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Robert Tijan: "we want to kill the journal impact factor"

Submitted by Alexis on Fri, 2015-08-14 23:41

Robert Tijan, outgoing president of HHMI, comments on one of the goals of the eLife team in an interview with Science:
(...) we want to kill the journal impact factor. We tried to prevent people who do the impact factors from giving us one. They gave us one anyway a year earlier than they should have. Don't ask me what it is because I truly don't want to know and don't care.

http://news.sciencemag.org/funding/2015/08/qa-outgoing-hhmi-chief-refle…

The 6th Brazil School for Single-Particle Cryo-EM 2014

Submitted by niko on Thu, 2014-09-18 11:18

As a graduate student doing an EM project in a non-EM lab I had spent a few months searching for a good course that would focus on what I needed to learn. I already had experience preparing samples and collecting data, but I was a novice when it came to data processing and analysis. The Brazil School’s focus on single particles seemed perfect for what I needed in order to move forward with my project.

Sydney Brenner: "I don't believe in peer review.

Submitted by Alexis on Sat, 2014-03-01 22:55

http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2014/02/24/how-academia-and-publ…

This is a long interview with Sydney Brenner. In the second half he has a few choice words about the current state of ascience. For example:

I don’t believe in peer review because I think it’s very distorted and as I’ve said, it’s simply a regression to the mean.

Randy Schekman says his lab will no longer send papers to Nature, Cell and Science as they distort scientific process

Submitted by Alexis on Mon, 2013-12-09 21:51

Randy Shekman is using media coverage of the Nobel prize ceremonies to say his lab will no longer submit papers to Science, Nature or Cell, for reason which will sound familiar to anyone browsing this forum:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/how-journals-natur…

Here is some more coverage from the Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-sci…

Ron Vale: "Evaluating how we evaluate"

Submitted by Alexis on Sat, 2013-11-30 22:44

Ron Vale's opinion piece in Molecular Biology of the Cell (2012) is worth a read. It concerns mostly how scientists are evaluated and articulates clearly the problems with, e.g., judging a scientist by their number of publications in "high impact" journals, judging a PI by the number of publications or of postdocs with faculty positions. There are many valid points in there as well as a few suggestions for the NIH.

http://valelab.ucsf.edu/external/publications/2012ValeMBOC.pdf