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"The Corrupted Blood incident was a widely reported virtual plague outbreak and video game glitch found in the ... game World of Warcraft... The plague began on September 13, 2005, when an area was introduced in a new update. One boss could cast a spell called Corrupted Blood, which would deal a certain amount of damage over a period of time, and which could be transferred from character to character. It was intended to be exclusive to this area, but players discovered ways to take it out, causing an epidemic across several servers. During the epidemic, some players would help combat the disease by volunteering healing services, while select others would maliciously spread the disease. These people have been compared to real-world disease spreaders, including early AIDS patient Gaëtan Dugas and Typhoid patient Mary Mallon... [World of Warcraft creator] Blizzard [was forced] to do a hard reset of all of its servers for the game." - Michael Nielsen

"a tool that can augment Google Scholar and monitor Google Scholar (and other services like Libra, CiteSeerX, SSRN), and also monitor the Web (Google, Bing, Ask) for mentions of the paper. You can access a pre-alpha version at http://www.citation-tracker.com" - Bill Hooker from Bookmarklet

at a first glimpse it doesn't really work for me being an organometallic chemist. it's easier to check scifinder (chemical abstracts) to see if someone cited me or use the journal's citation alert. i assume since scifinder is a commercial product it's not possible to implement it? - Oliver Schuster

Call me naive, but all of the comments on that post are very pessimistic. Yes, someone who shared her data got blatantly "scooped". But there was punishment, and a high profile media piece on the situation, which should be more than enough to tarnish the offending researcher's reputation. I find this almost a victory for openness - it was quite clear where they got the data, who they... more... - Shirley Wu from twhirl

A less clear example is the structural genomics consortium (www.sgc.ox.ac.uk). They are mandated to put out structures, through the PDB and on their website by the end of every month. On this case there is no target goal (ex all human kinases) that can serve as a milestone for publication. There is also no agreement or guidelines for how to use the data but obviously people working there need some publications as well for the future. - Pedro Beltrao

"Using an original method for controlling the intrinsic value of papers--identical duplicate papers published in different journals with different impact factors--this paper shows that the journal in which papers are published have a strong influence on their citation rates, as duplicate papers published in high impact journals obtain, on average, twice as much citations as their identical counterparts published in journals with lower impact factors. The intrinsic value of a paper is thus not the only reason a given paper gets cited or not; there is a specific Matthew effect attached to journals and this gives to paper published there an added value over and above their intrinsic quality. " - Michael Nielsen

Show me the duplicate papers data for social sciences. I want to understand how first -- I have seen perhaps one or two qua-duplicates in many years of reading, never two perfect duplicates, at the exception of reprints (articles becoming book chapters in edited collections, for example -- in which case citing the article is no Matthew effect at all). - Fr.

In this post, White predicts the demise of complexity/network science unless it gets more careful methodology-wise. I think he is being optimistic. Countless (sub)fields have survived despite dismal methodology. As an anonymous commenter writes: "Too many people are easily seduced by models, and too many people don't have a proper appreciation for rigorous testing, for that brand of "science" to ever go away." - Seb Paquet

Yes, I guess they will reach a point in their career where they have the luxury to let their productivity (in terms of # of papers per year) take a hit and shoot for quality instead of quantity. But I wonder if most of them will do it. - Seb Paquet

Still don't understand why their costs are higher at all - for instance, they tend to have less figures (particular ones in colour) than STM journals. - Daniel Mietchen

probably volume is one thing - they probably print and sell many fewer copies. there's hardly any advertising, and what advertising they can sell is not like what a science journal can sell. (think about the advertisements for the newest and coolest $100k piece of lab equipment or even lab consumables vs. whatever you might advertise to historians!) As the article mentions, the acceptance rate is <20% where in specialty science journals (particularly some places in physics) >60%. Articles are longer... - Christina Pikas

It's a sweeping generalization I know but it's still largely true across all the humanities disciplines that the monograph is more important as a form than the journal article. Also there is no great impetus for speed of publication; most humanities journals (again a sweeping generalization) can publish with a quarterly frequency and no one minds much, which translates to less of a... more... - Jill O'Neill

"The aim of this 3-year research project is to explore these processes through a detailed reconstruction of the ways in which the naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) assembled, filed, and cross-referenced information about plants and their medicinal virtues." - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

