Ulrich Herkenrath, a mathematician working on stochasticity, convened a tiny symposium of only about a dozen participants discussing the role of chance in living beings. Participants included mathematicians, philosophers and neurobiologists.

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about so-called “predatory publishers”, i.e., those corporations which publish journals, some or all of  which purport to peer-review submitted articles, but publish articles for a fee without actual peer-review. The origin of the discussion can be traced to a list of such publishers hosted by librarian Jeffrey Beall.

The Human Genetics Massive: #ASHG15 in Baltimore This week the human genetics “tribe“ (as NIH Director Francis Collins referred to “his people” here) have muscled out the Eastside and Westside crews to take over the Baltimore waterfront for the yearly American Society of Human Genetics (#ASHG15) meeting.

That Was The Review Week That Was If you’ve seen the #peerrevwk15 hashtag on social media, you may have noticed this week is the first ever Peer Review Week.

Today, GigaScience launched a project providing an alternative way to give authors credit for their work, contributing more to collaboration, transparency and better data. Amye Kenall tells us more about what this is and how it works. There is a clear need for better transparency and credit around authorship. In the current system researchers are evaluated by publications and the Impact Factor of journals in which they appear.

Science has infected itself (voluntarily!) with a life-threatening parasite. It has  given away its crown jewels, the scientific knowledge contained in the scholarly archives, to entities with orthogonal interests: corporate publishers whose fiduciary duty is not knowledge dissemination or scholarly communication, but profit maximization.

What does Neuroinformatics and The Great Barrier Reef have in Common? Both are faced with challenges and comprise of beautiful colourful entities that should be freely accessible and shared. This year’s International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) Neuroinformatics 2015 meeting was held in the northern tropical Queensland city of Cairns, Australia.

*This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge.** This is the third in a series of posts about my experiences completing a PhD with a chronic illness (Part 1, Part 2, and background information). Not only is this about the tools that I used to complete my PhD, but I am optimistic that these tools/coping mechanisms will allow me to be a scientist that gets paid for doing science. The tips &

For the last 5 years I’ve been actively involved in training efforts through Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry to train researchers in best practices for software development and data analysis. These are concepts that are fundamental to the research we do in my gropu and my commitment to open and reproducible research.

An anaerobic digester at BGI. Biofuels Research Shows the Utility of Container Publishing One of the most promising areas in biofuel development is biogas, which has huge potential as a renewable and clean source of energy.