Lifeboat Foundation

Behind all this is a change in the way a lot of journals make their money. Over the past decade, many have stopped selling subscriptions. Instead, they charge authors a publication fee and permit people to read the result for nothing. This “open access” business model has the advantage of increasing the dissemination of knowledge, but it also risks corrupting the knowledge thus disseminated.

WHETHER to get a promotion or merely a foot in the door, academics have long known that they must publish papers, typically the more the better. Tallying scholarly publications to evaluate their authors has been common since the invention of scientific journals in the 17th century. So, too, has the practice of journal editors asking independent, usually anonymous, experts to scrutinise manuscripts and reject those deemed flawed—a quality-control process now known as peer review. Of late, however, this habit of according importance to papers labelled as “peer reviewed” has become something of a gamble. A rising number of journals that claim to review submissions in this way do not bother to do so. Not coincidentally, this seems to be leading some academics to inflate their publication lists with papers that might not pass such scrutiny.

Experts debate how many journals falsely claim to engage in peer review. Cabells, an analytics firm in Texas, has compiled a blacklist of those which it believes are guilty. According to Kathleen Berryman, who is in charge of this list, the firm employs 65 criteria to determine whether a journal should go on it—though she is reluctant to go into details. Cabells’ list now totals around 8,700 journals, up from a bit over 4,000 a year ago. Another list, which grew to around 12,000 journals, was compiled until recently by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado. Using Mr Beall’s list, Bo-Christer Björk, an information scientist at the Hanken School of Economics, in Helsinki, estimates that the number of articles published in questionable journals has ballooned from about 53,000 a year in 2010 to more than 400,000 today. He estimates that 6% of academic papers by researchers in America appear in such journals.

Continue reading “Some science journals that claim to peer review papers do not do so” »

An expanding arcade of video games takes aim at easing autism traits, from poor visual attention to problems with motor skills, but the evidence of the games’ effectiveness remains limited.

New research shows that the brain‘s neuroplasticity isn’t as flexible as previously thought.

One of the brain’s mysteries is how exactly it reorganizes new #information as you learn new tasks. The standard to date was to test how neurons learned new behavior one #neuron at a time.

Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh decided to try a different approach. They looked at the population of neurons to see how they worked together while #learning a new behavior. Studying the intracortical population activity in the primary motor cortex of rhesus macaques during short-term learning in a brain–computer interface (BCI) task, they were able to study the reorganization of population during learning.

Continue reading “The Limits of Neuroplasticity in the Brain” »

Mariya Lyubenova is an astronomer at ESO. Her research focusses on the motions and chemical properties of stars in galaxies to unravel the build-up and evolution of galaxies. She also works as a science liaison in the education and Public Outreach Department (ePOD).

Women deserve attention for their great contributions to science. Here are some favorite figures who got us to where we are today.

Investigators at Harvard Medical School have identified the key cellular mechanisms behind vascular aging and its effects on muscle health, and they have successfully reversed the process in animals.

The scientists used a chemical compound that’s an NAD+ booster called NMN which plays a critical role in repairing cellular DNA as well as maintaining cell vitality to test what would happen.

Could reversing the aging of blood vessels hold the key to restoring youthful vitality? If the old adage “you are as old as your arteries” reigns true then the answer is yes, at least in mice.

Continue reading “Harvard Rewinds the Biological Clock of Time” »

David Eagleman, the science adviser for HBO’s TV series “Westworld,” shares his thoughts on the future of AI and whether robots will ever become conscious.

Be prepared to freak out.

Once you see them side by side, the resemblance is so obvious. Put an aggregated vision of what God looks like next to a head shot of Elon Musk and prepare to be freaked out.

July 12th sees us launch our first conference in New York City dedicated to the field of rejuvenation biotechnology, the science that seeks to end age-related diseases forever.

At the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, Cooper Union in New York City, we will be hosting a special one-day conference focused on aging research and biotech investment. Developing therapies from initial concepts, through clinical testing, and ultimately to market takes a pipeline, and right now, that p…