publishing – GOLLYGEE!

The Obama administration is calling for more access to publicly funded research. From the New York Times:

In a memorandum issued on Friday, John P. Holdren, science adviser to President Obama, called for scientific papers that report the results of federally financed research to become freely accessible within a year or so after publication. The findings are typically published in scientific journals, many of which are open only to paying subscribers.

The new policy would apply to federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture, that finance more than $100 million a year of research. The agencies have six months to submit plans for how they would carry out the new policy.

The hope is that broad access to scientific results will encourage faster progress on research and will let anyone apply the knowledge for technological advances.

A new study suggests that most science papers are that retracted are the result of misconduct and not experimental mistakes. Misconduct is behavior like plagiarism, fabricating or falsifying data, and other types of fraud. From NPR:

A newly published analysis finds that more than two-thirds of biomedical papers retracted over the past four decades were the result of misconduct, not error. That’s much higher than previous studies of retractions had found.

“We found something that is very disturbing,” Dr. Arturo Casadevall, the co-author of a paper looking into this phenomenon that was published Monday by Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, tells Shots. “This kind of stuff has the potential to do damage to science. But we need to expose it to clean our own house.”

Casadevall, a microbiologist and immunologist, and his partners looked at the more than 2,000 retracted biomedical research papers since 1977. They found that more than 67 percent had to be retracted because of fraud, suspected fraud, duplicate publication or plagiarism. Only 21 percent of the retractions they looked at were the result of error.

GOLLYGEE!

Tag: publishing

publicly funded research should be accessible to the public

retractions