The clearest, most nicely written post on the entire issue. Well done! - Bora Zivkovic

I think recent interview with Pete Binfield is a good addition to this thread at this point: http://network.nature.com/people... - Bora Zivkovic

Nice. I've been wanting this for a long time - Chris Miller

Of what, adding to Zotero? That would be cool, if the Mendeley team do that (street cred). Not about the sandwich, I'd take a Philly Cheese Steak. - Paulo Nuin

I dared not to, but I dared and watched this. Dr. Peck(er) Van Handle is one -crazy- interesting person, dude. Whatever will he 'plunge into' next?? - Graham Steel

CC-licensed. Crazy Dutch people! :) - Egon Willighagen

burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrk - Pierre Lindenbaum

alternative : manger 1 deuxième brownie pour ecraser le gout, passer à autre chose (du boulot), ecouter de la bonne musique. Mais si je donne pas de nouvelle d'ici ce soir, s'affoler ! dire que je viens de voir Into the Wild il y a 2 jours et que le gars meurt empoisonné... - elifsulavraie from email

Start here - http://www.ncbirofl.com/ - Neil Saunders

LOL, HIlary - that is funny. 'Defenestration' is one of my favourite words of all times. - Bora Zivkovic

A minima, a blog post describing the project, its history, its current status and its output would be worth the effort! - Enro

Christina - I think there's many fascinating questions to be answered; my posts don't nearly do the project justice. I'd like to know the answer to questions like: How did the pattern of participation change over time (e.g., who was replying to who, how long the comments were (it changed, I'm nearly certain), what caused lulls in the conversation, what caused the conversation to move... more... - Michael Nielsen

Un succès qui fait peur tout de même... Bel étalage d'obscurantisme parmi les commentateurs... - haruspice

I put up our Spectral Game paper just to see what happens - Jean-Claude Bradley

Efficient-market hypothesis meets peer-review. What a nice patchwork, I'd add some black-market features;) - marcin

We challenge the need for formatting an article before acceptance. The assessment of the scientific value of a paper doesn't require meticulous formatting. Editors should be satisfied with a readable, generic submission. Authors would format the article after acceptance. This is a simple way to save time and unnecessary effort: We call upon journal editors and publishers to take action. - Neil Saunders

Perhaps when Elsevier have bought up all the journals they will impose a common standard ...;-) - Frank Norman

This Vocabulary contains extensions to FOAF and other vocabularies, providing terms which are useful for describing academic researchers. - Pierre Lindenbaum

did you try the google bundle already? - Avi A

Avi, are you implying it's already possible? Tell us how (don't bogart that thought, my friend, pass it over to me). - ianf ⌘

How does Google Bundle allow me to filter within a feed? Correct me if I'm wrong but this feature just allows me to group feeds together and then share with others. No filtering... - manielse (Mark Nielsen)

A Serbian molecular biologist has beaten off competition from around the world to win International FameLab, a kind of Pop Idol of science. The competition is the brainchild of the Cheltenham Science Festival, in partnership with NESTA and supported by the British Council. - NESTA

via http://thenextweb.com/2009... && FF - Pierre Lindenbaum

lol I was going to say "that's so true, except what the heck is that flower thing" but I see you're all way ahead of me - Richard Akerman

Le séminaire se penchera sur l'émergence des Digital Humanities (DH), en Amérique du Nord et en Europe, à l'intersection des sciences humaines et sociales et des computer sciences. Ce terme désigne tout à la fois un ensemble de pratiques de recherche mobilisant de manière structurelle des moyens informatiques, des modèles épistémologiques relevant du concept de "e-sciences", mais aussi des modes de diffusion des résultats de la recherche qui mobilisent les nouveau moyens de communication en réseau. A un autre niveau, le développement des Digital Humanities a des implications en terme de politique scientifique pour les sciences humaines et sociales en faisant porter l'attention sur le besoin d'infrastructures de recherche d'un nouveau type (développement des cyberinfrastructures, grilles de calcul et plateformes d'édition). - Marin Dacos

Et hop, je me suis abonné à la liste de diffusion du séminaire :-) - Enro

Merci pour le signalement ! Voir aussi le troisième épisode de la série, sur les blogs de science : http://www.sciencepresse.qc.ca/node... - Enro