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Peer Review and the Scientific Process
Renegade:
Would be an interesting scenario if vitamins ended up getting a health warning like with cigarettes.
-tomos (August 01, 2013, 05:57 AM)
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Okay...Then I'd be pissing myself laughing.
-Stoic Joker (August 01, 2013, 11:32 AM)
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Search for info on Agenda 21 and Codex Alimentarius. You'll not just piss yourself, you'll shit yer droors as well.
Renegade:
More funny stuff from politicians about vitamins:
http://healthimpactnews.com/2013/new-legislation-threatens-supplements/
IainB:
Good news:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
University of California to allow open access to new academic papers
On November 1, faculty will be automatically enrolled in the UC's open access policy.
by Megan Geuss - Aug 3, 2013 8:45 pm UTC
The University of California—an enormous institution that encompasses 10 campuses and over 8,000 faculty members—introduced an Open Access Policy late last week. This policy grants the UC a license to its faculty's work by default, and requires them to provide the UC with copy of their peer-reviewed papers on the paper's publication date. The UC then posts the paper online to eScholarship, its open access publishing site, where the paper will be available to anyone, free of charge.
Making the open access license automatic for its faculty leverages the power of the institution—which publishes over 40,000 scholarly papers a year—against the power of publishers who would otherwise lock content behind a paywall. “It is much harder for individuals to negotiate these rights on an individual basis than to assert them collectively,” writes the UC. “By making a blanket policy, individual faculty benefit from membership in the policy-making group, without suffering negative consequences. Faculty retain both the individual right to determine the fate of their work, and the benefit of making a collective commitment to open access.”
Faculty members will be allowed to opt out of the scheme if necessary—if they have a prior contract with a journal, for example. Academic papers published in traditional journals before the enactment of this policy will not be made available on eScholarship at this time.
“As faculty members, we are asserting our control over the publication of scholarly research and recognize the responsibility for making that process sustainable and true to the intentions of scholars,” explained the UC on a FAQ page. “The faculty are also sending a strong collective message to publishers about the values and the system we would like in the future.”
The move comes at a time when the US federal government is heavily promoting open access. In February 2013, the White House announced that all science papers produced through federal funding would be made available to the public one year after their publication, and the Obama Administration is working to extend that policy to cover the information published by all federal agencies. Many other institutions have adopted open access policies, including 177 other universities and the World Bank.
As Chris Kelty, associate professor at the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, explained in a series of videos on the UC's eScholarship site: ”Everybody benefits from this really, the faculty benefit from this because their work's more widely available, it might come in for higher citations. The University benefits because the profile of the University is higher and it might send a message to Sacramento about our commitment to research. And the public benefits—whether you're a K-12 teacher, or someone in an emergency room looking for an article, or someone in business trying to get a patent, everyone in the public benefits from wider availability of our research.” In addition, Kelty explained, publishers “are quite reconciled to this” after seeing 177 other universities take a similar path.
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Renegade:
Good news:
-IainB (August 03, 2013, 10:15 PM)
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Very good news.
I briefly browsed and looked into a few articles.
One recently published one that I glanced at was simply terrifying. What the authors were advocating was horrific. And that was just the first paragraph.
I think it will be a very good thing to have these kinds of papers exposed to the light of day, rather than mulled over in dark corners by policy makers and implemented without anyone being able to even know what's going on.
IainB:
^^ Yes, the horrifying ideas that some so-called "scientists" and "progressives" seem to come up with from time to time that look as though they might almost have been deliberately designed to drag us backwards in time, into a kind of barbarism.
There was an interesting link about this at Bishop Hill, referring to the hijacking of science, motivated by power/political interests in the Energy sector:
Delingpole on shale
Aug 17, 2013 Energy: gas Royal Society
James Delingpole has a perceptive piece on shale gas and the parallels with Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged:
One of the things she foresaw was the current nonsensical, dishonest, canting campaign against shale gas. In Atlas Shrugged it takes the form of Rearden Metal, the miracle technology which is going to transform the US economy if only the progressives will let it. But of course, Rand’s fictional progressives don’t want Reardon Metal to succeed any more than their modern, real-life equivalents want shale gas to succeed. Why not? For the same rag-bag of made-up, disingenuous reasons which progressives have used to justify their war on progress since time immemorial: it’s unfair, it uses up scarce resources, it might be dangerous. Rand doesn’t actually use the phrase “the precautionary principle.” But this is exactly what she is describing in the book when various vested interests – the corporatists in bed with big government, the politicised junk-scientists at the Institute of Science (aka, in our world, the National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society), the unions – try to close down the nascent technology using the flimsiest of excuses.
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Although it has been pointed out that the Royal Society have been broadly supportive of shale developments, the parallels that James points out are rather striking.
Read the whole thing
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