elife delisted

Elife is one of the most interesting scientific journals with a full history at Wikipedia.  The Elife board  introduced  in 2022 that

From next year, eLife is eliminating accept/reject decisions after peer review, instead focusing on public reviews and assessments of preprint

with the unfortunate but foreseeable consequence that Elife now does not get anymore an impact factor

Clarivate, the provider of the Web of Science platform, said it would not provide impact factors to journals that publish papers not recommended for publication by reviewers.

I don’t care about impact factors. I also do not care about Clarivate or any other Private-Equity-company as we don’t need this kind of business in science. Elife however will loose it’s value in particular as system still has some flaws.

DeevyBee commented already about them a year ago

there is a fatal flaw in the new model, which is that it still relies on editors to decide which papers go forward to review, using a method that will do nothing to reduce the tendency to hype and the consequent publication bias that ensues. I blogged about this a year ago, and suggested a simple solution, which is for the editors to adopt ‘results-blind’ review when triaging papers. This is an idea that has been around at least since 1976 (Mahoney, 1976) which has had a resurgence in popularity in recent years, with growing awareness of the dangers of publication bias (Locasio, 2017). The idea is that editorial decisions should be made based on whether the authors had identified an interesting question and whether their methods were adequate to give a definitive answer to that question.

So the idea is that the editors get the title and a modified abstract with no author names and without results.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 04.04.2026

More AI headlines

-1-

While we are still waiting for the Nobel prize speech of Geoffrey Hinton in December, AI makes even more negative headlines.

[Hinton] “I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control.” He also said he uses the AI chatbot ChatGPT4 for many things now but with the knowledge that it does not always get the answer right.

 

-2-

The sheer power consumption of running AI models is frightening. Nature News asks if AI’s huge energy demands will spur a nuclear renaissance

Google announced that it will buy electricity made with reactors developed by Kairos Power, based in Alameda, California. Meanwhile, Amazon is investing approximately US$500 million in the X-Energy Reactor Company, based in Rockville, Maryland, and has agreed to buy power produced by X-energy-designed reactors due to be built in Washington State.

 

-3-

A former OpenAI employee talks on his blog how AI is using copyrighted material eg stealing content.

While generative models rarely produce outputs that are substantially similar to any of their training inputs, the process of training a generative model involves making copies of copyrighted data. If these copies are unauthorized, this could potentially be considered copyright infringement, depending on whether or not the specific use of the model qualifies as “fair use”. Because fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis, no broad statement can be made about when generative AI qualifies for fair use. Instead, I’ll provide a specific analysis for ChatGPT’s use of its training data, but the same basic template will also apply for many other generative AI products.

Effects can be measured only indirectly for example by the visitor count at Stack Overflow where the traffic declined as many user (including me) don’t need Stack Overflow anymore.
Here is another phantastic discussion over at PP between Henry Leirvoll and 495yt on the very basic questions of copyright.

humans get inspired (parsing the external examples or experiences through their inner understanding and individual perspective) they start working to make something with their tools, skills, time and purpose. the result represents the author, their influences and their message.
a lot of this process is protected by copyright.
ai is not inspired. and it has no personal perspective or tools. no message to transmit.
any message put into prompts by an ai user is translated by it’s LLM layer into other, more complex prompts, which also get treated quasi-randomly by the weights and biases of the model, as well as rand seeds.

 

-4-

And well, ChatGPT can produce malicious code even with all precautions: Researchers Bypass AI Safeguards Using Hexadecimal Encoding and Emojis

If a user instructs the chatbot to write an exploit for a specified CVE, they are informed that the request violates usage policies. However, if the request was encoded in hexadecimal format, the guardrails were bypassed and ChatGPT not only wrote the exploit, but also attempted to execute it “against itself”, according to Figueroa.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 04.04.2026

Alternatives to Google Scholar

Kirsten Elliott has an interesting blog post

There are alternatives to Google Scholar which operate from an open research ethos and are free to use. Three prominent alternatives are The LensMatilda and OpenAlex. The one I’ve used most is OpenAlex. One study has found it to have comparable coverage to Web of Science and Scopus, and my own limited testing found significantly more publications indexed from social sciences and humanities subjects. Their code is fully open, and the data is reusable.

not as good as Google but usable

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 04.04.2026

COVID-19 Mortalität IX: Doppelt so hohe Krankenhausmortalität in Deutschland als in der Schweiz

Ich hatte in einer eigenen Studie vermutet, daß die viel höhere Beatmungsrate von Stefan Kluge in Hamburg zu einer doppelt so hohen Mortalität führte.

Nun kommt eine unabhängige Studie im Vergleich zwischen Deutschland und der Schweiz zu einem nahezu identischen Ergebnis.

The in-hospital mortality was significantly higher in Germany than in Switzerland (21% vs. 12%, OR 2.0, 95% CI 1.9–2.0, p < .001). Matched cohorts showed reduced differences, but Germany still exhibited higher in-hospital mortality. Discrepancies were evident in both pre-pandemic and pandemic analyses, highlighting existing disparities between both countries […]  The fact that a higher pre-pandemic in-hospital mortality rate was observed in Germany with a comparable mechanical-ventilation rate suggests that there might be reasons other than the pandemic.

