Alternative futures for academic and professional publishing

Five Futures for Academic Medicine

Introduction “Academic medicine” might be defi ned as the capacity of the health-care system to think, study, research, discover, evaluate, innovate, teach, learn, and improve. As such, little could be more important—particularly as new discoveries in science offer tremendous opportunities and emergent diseases pose huge threats. Yet something is not right with academic medicine. Worse, the dia...

Professional ethics and publishing.

We are all troubled by ethics violations we see in the newspaper and other media outlets. Are there similar areas of concern in the sciences and in poultry science? Recently there have been a number of cases in some of the most prestigious scientific journals, including Science, of papers being withdrawn because the results were not replicable due to scientific misconduct or fabrication of resu...

Academic publishing is electronic publishing

Derk Haank began by saying that he wanted to keep his presentation simple and would make only a few statements. The first of these was to say that, although it might be stating the obvious, academic publishing is electronic publishing. It has been remarkable how quickly things have progressed since the invention of the Web, and an EC study recently recognised that the revolution in electronic p...

Choosing Among Alternative Futures

Non-determinism is a serious impediment to testing and debugging concurrent programs. Such programs do not execute the same way each time they are run, which can hide the presence of errors. Existing techniques use a variety of mechanisms that attempt to increase the probability of uncovering error conditions by altering the execution sequence of a concurrent program, but do not test for specif...

What academic publishing can do for science?