Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
I had a book review recently in Nature, on a new volume (Thrifty Science) that looks over the history of early scientific experimentation from the viewpoint of its frugal nature – the idea of reusing and repurposing equipment, objects, and even rooms in one’s house. There was indeed a lot of this sort of thing… Read More
Here’s a personal experience with fraudulent scientific literature, as reported in Nature: In 2015, I discovered several papers had been written about a gene that I and my colleagues first reported in 1998. All were by different authors based in China, but contained shared and strange irregularities. They also used highly similar language and… Read More
A brief discussion the other day on Twitter got me to thinking about the lost world of literature searching – back when everything was bound journals and paper. My whole grad school career took place in the pre-PDF world, and a good part of it was pre-CAS Online. So those of you from that era… Read More
Update: see the comments section. The editors of the journal are calling this “a highly unusual and unfortunate error” and are taking steps to correct it. Now, this is a situation that I haven’t seen mentioned before. A reader (from one division of a large pharma company that I won’t name) had prepared a manuscript… Read More
I wrote here about a European plan to mandate open-access scientific publication – one whose sweep many found startling when it was proposed. And some of the ones who were startled were researchers themselves, it seems – here’s an open letter opposing the plan as written. Chemists seem to be among those leading the charge… Read More
Cyclin-dependent kinase (CDKs) have been drug targets for quite a while now. There are 20 different ones, and they help to regulate a whole list of important functions, particularly involving the cell cycle (which has made them of great interest in oncology research). There are three approved drugs in the area so far: Kisqali (ribociclib)… Read More
Time is short for blogging today, but I wanted to take a moment to point out people for whom time for writing things up is (apparently) never, ever short. This is a study on prolific authorship, and the high end of that cohort is pretty terrifying. At least 9,000 authors have been on 72 papers… Read More
Here’s something to keep an eye on: eleven of the largest national research funding agencies in Europe have announced a plan to require open-access publication of papers arising from their grants. The plan is that by 2020, all such work must be published in compliant open-access journals or on compliant open-access platforms. There are quite… Read More
There’s more activity on the predatory journal front. A large investigation reported recently that the number of papers put out by the five largest publishers in this category has tripled since 2015, so there’s clearly an expanding market for such “services”. Among the elite (by which I mean the top layer of this pond scum) Read More
Superconductivity is one of those places where chemistry and physics cross paths. That’s especially true as people search for higher-temperature materials, because that seems to involve more and more complex synthesis and characterization of the results. Very tiny changes in conditions or starting materials can make for huge differences in th… Read More
