Not one, but two papers on fibroblast growth factors and glycosaminoglycans

Changye Sun and Yong Li, who successfully defended their PhD theses in November have published a paper each in Open Biology on the interactions of fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) with glycosaminoglycans:

Heparin binding preference and structures in the fibroblast growth factor family parallel their evolutionary diversification

and

Selectivity in glycosaminoglycan binding dictates the distribution and diffusion of fibroblast growth factors in the pericellular matrix.

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Can we evaluate ourselves without journals?

This is a question raised at the end of the excellent article by @Amy_Harmon regarding Open Access and preprints is can biomedical scientists evaluate each other without journals?

The short answer is a resounding yes.  Physical scientists and mathematicians have been posting much of their research as preprints on arXiv for a few decades, with no prejudice to their ability to evaluate the quality of work or of individuals.

The counter argument raised by many in biomedical sciences, from scientists to some journal editors can be boiled down quite simply: We are special and cannot possibly do this.

Various arguments are put forward, from competition (=fear of scooping) to intellectual property. These arguments are heard in many biomedical/biology departments, sometimes leading to quite heated discussions. It is also interesting to note that the defenders of the status quo are not necessarily the older members of the community.

There is a simple answer. Yes you are special, but not in the good sense of the word.

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We are afraid

A tweet brought me to a PeerJ blog post on the uptake of open peer review. The post is worth reading. At PeerJ open review is an option – authors and reviewers can opt in or out, and only if both opt in is the reviewing history of a paper published.  One thing that caught my eye was that while 80% of authors opt in, the total number of paper with open reviews is just 40%, which indicates that reviewers are more reticent.

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Open access and sci-hub: stumbling into the future

This post assembles various comments I have posted and other thoughts on sci-hub and access to the scientific literature. It finishes with some ideas about what we should consider keeping and some of my better experiences, as a consumer and producer of the scientific literature.

Some time between clay tablet and the PDF

Once upon a time manuscripts were hand written, double spaced (fountain pen as ever outperforming all other tools), graphs transferred to tracing paper using a rotoring pen and Letraset (also alive and well) used for symbols.

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Pubpeer & progress

During a quick scan this morning of the “recent” comments on Pubpeer, an activity that I pursue regularly, as part of my reading, there seemed to be a lot more author responses.  So I counted.

70 articles featured with comments.

10 of these had an author response.

This is progress. I have no data, but my impression is that a year ago author comments were far rarer, maybe 1% or thereabouts. Now we are at 14%. Let’s hope this is not an anomaly, but a trend, and maybe in a few years papers without author responses will be in the minority.

Regardless of arguments about anonymity, etc., post publication peer review is growing, which is a sign of health in the scientific enterprise.

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