All posts by admin

Software

Der Betreiber einer Internetsuchmaschine ist bei personenbezogenen Daten, die auf von Dritten veröffentlichten Internetseiten erscheinen, für die von ihm vorgenommene Verarbeitung verantwortlich

Der Gerichtshof der Europäischen Union schreibt in einer neuen Pressemitteilung

Urteil in der Rechtssache C-131/12 Google Spain SL, Google Inc. / Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González
Der Betreiber einer Internetsuchmaschine ist bei personenbezogenen Daten, die auf von Dritten veröffentlichten Internetseiten erscheinen, für die von ihm vorgenommene Verarbeitung verantwortlich
Eine Person kann sich daher, wenn bei einer anhand ihres Namens durchgeführten Suche in der Ergebnisliste ein Link zu einer Internetseite mit Informationen über sie angezeigt wird, unmittelbar an den Suchmaschinenbetreiber wenden, um unter bestimmten Voraussetzungen die Entfernung des Links aus der Ergebnisliste zu erwirken, oder, wenn dieser ihrem Antrag nicht entspricht, an die zuständigen Stellen.

Das Urteil hat ziemlich lange gedauert, 20 Jahre, oder? Leider, so gut das Urteil auch ist, es wird umgehend instrumentalisiert

Jane Wakefield reports at BBC that a man convicted of possessing child abuse images is among the first to request Google remove links links to pages about his conviction after a European court ruled that an individual could force it to remove ‘irrelevant and outdated’ search results. Other takedown requests since the ruling include an ex-politician seeking re-election who has asked to have links to an article about his behaviour in office removed and a doctor who wants negative reviews from patients removed from google search results.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.01.2026
Allergy, Software

Journal of Allergy

Being spammed by a company called Hindawi for many years, I tried to find out a bit more about one of their journals called “Journal of Allergy”. The website http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ja says

Journal of Allergy is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes original research articles, review articles, and clinical studies in all areas of allergy. Journal of Allergy currently has an acceptance rate of 43%. The average time between submission and final decision is 59 days and the average time between acceptance and final publication is 34 days.

According to their own description, they are located in Cairo and employ some 200 to 1,000 employees. Hindawi seems to be the name of one of their founders. In some other web sources they claim  410 Park Avenue, 15th Floor, New York, USA, as their address.  Google Streetview shows at  that address a 11+2 floor building with Chase Manhattan Bank located at the ground floor.
Only 40 or so of the 500+ Hindawi journals have any impact factor associated with.
Declan Butler at Nature already wrote about these kind of journals:

Open-access publishers often collect fees from authors to pay for peer review, editing and website maintenance. Beall asserts that the goal of predatory open-access publishers is to exploit this model by charging the fee without providing all the expected publishing services. These publishers, Beall says, typically display “an intention to deceive authors and readers, and a lack of transparency in their operations and processes”.

At the moment, the Journal of Allergy is not being black listed by Beall (while Hindawi had been in the past). “Journal of Allergy” should not be confused with “The Journal of Allergy”[Jour] that has 1514 PUBMED entries while the “Journal of Allergy”[Jour] has only 157 entries so far. Is this an “intention to deceive authors and readers”?
The most recent issue appears as of “Epub 2014 Apr 6”, the first one as “Epub 2009 Jul 2”, so the company basically publishing 2-3 papers per month.
The Pubmed Analyzer are not very informative here. The whole “Journal of Allergy” has accumulated only 135 citations in the past 5 years (not an impressive figure as I have authored more than a dozen single papers that have received all more citations than the whole journal).
The extreme low citation rate and the missing impact factor may not be taken as an indicator that all papers are of poor quality but raises serious doubts.
The next question therefore is: Does the journal run a state of the art review process? The website list the following 24 scientists on the review board:

