The publishing industry complains about Sci-Hub, the Kzakhstan website that provides free PDF access by pulling them through some .edu proxies. This is not new while the publishing industry’ protest is getting louder and louder: Continue reading Sci-Hub and Elsevier: like David and Goliath?
Tag Archives: elsevier
Allergy transplantation
A new paper in Transplantation takes up an old question – can you passively transfer asthma or allergy? It seems so – the current study reports in 5 of 42 patients elevated IgE plus allergy symptoms. This is in line with earlier reports. Sorry to say — you can get allergy also by bone marrow transplantation.
Addendum 10/6/08
Blood
A total of 16 nonallergic recipients with allergic donors were reported to develop allergic disease posttransplant, however, conclusive information was available for only 5 cases. Allergic disease was reported to abate in 3 allergic recipients with nonallergic donors, however, conclusive information was available for only 2 cases. Problems in interpreting the reports include incomplete data on allergic disease in the donor or recipient pretransplant, not knowing the denominator, and the lack of controls. In summary, review of the literature generates the hypothesis that allergic disease is transferable
Addendum 14/7/22
Ann All Asthma Immunol
Born to be write
A decade ago Karen Hunter (at that time Senior Vice President of Elsevier) did a brilliant analysis why scientists publish:
For academic scientists, the research paradigm is the experiment and the publication output is a journal article. Academic science researchers publish to establish their claim at a specific time to a specific result. They publish to gain other forms of recognition (such as promotion and tenure) that require publication. They publish in order to have independent certification of the results and to have those certified (refereed) results archived in perpetuity. Finally, they publish to communicate with those who may be interested in their works today …
She continues with another important aspect
… not the circle of cognoscenti (who do not need publication to be informed) but researchers in related fields, researchers in less well-connected institutions and students working their way into the inner ring.
In my opinion, the “claim at a specific time to a specific result” is probably the most relevant motivation for a scientist. Nevertheless having claims on ideas presented in a printed paper seems to be still a habit of the pre 1995 stone age of scientific publishing. Databases will be certainly as reliable in the future as printed paper. I guess that in 50 years the access to current electronic documents will be even better than to any printed paper. Yea, yea.