Well, sorry for the lack of posting recently. Out sick thanks to a fun antibiotic resistant bacteria. In honor of that here are some tips to staying clean:
A Germ-Zapper’s Guide to Clean (from the Washington Post
hat tip to Doug Rusch for pointing this out and giving me something to do other than worry about bacterial infections)
Just got an announcement from a friend of mine who has started a new campaign for trying to “raise America’s Walk Score.” They have launched a web site www.walkscore.com with walkability rankings of 2,508 neighborhoods in the largest 40 U.S. cities. If you go to the site and type in your address you can see how you score (Downtown Davis does really well). And if you support walkable communities they have a petition online to encourage Congress to support walking towns …
Big big news for Davis. Stage 2 of the Tour of California in 2009 will start in Davis (after Stage 1 which starts and ends in Sacramento).
Well, I wrote up this award a short time ago and already the story has changed. But I am still giving the award. On Tuesday, Peter Suber reported that
The American Psychological Association may have the worst publisher policy to date for NIH-funded authors. Excerpt:
In compliance with [the NIH OA policy], APA will deposit the final peer-reviewed manuscript of NIH-funded research to PMC upon acceptance for publication. The deposit fee of $2,500 per manuscript for 2008 will be billed to the author’s university per NIH policy….
Even after collecting the fee, the APA will not deposit the published version of the article, will not allow OA release for 12 months, will not allow authors to deposit in PMC themselves (and bypass the fee), will not allow authors to deposit in any other OA repository, and will not allow authors to retain copyright.
I agree with Peter that this is a stunningly inane move on their part (for more discussion see Suber’s follow up here). They are basically saying that to carry out a simply electronic submission they will charge $2500.
Apparently someone convinced them this was not the brightest thing in the world to do as they are now reconsidering this move (I learned about this reconsideration from the Scientist magazine blog here … you need to register to read the blog). This blog reports
A statement sent to The Scientist today from APA Publisher Gary VandenBos said: “A new document deposit policy…is currently being re-examined and will not be implemented at this time…APA will soon be releasing more detailed information about the complex issues involved in the implementation of the new NIH Public Access Policy.”
VandenBos was not available for further comment.
Even though they are reconsidering their policy, since they have not out and out rescinded it, I am still giving the American Psychological Association my first “Closed Access Award” for this incredibly silly move
The New York Times had a long and extensive article on conflicts of interest in medicine. See Times article here.
“Having everyone stand up like a Boy Scout and make a pledge isn’t going to quell suspicion,” said Dr. Donald Klein, an emeritus professor at Columbia, who has consulted with drug makers himself. “The only hope to rule out bias is to have open access to all data that’s produced in studies and know that there are people checking it” who are not on that company’s payroll.
Unfortunately the Times does not raise the issue of access to the publications themselves. Clearly having the data is good. But if nobody can read the papers and they can just read the press releases that come from the papers, we are all doomed.
Seen recently at the California Railroad Museum. I guess the people from Nature were right – PLoS One is leaving its mark everywhere.
Some people may have seen the press Stanford got a few weeks ago regarding the Open Access initiative of their School of Education. For some more information on this see
Certainly sounds like a good move on their part. And then I got an interesting thing in the mail from the Stanford Alumni Association (I earned my PhD from Stanford) trying to get me to join the association (see letter below). What was the selling point? If I joined I would get access to newspapers, periodicals and even scientific journals, through their library. So Stanford is all for OA in some places. But while they have access to closed journals, they will use that as a recruitment tool to join the Alumni Association. Seems to me like a better way to push for Open Access would be for all of Stanford to take the School of Education’s position and for the university to immediately cancel all subscriptions to completely closed access journals.
A UC Davis professor has been getting some local press for NOT going to a meeting . Well, OK that is not exactly the point. He (Timothy Morton) gave his talk remotely by video taping it and then having the people in Scotland watch the DVD and then talk to him. The reason for the news coverage is that by doing this this saves both money and carbon output. Given that I have been canceling trips left and right recently for some medical reasons, I like this idea.
So what I am now going to say is that I am canceling the trips for environmental reasons …
Well, Day 2 has begun. And I confess I still find the whole thing to be freaky. I had a rough night trying to sleep with the pump by my side and the tube connected to me. At one point it fell out of my pocket and onto the floor. In addition, my 3.5 year old daughter woke up screaming few times wanting daddy to come to her room. So I rushed into her room, once forgetting to pick up the pump from the bed and nearly dragging it on the floor.
I spent much of the AM trying to figure out how I was supposed to take a shower with this thing. I disconnected the tubing but was not sure how wet I could let the port on my belly get. So I washed the rest of me and was careful with the port.
I decided to skip work today. Just could not deal with it. And I spent the AM doing some yard work and the PM making jam and freezing some of our summer fruit growing in our yard. And I still was a bit freaked out by the whole thing.
So we decided to go out for dinner and though it was nice to be able to punch in how much I was going to eat and get a bolus from my pump, I still found the whole thing stressful. I did not know what to do with the tubing nor exactly how to carry the pump around. Then we went out for ice cream and eventually came home. So – Day 2 survived but still not exactly relaxing.
A little late on tis post but still wanted to point out this story in the Davis student newspaper (California Aggie – UC Davis Med School’s conflict of interest policies among best). They report that:
The American Medical Student Association recently conducted a ranking of medical schools based on their policies regarding free gifts from pharmaceutical companies. UC Davis was one of only seven schools nationwide who received a grade of “A” – meaning the school has a comprehensive policy that restricts pharmaceutical company representatives‘ access to both campuses and academic medical centers.
Good to see this. I find the layers of real and potential conflicts of interest in medical research in general to be very poorly handled by the community. Not that basic science is immune to this problem either but it seems worse in medical research. For some scathing commentary on conflict of interest in medical research, keep an eye on Steven Salzberg’s blog. Every once in a while he has some juicy stuff to discuss.
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 