William E. Berger, University of California, Irvine, USA
Kurt Blaser, Universität Zürich, Switzerland
Eugene R. Bleecker, Wake Forest University, USA
Jan de Monchy, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Frank JP Hoebers, MAASTRO Clinic, The Netherlands
Stephen T. Holgate, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
S. L. Johnston, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Young J. Juhn, Mayo Clinic, USA
Alan P. Knutsen, Saint Louis University, USA
Marek L. Kowalski, Medical University of Lodz, Poland
Ting Fan Leung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Clare M Lloyd, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Redwan Moqbel, University of Manitoba, Canada
Desiderio Passali, University of Siena, Italy
Stephen P. Peters, Wake Forest University, USA
David G. Proud, University of Calgary, Canada
Fabienne Rancé, CHU Rangueil, France
Anuradha Ray, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Harald Renz, Philipps University of Marburg, Germany
Nima Rezaei, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Iran
Robert P. Schleimer, Northwestern University, USA
Massimo Triggiani, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy
Hugo Van Bever, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Garry M. Walsh, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom

Unfortunately this list is not identical to the editor names that are being listed directly on the PDFs ( eg the academic editor RM is not being listed at the web front). The  above editor list includes indeed some well respected scientists but there are also others that show their Hindawi affiliation as their first hit on Google only. As I know 7 of the 24 persons, I decided to email them a short 6 item questionnaire via Surveymonkey.

When did you start your role as an editor?
2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
2. What is your role there?
Leading editor- supervising associate editors
Editor – assigning papers to reviewes, holding final decision Reviewer – reading and scoring papers
Sonstiges (bitte angeben)
3. How many papers have you been dealing with?
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or more
4. How many papers did you accept?
nearly none, about half, most, all
5. Are you being paid for that work?
no, yes, don’t want to tell
6. Is this a serious journal?
no, yes, don’t know

2 of my 24 emails bounced- some of the members of the editorial board are already retired.
19 did not respond. I believe they will show the same behaviour when being addressed by Hindawi.
1 editor sent me a personal email saying that he will resign from the board. It will be interesting to see when the list of editors will be changed, I already started a change detection.
3 editors answered the mini survey: Editor #1 started in 2010, has been dealing with more than 5 papers, accepted most, is not paid and believes it is a serious journal. Editor #2  started in 2009 with all other responses being identical.  Editor #3 started also in 2009 but accepts only half of the papers.
It doesn’t come unexpected that these 3 motivated editors believe in a regular review process. I fear, however, that most editors either do not work for the journal (anymore) or are not motivated to spend even 3 minutes for the quality control of their work.
Without any transparent review process like that at the BMC journals, we can not judge from the outside if there is any review process. The names of the individual reviewers are unknown, and even contacting the authors would not help as they don’t have an interest to reveal that they get a paper published without any review process.

As a library one could order printed copy ( e.g. 20 articles per year for $395 ) although I could not locate any library in the world that has any subscription to this journal.
As an author I would be charged $800 per PDF. There seems to be no major text editing included in the publication process, what you get for your $800 is a quickly reformatted text, a PUBMED entry and a PDF sitting at a cloud server for an unknown storage time. My estimate for that service is $10.

Declan Butler developed a check list of serious publishers and journals. So we can now use that check list to judge this journal.

Check that the publisher provides full, verifiable contact information, including address, on the journal site. Be cautious of those that provide only web contact forms.

FAILED (PARTIALLY)

Check that a journal’s editorial board lists recognized experts with full affiliations. Contact some of them and ask about their experience with the journal or publisher.

FAILED (PARTIALLY)

Check that the journal prominently displays its policy for author fees.

PASSED

Be wary of e-mail invitations to submit to journals or to become editorial board members.

FAILED (SPAMMER)

Read some of the journal’s published articles and assess their quality. Contact past authors to ask about their experience.

FAILED (POOR QUALITY)

Check that a journal’s peer-review process is clearly described and try to confirm that a claimed impact factor is correct.

FAILED (NO IMPACT)

Find out whether the journal is a member of an industry association that vets its members, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (www.oaspa.org).

PASSED

Another set of guidelines for fake journals is available at Wikipedia. Complaints that are associated with predatory open-access publishing include

Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control, including hoax and nonsensical papers.

CAN NOT BE DECIDED YET

Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted.

FALSE

Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards.

TRUE

Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission, and not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards.

UNCLEAR

Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.