Ursache ist natürlich die Indikation zur Beatmung. Und das obwohl wir es schon ziemlich früh in der Pandemie besser wussten dank  Thomas Voshaar in Moers, siehe auch

COVID-19 Mortalität VIII: Hamburg reloaded

COVID-19 Mortalität VII: ICUs in Deutschland

COVID-19 Mortalität VI: Was hat sich an der S3 Leitlinie geändert?

COVID-19 Mortalität V: Vergleich Schweiz/Österreich

COVID-19 Mortalität IV: Wie wir sie senken könnten

COVID19 Mortalität III: Wie gut ist die Leitlinie zur Beatmung?

COVID-19 Mortalität II: Hamburg und München im Vergleich

COVID-19 Mortalität I: Wieso ist die Mortalität In Deutschland so unterschiedlich?

Christian Karagiannidis in seiner letzten Publikation vermeidet wohlweislich meinen Ortsvergleich, kommt am Ende aber nicht umhin, die Übertherapie aus wirtschaftlichen Gründen zu kritisieren – reichlich verklausuliert – daß nämlich eine neue „Indikationsqualität zur Aufnahme auf die Intensivstation“ notwendig ist.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 04.04.2026

Scientific integrity is now included in the Helsinki Declaration

JAMA has a new revision of the Helsinki Declaration. Compared to the 2013 version there is now a new chapter on scientific integrity

Scientific integrity is essential in the conduct of medical research involving human participants. Involved individuals, teams, and organizations must never engage in research misconduct.

Additional details can be found in an Editor’s note and my comments are at Retraction Watch.

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 04.04.2026

Comparatively trivial

Nature has a short report about historical peer reviews including a link to the Referee Report of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin about the 1954 Watson & Crick complementary paper (not the 1953 Watson & Crick double helix paper).

https://makingscience.royalsociety.org/items/rr_79_230/referees-report-by-dorothy-mary-crowfoot-hodgkin-on-a-paper-the-complementary-structure-of-deoxyribonucleic-acid-by-francis-harry-compton-crick-and-james-dewey-watson?page=1

And here is Fig 5 and Fig 6 of the paper under review. So did Watson & Crick follow her advice?

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.1954.0101

I don’t think so.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 04.04.2026

Risks you should be aware of as study participant

I wrote about this about this basically 15 years ago

Confidentiality has been seen in the past as a fundamental ethical principle in health care and breaching confidentiality is usually a reason for disciplinary action. It has been assigned such a great value because it directly originates from the patient’s autonomy to control his or her own life […] Two types of re-identification are possible: the “Netflix” type and the “profiling” type.

There is a new Cell paper that builds a “profiling” attack using even single-cell gene expression data only

we demonstrate that individuals in single-cell gene expression datasets are vulnerable to linking attacks, where attackers can infer their sensitive phenotypic information using publicly available tissue or cell-type-specific expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) information.

So this should be included in informed consent forms also.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 04.04.2026

Fellow Scientist: You must correct the record

Many PubPeer records highlight papers that are never corrected. Unfortunately there are many authors who never respond to comments in the hope that everything will be forgotten a few days later. Also Stanford’s Tessier-Lavigne hoped that time will let the dust settle while the Kirkland & Ellis Report by July 17,2023 clearly states

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/12/statement-stanford-board-chair-jerry-yang

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 04.04.2026

Christian and Islamic Fundamentalism

After a recent discussion here I followed up the empirical data that are published in “Fundamentalismus und Fremdenfeindlichkeit Muslime und Christen im europäischen Vergleich“.

 Almost half of European Muslims agree that there is only one interpretation of the Koran, that Muslims should return to the roots of Islam, and that religious rules are more important than secular laws. Based on these items, a WZB study shows that religious fundamentalism is much more common among Muslims than among Christians. This is alarming in the light of the strong link between religious fundamentalism and outgroup hostility.

Legend of the WZB results from left to “return to the roots”, “only one binding interpretation”, “religious rules more important than secular law”, “agree to all”

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 04.04.2026

Wissenschaftsbürokratie

Ich habe es schon immer vermutet, was bei der Horvath Studie nun schwarz auf weiss herauskam

Die deutschen Bundesministerien sind einer Studie zufolge auf Leitungsebene von Expertinnen und Experten mit politikwissenschaftlichem und juristischem Hintergrund dominiert. Nur knapp ein Viertel verfüge über ein abgeschlossenes Studium im Bereich der Wirtschaftswissenschaften oder der MINT-Fächer, heißt es in der Studie „Top-Verwaltung im Fokus“ der Unternehmensberatung Horváth. Zudem hätten nur 42 Prozent vor ihrer Tätigkeit in einem Bundesministerium Berufserfahrung in der Privatwirtschaft gesammelt.

Horvath

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 04.04.2026