Facebook and science

Like all the best London based media outlets (ha!), I'm going to go on and on and on about Facebook for a bit (but about a year too late, I really am cutting edge).

Facebook (*sigh*): I think I hate it, but amazingly I find myself a regular user; a fact that makes me sad on the inside. And yet some in the scientific community have taken to it like geeky ducks to nerdtastic water, no doubt a large part due to Facebook's origins as a university/workplace social network tool. There are over 500 science groups on Facebook, and I'm sure some are actually about science, such as the "American Association for the Advancement of Science" groups, and more frivolous ones such as the"I listen to the Guardian Science Podcast" and "Null Hypothesis - the journal of unlikely science" groups.

Now Biomedcentral have the option to post articles published by them on to Facebook (along side social bookmarking sites like digg and cool specialist scientific bookmarking sites like citeulike). I cannot quite work out if I'm angered or amazed by this. I think I'm amazed, it's really great to see social networking and all that web2.0 stuff creeping into biomedical science. The only think that makes me slightly scared is that Facebook is just a passing fad, and in a years time we'll all be like "hey remember Facebook? No one uses Facebook now, all the cool kids use Kidney Network". That said, BMC have nothing to lose in adding Facebook functionality. Who knows, maybe these social networking sites might revolutionise the scientific publication system in ways we are yet to imagine.


This reminds me, I really should add digg, del.icio.us, etc.. this blog.

Reed-Elservier decide to stop being evil.

Wow, my faith in humanity is in a little way restored today; Reed-Elsevier have announced that they are going to stop running the DSEi and other arms fairs.

In a statement, they announced:

"it has become increasingly clear that growing numbers of important customers and authors have very real concerns about our involvement in the defence exhibitions business.

"We have listened closely to these concerns and this has led us to conclude that the defence shows are no longer compatible with Reed Elsevier's position as a leading publisher of scientific, medical, legal and business content."

Which appears to be a victory for those with any sense. Woot! I wish this sort of thing happened more often.

Big dog, little dog, single gene, dwarf mice and many authors.

Research published in Science shows that variation in a single gene, insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1), may determine the body size of domestic dogs [1]. IGF1 is one of those growth factors that crops up all the time in skeletal development (mouse knockouts, for example, exhibit achondroplasia [2]), so it's not a shock to see it here. Though it is pretty cool science. You can read all about the ins and outs of this in other places, I've got another point to make.

There are 12 people on this paper. 12, from 8 different institutions. This is fairly typical for Science, Nature, Cell papers, and indeed any other high impact paper. People get put on papers to add weight to the research, or to embiggen friends, bosses and spouses. I have heard of at least one researcher who puts their partner on to papers, even when the partner in question has had nothing to do with the actual research, and conversely I know of students and technicians who have put the hours in to actually do the research for a paper, only to be thanked by being left off the paper, sometimes not even making the acknowledgments. These practices, whist being widespread, are dodgy at best and down right fraudulent at worst.

As I've said before, I'm just a lowly PhD student, and who am I to comment, but the whole situation leaves me saddened. Though, that said, if i was to be put on to a Science paper with out lifting a finger, would I get on my high horse and ride out into moral sunset? I doubt it.

I've copied the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' guidelines on authorship below [3]. I'd be very surprised if all 12 authors on this paper fulfil all three criteria of the first point below, though I'd love to be wrong.

• Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.

• When a large, multi-center group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript (3). These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship defined above and editors will ask these individuals to complete journal-specific author and conflict of interest disclosure forms. When submitting a group author manuscript, the corresponding author should clearly indicate the preferred citation and should clearly identify all individual authors as well as the group name. Journals will generally list other members of the group in the acknowledgements. The National Library of Medicine indexes the group name and the names of individuals the group has identified as being directly responsible for the manuscript.

• Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship.

• All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed.

• Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.

[1]Sutter et al, 2007, DOI: 10.1126/science.1137045
[2]Wang et al, 2006, DOI:10.1210/en.2006-0196
[3]http://www.icmje.org/ accessed 10/04/2007

Elsevier promote arms sales

Really, this update, which the first in a very long time, should be pithy, "comical" and light hearted. Especially as our one reader has viciously slandered me on their site.

Alas, it isn't to be.

Thanks Dr Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column in the Guardian, (and associated blog) I recently discovered that Reed Elsevier are involved in running trade fairs for arms manufacturers.

Remember kids, guns and bombs, death and destruction, all that stuff is bad. The arms industry is bad. It doesn't take a genius moral philosopher to work out why.

I'm writing a paper at the moment. You try and write a paper about biology and not think about publishing it in an academic journal owned by Elsevier, they publish the vast majority of all reputable journals in the biological and health science, including some of the biggies, such as the Lancet. Richard Smith[1] has recently published an engaging editorial on this very matter in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine pointing out the irony of health journals beng published by the agents of death[2], especially as the Lancet has published a few high profile pentagon baiting articles on the civilian death toll in Iraq and the danger of cluster bombs. I've no idea what it's like in other fields, but I wouldn't be surprised to find Elsevier dominating there too.

What to do? Well, protesting, boycotting and petitioning are all great places to start. It's easy to sign the petitions and wave a placard, but is what about boycotting? I'm finding a conflict between my ethics and my desire to get my first publication into the most respected and widely read publications possible. It's shite, especially as KCL (where I'm based) is not a full member of the open access published Biomed Central, and so to publish in their (equally excellent) journal will cost my grant several hundreds of pounds.
In my case, unless my boss and collaborators pull rank, morality will win out. and I'll ask to publish somewhere else, probably to the detriment of my CV. But I'm just one little [3] PhD student working in a rather obscure branch of biology, what difference will I make? It's time to get organised. As Richard Smith wrote:

It is essential, however, to act together. Somebody
needs to orchestrate a campaign. The people in the
strongest position to do so are the authors and readers of
The Lancet and the 2000 other journals. Who will take the
lead?

I'll get off the soapbox now. Occasional, poorly written things about science will continue to be posted in the future.

[1] medical doctor, former editor of the BMJ, journalologist (is that even a word?), and brother of comic Arthur Smith, that, as they say, is a fact!
[2] excuse the melodrama for a moment please
[3] ok, ok, I'm not little, but I am inconsequential.