"The University of California, San Francisco Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of current and future scientific articles freely available to the public, helping to reverse decades of practice on the part of medical and scientific journal publishers to restrict access to research results. The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest scientific institution in the nation to adopt an open-access policy and among the first public universities to do so." Read the press release on the UCSF web site. A similar effort is being considered for the entire University of California system. According to Peter Suber, a researcher at Earlham College and open access guru, open-access (OA) literature is "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright ... Continue reading →

About AHCJ: General News Boston named as Health Journalism 2013 site Health Journalism 2013, the annual conference of the Association of Health Care Journalists, will take place in Boston next year, AHCJ has announced. The conference, which has drawn more than 600 attendees in each of the last two years, will take place March 14-17, 2013, at the Seaport Boston Hotel and the adjacent Seaport World Trade Center. The hotel and conference center are located on the Boston waterfront in the growing Seaport District. A local planning committee is being formed by Boston Globe health and science editor – and AHCJ board member – Gideon Gil. It will be made up of area journalists from print, broadcast and online outlets. “The group will help national ... Continue reading →

By Mike Collett BUDAPEST | Thu May 24, 2012 1:13pm EDT BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Howard Webb, the referee when Bolton Wanderers midfielder Fabrice Muamba collapsed on the pitch with a cardiac arrest and nearly died in March, has warned players that feigning injuries could risk lives. Webb said in an interview that the Muamba incident during an FA Cup match against Tottenham Hotspur and his subsequent recovery had had a lasting impact on him.Speaking at FIFA's medical congress, he said that referees might be reluctant to stop the flow of games if they thought a player was "crying wolf" and that any delay could have been fatal for Muamba."I turned and saw him lying face down on the ground with no one else nearby - ... Continue reading →

May 24 2012 ASCO & the news-making sausage factory Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Health care journalism No Comments Journalist-turned-PR man Brian Reid wrote an important guest post on the Embargo Watch blog this week. It’s about the release of information from the huge American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting – about to dominate the news cycle from June 1-5 from McCormick Place in Chicago. Photo by © ASCO/Todd Buchanan It provides an insider’s look at the sausage-making factory where news is made from scientific/medical conferences. I think this is a very important topic – as did those who left comments on the blog. There’s a lot the public doesn’t know about how stories in their daily paper, evening newscast or online surfing move from: ... Continue reading →

As we reported earlier this spring, the UK journal Anaesthesia published a remarkable statistical analysis of the work of Yoshitaka Fujii, the Japanese anesthesiologist who has been accused of fabricating his results for years — and who, we’re led to believe, may soon wind up with the record for retractions, at a number north of 190. Fujii has responded to the journal with an equally startling (for different reasons, of course) rebuttal. We received permission from Steve Yentis, Anaesthesia‘s editor, to reprint the letter in its entirely. We present it here, and strongly recommend that readers take a look at the journal’s website to read the piece that prompted Fujii’s response: I seriously read the Special Article by Dr Carlisle [1]. As is well known, ... Continue reading →

By the window of a country house I found two celeoptera performing an incomprehensible dance for me: the female was licking the tip of the male's elytra (the picture shows this instant) while the male gets behind the female with the apparent intention of copulating. I think the tiny couple are Ebaeus collaris. How is the sexual life of these malachites? How is their behaviour explained, which any human unaware of its reason may call oral sex? Question sent by CONSUELO VENTO MARTI (Valencia). SERGIO MONTAGUD answers: First of all, I would like to congratulate Consuelo for her entomological skills. Knowing that the animals she was observing were malachites and recognizing them as belonging to the Elbaeus collaris Erichson, 1840 species, is not within everybody's ... Continue reading →

Regular readers will remember my outraged rant post from almost a year ago, reacting to the news that the Central Intelligence Agency faked a vaccination campaign in Pakistan as a way of getting close to Osama Bin Laden’s hide-out, hoping to prove his presence by using a vaccine needle to grab a sample of DNA. I felt, and still feel, that the maneuver — which was belatedly acknowledged by the CIA — was a cynical attempt to hijack the credibility that public health workers have built up over decades with local populations. I especially felt it endangered the status of the fraught polio-eradication campaign, which over the past decade has been challenged in majority-Muslim areas in Africa and South Asia over beliefs that polio vaccination ... Continue reading →