FALSE

Mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals.

TRUE

Verdict: The journal does not pass the Butler criteria of a scientific journal.

Comment: I do not see any major problem if an open access journal is publishing all manuscripts it receives, leaving the final decision of being good or bad science to a post-publication review process. I see, however, a major problem if any pre-publication review process is being assumed for Pubmed listed papers (and paid for) while being never documented in a transparent way.

Addendum: Change log editor page

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.01.2026
Philosophy

Looks really good on paper?

Chinese science hasn’t the best reputation at all. A new piece at the Economist now shows that

by volume the output of Chinese science is impressive .. The number grew from a negligible share in 2001 to 9.5% in 2011, second in the world to America, according to a report published by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China. From 2002 to 2012, more than 1m Chinese papers were published in SCI journals; they ranked sixth for the number of times cited by others.

But wait

A hint of the relative weakness of these papers is found in the fact that China ranks just 14th in average citations per SCI paper, suggesting that many Chinese papers are rarely quoted by other scholars.

So, they are now overdoing it even more than Euopean scholars who are already crazy at getting as many papers published irrespective of any science behind.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.01.2026
Joke, Software

How our personal data are being traded

Tom Brewster had an interesting idea: selling hsi own data. Why should anyone else make money with it?

When I decided to sell the secret details of my personal life, I had high hopes I’d get a willing buyer. It didn’t go well.
I had been curious to see if I could make money from my online information – something that data brokers across the world are doing every day; collecting it, combining it with others’ information and flogging it to marketing firms or anyone willing to pay. So I put myself on eBay.

The article is really interesting to read, yea, yea.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.01.2026
Software

ChipMe

I am excited to be part of a new COST action So far only the EU description has been online while now also the brandnew website can be reached at chipme2.promoscience.com (twitter channel is @IS1303CHIPME).

Bildschirmfoto 2014-05-08 um 14.13.30

From the official project description

The falling cost of genome sequencing is making genetic information more easily accessible to the ordinary citizen. The proliferation of different actors in COST countries and beyond, engaging with the generation and interpretation of genetic data represents a tremendous opportunity but also a new challenge for society. The public health care system will increasingly be asked to provide interpretation and counselling relating to genetic information that has been generated privately and to satisfy the legitimate curiosity of participants in large-scale population genetic research. Existing ethical and regulatory frameworks may not be suitable to allow an efficient and ethical meeting of demand and supply of genetic knowledge and health, as well as a virtuous interaction between public and private actors. This Action aims to improve the state of the art by creating a community of researchers and stakeholders and linking existing initiatives which bring critical expertise in bioethics, social studies of science and technology, genetic technology, information and communication technology, stakeholder deliberation, and patient centred initiatives (PCI).

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.01.2026
Genetics, Philosophy

For research use only!

I am currently writing a piece on genetic testing, basically arguing that genetic testing is still a research method and whole genome sequencing nothing for prime time as basically now summarized also in JAMA:

In this exploratory study of 12 volunteer adults, the use of WGS was associated with incomplete coverage of inherited disease genes, low reproducibility of detection of genetic variation with the highest potential clinical effects, and uncertainty about clinically reportable findings. In certain cases, WGS will identify clinically actionable genetic variants warranting early medical intervention. These issues should be considered when determining the role of WGS in clinical medicine.

Maybe the judgment of any scientific method was largely limited to experts about 20 years ago. You had to know something about research, you had to go to a library, you had to find the relevant information and eventually put it into the right context. Only a few people and only a few journalists could do that. (and only the latter would even publish their opinion).
This has completely changed with so many research papers now being published online. There is no more gate, no more gatekeeper. It means, however, that research papers are frequently misinterpreted – from patient advocacy groups to companies to medical doctors. I would wish that research papers would carry a “For research use only!” label as printed on many bottles with enzymes, antibodies and alike (Medical information is otherwise still restricted in Germany to physicians, pharmacies and medical staff). Given that rather muddle-headed situation in genetic testing, I think the new JAMA paper is a welcome recommendation for everybody!

incomplete … low reproducibility .. uncertainty

yea, yea.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.01.2026
Philosophy, Software

The human disease network (no need to call it diseasome)

There was the 2077 Goh PNAS paper using that title. And it is a sound approach probably better than any division of chapters in Harrison’s Internal Medicine!

