Monthly Archive for August, 2010

Free Journals Grow Amid Ongoing Debate

Published on August 31, 2010 in News. 0 Comments
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PLoS founders Brown, Eisen, and Varmus. CREDIT: MARTY KATZ/WASHINGTONPHOTOGRAPHER.COM

From Jocelyn Kaiser in Science:

A decade ago, three U.S. biomedical scientists vowed to start a revolution in science publishing. They wanted to persuade publishers to share research papers normally available only to paying customers in a free online library. The trio threw their weight behind a radical idea: charge authors a fee, give them copyright, and post their peer-reviewed papers on the Internet immediately for anyone to read.

The scientists called their venture the Public Library of Science (PLoS), echoing a frustration among librarians over the escalating cost of journals. They argued that taxpayers shouldn’t have to buy subscriptions to see the results of research they had already paid for. Making the world’s research papers freely available would “vastly increase the accessibility and utility of the scientific literature, enhance scientific productivity,” and bring together disparate communities in biomedicine, wrote PLoS’s founders, including Harold Varmus, the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who now heads the National Cancer Institute.

Today, the so-called open-access movement is claiming success. Publishers big and small are producing hundreds of free-to-read, peer-reviewed online journals that charge authors fees ranging from about $500 to $3000 per paper. (By various measures, between 7% and 11% of the world’s peer-reviewed scientific journals are now open access.) The most prominent publisher, the nonprofit organization PLoS, launched its first journal in 2003. This year, PLoS is on track to make a small profit—a “landmark for PLoS, but also for open-access publishing as a whole,” testified Catherine Nancarrow, a managing editor of PLoS, at a U.S. congressional hearing last month.

For more… (subscription required)

Darwin’s Method: Induction, Deduction, or Synthesis?

Published on August 25, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From The Box Move,

From Becquerel’s uranium rock to Newton’s proverbial apple and Fleming’s serendipitous observation of penicillin, the way science is done has come to be associated often with a romanticized but highly suspect notion of objectivity. This may very well be the effect on science of inductivism and the bold claim of the proponents of inductivism that science could not possibly lead to any kind of truthful explanation of the world around us without it. The questions any historian of science must then ask are: to what extent does objectivity, as surely as it is the hallmark of science, lead to the best scientific discoveries and further, how do we weight the role of accident, hunch, intuition, experimenters’ bias in the role of science especially if they happen to lead us to the right conclusion?

Charles Darwin in his Autobiography stated that he had ‘worked on true Baconian principles…collected facts on a whole-sale scale…and by extensive reading’. Such a canonical biography may be appealing but it is also a dangerous way of approaching history. At some point it must be recognized that evolution by natural selection was not the result of years of observation in which Darwin had no working hypothesis, but instead years of observations geared towards designing proofs for a hypothesis based on little more than a hunch; a frantic search on ‘the species question’ that ensued as little more than a rat race with Alfred Russell Wallace. This is all counter to the inductive procedure. Stephen Jay Gould concurs – in his essay ‘Darwin’s middle road’, Gould argues that Darwin was no inductivist but instead marshaled evidence from many different aspects:

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The Quantification of Everything

Published on August 23, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From Vlatko Verdal, Five Books

The quantum information theory professor says there is nothing distinctly novel that was brought to philosophy by quantum mechanics. The key tenet is this randomness that is at the core of our interaction with the world: there is an element that you can never make more deterministic. And, of course, randomness as a way of looking at the world has existed for a long time. He chooses books on quantifying the universe.

Your first book is Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality? by Alastair Rae. This is a completely popular book about quantum physics: there is not a single equation in there, I think. What he does is to go through all the major ways in which we try to understand quantum physics, all the major interpretations. It’s extremely good in that he writes in a very objective way and it’s very difficult to tell which one he supports. It’s very passionately argued as well, and it’s a beautiful exposition, very philosophical. I think it’s the best, probably my favourite, popular account of all the things we argue about on the fundamental side of quantum physics.

To Read More…


Science in Society Journal – Become an Associate Editor

Published on August 8, 2010 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

As part of the process of publishing The International Journal of Science in Society all submissions are sent for peer refereeing, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.

In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have reviewed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.

If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of Science in Society, please email journals@science-society.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.

Science in Society Journal Submissions Open

Published on August 8, 2010 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

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We are accepting submissions for The International Journal of Science in Society.

The International Journal of Science in Society provides an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of the past, present and future of the sciences and their relationships to society.

Conference presentations and Journal articles range from broad theoretical, philosophical and policy explorations, to detailed case studies of particular intellectual and practical activities at the intersection of science and society.

Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.

Paper submission guidelines and timelines are available online.

Series: Science in Society

Published on August 8, 2010 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

We are accepting book proposals for the imprint Science in Society.

Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.

Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.

If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.