OPEN SCIENCE
The Student Initiative for Open Science (SIOS) aims to promote the principles and practices of open science to undergraduate students. A wonderful initiative by students for students. Their next event is a talk by Eric-Jan Wagenmakers on June 6, 2019 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Richard Poynder has interviewed Arianna Becerril-García, Chair of AmeliCA, on her plans and objectives for open access in Latin America and the Global South.
PUBLISHING
Louisiana State University will cancel its big deal with Elsevier at the end of 2019 and instead opt for subscription of selected journals only. The university expects this to cut its costs by half.
RESEARCH
China is planning to introduce legislation regulating genetic modifications in humans that also creates liabilities in the event of negative outcomes. News story by David Cyranoski in Nature. In the US on the other hand, the House spending panel plans to remove an outright ban on gene-edited babies imposed by congress on the FDA. Report by Jocelyn Kaiser in Science.
PLOS
Authors at all PLOS journals have now the option to publish their peer review history alongside their accepted manuscript. Reviewer names would remain anonymous unless a reviewer opts to sign the review with their name. The peer review history items will also have doi persistent identifiers. It is an exciting step towards openness and transparency in peer review, at large scale.
EVENTS
The 2nd PEERE International Conference on Peer Review will be held in Valencia, Spain, from 11 – 13 March 2020. Abstract deadline is 15 November 2019.
OTHER
The US Senate has postponed consideration of an amendment to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (bill H.R. 1608) over objections from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The FACA bill requires increased transparency for federal advisory committees, but the NIH claims that the associated burden on scientific reviewers of research grants would be prohibitively high.
Elisabeth Bik has started a new blog, Science Integrity Digest. We look forward to her blog posts.