Research funders and UUK agree principles on open data

Times Higher Education (THE) The Concordat on Open Research Data, launched on 28 July, was developed by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce), Research Councils UK, Universities UK (UUK) and the Wellcome Trust, although they also consulted more widely ...…

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/breaking_news_files/concordat_on_open_research_data.pdf

Photographs from the 1930 become vital data for climate research

NATURE | NEWS FEATURE

180,000 forgotten photos reveal the future of Greenland’s ice

To tell whether the island’s glacial cap will melt away any time soon, researchers are poring over old pictures and drawings for clues to its past behaviour.

Quirin Schiermeier
27 July 2016


“The instantaneous record contained in the air and terrestrial photographs of the present state of the glaciers of the entire coast is in itself of great value for future researchers,” the Danish captain Carl Gabel-Jørgensen wrote in a 1935 report.

PLoS blog: Measuring Up: Impact Factors Do Not Reflect Article Citation Rates

Journal-level metrics, the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) being chief among them, do not appropriately reflect the impact or influence of individual articles—a truism perennially repeated by bibliometricians, journal editors and research administrators alike. Yet, many researchers and research assessment panels continue to rely on this erroneous proxy of research – and researcher – quality to inform funding, hiring and promotion decisions.


In strong support for the shedding of this misguided habit, seven journal representatives and two independent researchers – including the three authors of this post – came together to add voice to the rising opposition to journal-level metrics as a measure of an individual’s scientific worth. The result is a collaborative article from Université de Montréal, Imperial College London, PLOS, eLife, EMBO Journal, The Royal Society, Nature and Science, posted on BioRxiv this week. Using a diverse selection of our own journals, we provide data illustrating why no article can be judged on the basis of the Impact Factor of the journal in which it is published.


Read the full post at: http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2016/07/impact-factors-do-not-reflect-citation-rates/

Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates

doi: 10.1073/pnas.1602413113

Exeerpts:

"Through the introduction of international data-sharing initiatives in the neuroimaging field (4–10), it has become possible to evaluate the statistical methods using real data."

"Functional MRI (fMRI) is 25 years old, yet surprisingly its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data. Here, we used resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy controls to conduct 3 million task group analyses. Using this null data with different experimental designs, we estimate the incidence of significant results. In theory, we should find 5% false positives (for a significance threshold of 5%), but instead we found that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results."

http://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7900