Penn Science Policy and Diplomacy Group

    By Annie Chen and Michael Allegrezza                   When scientific publishing was developed in the 19 th century, it was designed to overcome barriers that prevented scientists from disseminating their research findings efficiently. It was not feasible for scientists to arrange for typesetting, peer review, printing, and shipping of their results to every researcher in their field. As payment for these services offered by publishers, the researchers would transfer the exclusive copyrights for this material to the publisher, who would then charge subscribers access fees. To limit the printing costs associated with this system, journals only published articles with the most significant findings. Now, nearly 200 years later, we have computers, word processors, and the Internet. Information sharing has become easier than ever before, and it is nearly instantaneous. But the prevailing model of subscription-based publ...

 By Brian S. Cole     The real lesson I’ve gleaned from my time in pursuit of a PhD in biomedical research hasn’t been the research itself; indeed many of my colleagues and I came into the program already equipped with extensive bench experience, but the real eye-opener has been how science is communicated.  When I was an undergraduate, assiduously repeating PCR after PCR that quietly and dutifully failed to put bands on a gel, I just assumed that experiments always worked in the well-funded, well-respected, well-published labs that wrote the papers we read in school.  As an undergraduate, I had implicit trust in scientific publications; at the end of the PhD, I have implicit skepticism.  It turns out I’m not alone.     The open access movement has taken a new tone in the past year: increasing recognition of the irreplicability 1 and alarming prevalence of scientific misconduct 2 in highly-cited journals has led to questioning of the c...

The Penn Science Policy Newsletter is out! Click here or on the image below to view.