A network of disorders and disease genes linked by known disorder–gene associations offers a platform to explore in a single graph-theoretic framework all known phenotype and disease gene associations, indicating the common genetic origin of many diseases. Genes associated with similar disorders show both higher likelihood of physical interactions between their products and higher expression profiling similarity for their transcripts, supporting the existence of distinct disease-specific functional modules. We find that essential human genes are likely to encode hub proteins and are expressed widely in most tissues.

I found this on a slide at the recent vitamin D congress in London and was just interested to see, how often this paper has been cited. So far as I remember only the Barabasi update. And the result is impressing Continue reading The human disease network (no need to call it diseasome) →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.01.2026
Allergy

John Bostock – the first scientific description of allergy

The Lancet reported recently about the life of John Bostock, the famous author “Of the Catarrhus Aestivus or Summer Catarrh” in  the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions 1828; Vol.14: 437-446.

And I knew already that his grave is on the Kensal Green Cemetry in London. Although the description at findagrave is correct, I needed additional help of the cemetry – Ioannis Bostock (1773-1846) is buried in grave number 6263, square 102. It is a portland stone pedestal with an urn on it (he died of cholera) but the inscription is very faint after nearly 170 years and reads

Continue reading John Bostock – the first scientific description of allergy →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.01.2026
Software

Avoid spinners

I see spinners everywhere – although I once learned that this is just poor website design. There are even spinner factories to create you own custom waiting room.
gif
As I am doing a lot of time consuming jpg manipulation here and didn’t want to further increase any server overhead, I went back to rather old fashioned method – the turning slash known from old UNIX and DOS times. It expands my previous article on avoid-browser-flickering-with-dark-backgrounds writing to the preloader div and stopping after loading the iframe.

var str = "|/-\\";
var i = 1;
function myLoop () {
   setTimeout(function () {
      j=str.charAt(i%(str.length));
      $('#preload').text( i ) ;
      i++;
      if (i<99) myLoop();
   }, 150)
}
myLoop(); 
$(function(){
    $('#iframe').load(function(){
        i=99;
    });
});

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.01.2026
Philosophy, Theology

One of my biggest problems

One of my biggest problems in science certainly is the motivation of finding truth. But as Oliver Burkeman puts it correctly

Even in the world of academia, most people aren’t motivated by the truth. What they want, above all, is not to be bored

And he continues to cite Murray Davis

What is it, Davis asks, that makes certain thinkers – Marx, Freud, Nietzsche – legendary? “It has long been thought that a theorist is considered great because his theories are true,” he writes, “but this is false. A theorist is considered great, not because his theories are true, but because they are interesting.”

Yea, yea, that’s true.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.01.2026
Genetics, Joke, Vitamins

Cycling is good for you (and vitamin D is an activity marker)

Vitamin D level is an activity or lifestyle marker, although this has been largely neglected in the medical literature, maybe except Gannage 2000, Hyppönen 2007, Sohl 2013 and Choi 213. A new paper by de Rui in PLoS now shows that

serum 25OHD levels were significantly higher in individuals who engaged in outdoor pastimes … compared to those who did not. In particular, subjects regularly practicing gardening or cycling had higher serum 25OHD levels than those who did not, whereas 25OHD levels differed little between subjects who did or did not undertake indoor activities.

While these are good news for older cyclists Continue reading Cycling is good for you (and vitamin D is an activity marker) →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.01.2026
Software

“Keep left on bike path” – an old Garmin 60 CSX and a brandnew Openfietsmap

This is the combination that I tried today on a cycle route across Munich. And it is funny to see that there are some hidden bike paths that I was not aware off – the picture shows Schloß Blutenburg where I did not know this track along Pippinger Straße.

DSCF2516

Sure, many cycle paths are not usable Continue reading “Keep left on bike path” – an old Garmin 60 CSX and a brandnew Openfietsmap →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 19.01.2026