t always declared, so to double check, the researchers searched on the University of California’s Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, a vast collection of scanned material which has been gathered over decades of legal action.

I didn’t know of this collection (Show me more…)

It is an always increasing problem: the EU doesn’t pay in time for your science. The European Ombudsman now invites observations from the public concerning his own-initiative inquiry into the problem of late payment by the European Commission [link].

From a press release

Today, the open-access publisher the Public Library of Science (PLoS; www.plos.org), announces the release of an expanded set of article-level metrics (Show me more…)

Overfunding of research seems to be a largely neglected area. Getting money twice for the same project (or doing something different than being in the application) seems to be the “creative” (Show me more…)

NG has a remarkable retraction – one of the few that are ever published which is a fact that that may otherwise rise severe doubts (Show me more…)

A new Science paper is worried about internet neutrality:

… Researchers who support “network neutrality” have become worried that the Internet may lose its innovative edge. They are concerned that control could be shifting from the edges of the Internet toward the service providers at the center, which would allow the providers to have “gatekeeper” capacity and would contradict the Internet’s “end-to-end” principle . This core tenet states that control over information flows should take place, to the extent possible, at the end points of the network…

While politicians are still debating on that issue, (Show me more…)