Scientific journals have been retracting unreliable articles at rapidly escalating rates in the past few years, raising concern about whether research faces a burgeoning ethical crisis. Various causes have been suspected, with the common theme being that journals are seeing more cases of plagiarism and fudging of data as researchers and editors…

The National Science Foundation (NSF), in carrying out the Obama administration's new push for greater public access to research published in scientific journals, will consider exclusivity periods shorter than the 12-month standard in the White House directive, as well as trade-offs involving data-sharing and considerations of publishers'…

The Association of American Publishers has hired a public-relations firm with a hard-hitting reputation to respond to the open-access-publishing movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available to the public. The firm, Dezenhall Resources, designs aggressive public-relations campaigns to counter activist groups. The…

This article reports on new programs that focus on training skilled scientists and mathematicians who will help solve Africa's myriad problems. The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, in Cape Town, South Africa, offers one of the first working examples of a growing effort to develop a cadre of highly trained, practically minded scientists…

Five published leukemia studies have been retracted by the director of the Human Genome Project because they were based on falsified data from a graduate student, although some of the conclusions are still supported. Inconsistencies were discovered by a peer reviewer and were also found in the student's other work. (MSE)

A life-and-death battle is going on over public access to federally financed research--life for taxpayers and many scientists, and death for publishers. Or so each side claims. That battle, whose outcome will affect many university researchers, kicked into high gear on Capitol Hill on September 11, as the combatants debated the merits of a bill…

While the past several decades have brought federal regulations that are designed to make animal research more humane, ethics courses still form only a patchwork across colleges. The amount and types of ethical training available to students vary widely by program and the culture of an institution. Now discussions about animal-research ethics that…

Blogs, wikis, and social-networking sites such as Facebook may get media buzz these days, but for scientists, engineers, and doctors, they are not even on the radar. The most effective tools of the Internet for such people tend to be efforts more narrowly aimed at their needs, such as software that helps geneticists replicate one another's…

In the past few decades, with the explosion of biotechnology and the aging of the population, the use of human subjects in research has increased significantly. The United States has done much to protect human research subjects, and no one can deny the importance of keeping them safe. But at the same time, researchers whose work poses no threat to…

These are especially difficult times for researchers who depend on government money. Their "anxiety is palpable," Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote last 2006. Moreover, Leo Furcht, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, warned Congress that "we are, quite simply, losing our…

Not long ago, academic scientists welcomed calls from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asking them to volunteer as peer reviewers. Many were glad for the opportunity to help distribute billions of dollars in federal biomedical-research grants even though the service required a big time commitment--the equivalent of one month a year to…

The perception that academic scientists must pursue money from government agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health is subverting the aims of science and making it harder for institutions and individual professors to do innovative and original research. Of course winning a large federal grant attracts a…

This article discusses regeneration which is actually the dream of a scattering of biologists working in a relatively unheralded field called regenerative medicine. They hope to learn how other animals make whole their damaged parts, recreating complete working organs and appendages just as they did as embryos, but swiftly, and on a scale that…

Switzerland is the land of Big Ideas, where even the streets have Nobel prizes. At the European particle physics lab known as CERN, the roads through campus bear the names of Einstein, Curie, Bohr, and Heisenberg. Working amid those tributes to giants of the past century, physicists from around the world are trying to make history of their own and…

This article reports on firebomb attacks at the homes of two animal researchers which have provoked anger and unease. The firebomb attacks, which set the home of a neuroscientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz aflame and destroyed a car parked in the driveway of another university researcher's home, have left researchers and…