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In an unprecedented move, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) asked the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) to pull a bioterrorism-related paper that [...]

One of the authors of two plant biology papers that were retracted last year is suing the senior author who withdrew the papers. She is alleging that her former lab [...]

Six months after scientific societies and publishers won a hard-fought battle with the U.S. government to edit and publish manuscripts from countries under a U.S. trade embargo, the American Institute [...]

Controversial plans for a Web-based repository of biomedical literature, to be hosted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have undergone another shift in the past few weeks. After the [...]

Many biologists are protesting a decision by the editors of the journal Cell to retract a paper without the authors' assent or any allegations of misconduct. In July 2004, a [...]

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS -- It's the closest most scientists will come to picking their own jurors. Amid all the checklists, bibliographic information, and file-attachment instructions, the manuscript submission forms of many [...]

Editorial Changes for Einstein Papers THE project to publish Einstein's collected papers is facing a change in leadership. John Stachel, the Boston University phisics professor who has been editor since [...]

BARCELONA, SPAIN--Mention 'peer review' and almost every scientist will regale you with stories about referees submitting nasty comments, sitting on a manuscript forever, or rejecting a paper only to repeat [...]

CALTECH, UNLIKE A NUMBER OF OTHER PREmier universities, had not been hit with a single case of research fraud--until last year. But when trouble came, it came in spades. Last [...]

New editors have a certain obligation to define their purposes and their intentions to their constituents. If they aren't already aware of that obligation, it is soon made plain to [...]

It is every scientist's nightmare: An editor calls saying he needs to talk urgently about a paper you've submitted. A reviewer thinks there's something weird in the data. It can't [...]

Scientific meetings are putting pressure on the embargo system that delays the publication of research news in the press until it was published in a journal. Journal editors maintain that authors can discuss their research at meetings but should honor the embargo in dealing with the press. However, some researchers feel they are being silenced by the journals.

Two events last week are prompting a public debate over a hot-button issue that has quiet been discussed in the scientific community since last fall's anthrax attacks: Should unclassified research [...]

Hoping to resolve an escalating debate about public access to biomedical research reports, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Elias Zerhouni consulted with scientists this week and said that he [...]

A new program is funneling money and resources to a chosen few who are found to be highly productive--but at the expense mainly of older researchers BEIJING--Being one of the [...]

As the year turns, many of us think about change, from New Year's resolutions to new ventures. At Science, the New Year is an occasion for examining our journal, reflecting [...]

Faced with spiraling costs of commercial journals, some university leaders are talking up an unusual proposal: They want to separate a, paper's peer review from its publication, so that once [...]

Starting in October, all investigators funded by the big eight research agencies in Britain may be required to put their papers and meeting talks in a free public archive 'at [...]

TOKYO -- Does a country need to publish its own internationally recognized journals to be a scientific power? Last month a group of Japanese scientists debated that question at a [...]

One of our senior outside editors gave us a shock the other day. A scientist in a country from which we get relatively few papers had sent along a manuscript, [...]

Scientists who study encryption or computer security or otherwise reverse engineer technical measures, who make tools enabling them to do this work, and who report the results of their research face new risks of legal liability because of recently adopted rules prohibiting the circumvention of technical measures and manufacture or distribution of circumvention tools. Because all data in digital form can be technically protected, the impact of these rules goes far beyond encryption and computer security research. The scientific community must recognize the harms these rules pose and provide guidance about how to improve the anticircumvention rules., Recent legislation in the United States and Europe whose ostensible purpose is to protect copyrighted works from pirates is being used to inhibit science and stifle academic research and scholarly [...]

A scientist's enthusiastic endorsement of a skin lotion against anthrax has ended his career at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston. On 17 August, John Heggers, a [...]

An embargo arrangement is general successful in keeping science news out of the press until it is formally published by a journal. However, the embargo system is increasingly under attack, and journals are revising their policies. The World Wide Web is a major cause of the changes.

Small labs have their partisans; so do big ones. The key, however, is not size alone but the style of the lab's chief--his talent for organizing, inspiring, and communicating AS [...]

The Dingell Probe Finally Goes Public Congressman John Dingell did his level best to pillory Nobel laureate David Baltimore last week. His principal strategem: to catch Thereza Imanishi-Kari at fraud [...]

In the evolution from the Gutenberg era to the so-called Ginsparg era of electronic publishing, European researchers have mostly watched from the sidelines. But big changes are afoot. Germany's Max [...]

