Journalology roundup #1

The idea for this blog grew out of an email I send around various folks at BioMed Central every week or so, with snippets gleaned from the literature. There is a vast store of these awaiting categorisation and eventual posting, but from now I'm going to post these snippets on this blog as well. Enjoy.

Science degrees without the science. "Some UK universities offer science degrees in complementary medicine. David Colquhoun argues that these are not science but anti-science, and asks who is to blame". I'd challenge the idea that it would be impossible to have a rigorous course in complementary and alternative medicine, but the current practice does not look at all rigorous.

Rebuffs and rebuttals I: how rejected is rejected? "I just got news that the paper we submitted a mere six weeks ago has been rejected, but with the kind of rejection that says, "do come back and show us how you've fixed it." Okay, it didn't say that, but I know that's what they meant. And that's all very, very terrific".

EC to promote open access publishing. The European Commission is considering a series of initiatives to promote open access publishing as part of moves to disseminate scientific information as widely as possible.

Bias in psychiatric case-control studies. Poor reporting of recruitment strategies threatens the validity of reported results and reduces the generalisability of studies.

A new Journal of Clinical Investigation conflict-of-interest policy. A rather complicated policy! And it seems to be full of holes - if an author has $9,999 in shares in a company, their policy wouldn't seem to require declaration... Perhaps less than 10K is peanuts to US authors?

China Mulls Open Access. As Research Councils UK continues to deliberate over its policy on public access to scholarly papers (a final announcement has been delayed until November), the Chinese Academy of Sciences has also begun mulling over the question of open access.