If Celera Genomics--the biotech firm in Rockville, Maryland, that has sequenced the human genome--had decided never to publish its work, nobody would have kicked up a fuss, says company president [...]

The work day lasts well into the night, but the rewards are considerable for postdocs in Robert Langer's chemical engineering laboratory at MIT CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS--If Robert Langer's chemical engineering laboratory [...]

Following what he calls an 'egregious' violation of scientific etiquette, a researcher has shut down a public Web site containing his team's raw sequence data for Giardia lamblia, a diarrhea-causing [...]

'Dangerous' Liaisons in Cell Biology ON 2 JUNE, the journal Cell published some astonishing research results, together with an accompanying editorial, that have touched off a spirited debate among molecular [...]

Those few words in the 25 January issue of Cell made painfully public what many immunologists have known for months: there has been trouble in the lab of Caltech biologist [...]

After 'a decade in limbo,' as Nobelist and co-author David Baltimore put it last week, immunologist Thereza Imanishi-Kari has been cleared of 19 charges that she committed scientific misconduct in [...]

San Antonio--To Bernadine Healy and her staff, it was to be a historic occasion: the first-ever attempt by leaders of the National Institutes of Health to engage the scientific community [...]

'L'Affaire Pasteur' Prompts Canadian Outcry GALLIC PRIDE took it on the chin last month when scientists from one of France's former colonies accused their European colleagues of promoting Anglo-Saxon imperialism. [...]

BEIJING AND HANGZHOU--In August 1998, geneticist Yang Huanming led a skeptical crowd of scientists from around the world through a new, two-story brick building in the northern reaches of Beijing. [...]

MOSCOW--Is peer review in Russian science on the way out? It depends on whom you ask. The heads of two foundations that follow a Western-style peer-review system have very different [...]

TOKYO--Japan's Education Ministry is weighing a plan to make an institution's track record a criterion in future spending on new research buildings and large equipment. The approach would break with [...]

The importance of publicity to the field of astronomy is impacting the practice of embargoing the publication of scientific reports. Astronomy provides examples of how publicity and embargoes influence scientific communication, research priorities and funding of projects. There is often conflict among the journals, organizations sponsoring meetings and NASA.

The Underrepresentations Syndrome 'Birds of a feather flock together' is a truism that applies to scientific publishing. Authors like to see articles in their field in a journal to which [...]

Of the recent controversies at NIH's Office of Scientific Integrity, few have been as murky as the flap over University of Chicago immunologist Ursula Storb. Early this summer, Storb was [...]

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON -- James Rasmussen, owner of a funky used-record store called Bud's Jazz, and Ruth Ludwin, a seismologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, make an unlikely professional team. [...]

With new modeling techniques for estimating and pricing the risks of natural disasters, the donor community is now in a position to help the poor cope with the economic repercussions of disasters by assisting before they happen. Such assistance is possible with the advent of novel insurance instruments for transferring catastrophe risks to the global financial markets. Donor-supported risk-transfer programs not only would leverage limited disaster-aid budgets but also would free recipient countries from depending on the vagaries of postdisaster assistance. Both donors and recipients stand to gain, especially because the instruments can be closely coupled with preventive measures., Postdisaster assistance for emergency relief and reconstruction, although important for humanitarian reasons, has failed to meet the needs of developing countries in reducing their exposure to disaster risks and ensuring [...]

GenBank, the national repository for nucleotide sequence data, has implemented a new model of scientific data management, which we term electronic data publishing. In traditional publishing, both scientific conclusions and [...]

Sergy Haut, France -- On a clear day, you can see Mont Blanc, Europe's highest mountain, from David Fedson's study. His 320-year-old home, tastefully restored and decorated, is a haven [...]

The pandemic prophets are finally being listened to--at least in the United States. Last week saw a flurry of political activity on influenza in Washington, D.C. Flu experts relish the [...]

Talk about a touchy subject. Three years ago, plant ecologists were nervously discussing new findings that showed that the mere act of touching a plant during field studies could significantly [...]

Until the past few weeks, a bitter and protracted dispute between France and the United States over who should receive credit - and commercial reward - for discovering the AIDS [...]

This issue inaugurates a new look for Science and culminates an effort by the entire staff that began nearly 2 years ago to determine how best to communicate our rich [...]

A research chief could hardly ask for a happier prospect than the one that faces Walter Massey, director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), as he approaches the end of [...]