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The nascent "open-access" publishing movement got a qualified, but high-profile, endorsement this week. After a 7-month investigation, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee of Great Britain, concluded that "the current system of scientific publishing is not providing the access needed for the progress of science," says committee chair Ian Gibson. In a 114-page report, the committee recommends that papers produced by publicly funded research be put in repositories at universities and research institutions, where they would be open to all, free of charge, soon after publication. It also says that online journals that have authors pay the cost of publication and that allow free access to all "could be viable," and it calls for a major study of the idea.

The article reports that scientific papers by British scientists rank first in citations. Results from a citation analysis by Great Britain's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the U.S. independent research institute Thomson Reuters found that when the six most prolific nations were ranked by average number of citations, Great Britain had the world's greatest impact.

The article discusses medical research on the diagnosis of psychopathy that was withheld from publication for 3 years. The article focuses on variations in libel laws in the U.S., Great Britain, and Canada that may not have protected forensic psychologist and coauthor Jennifer Skeem from a libel suit that could have been filed by forensic psychologist Robert Hare.

After 13 years as editor of the British Medical Journal, Richard Smith is leaving to become head of the European arm of a U.S.-based health care company. Smith will link up with Simon Stevens, who is stepping down as British Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior health policy adviser, to run the new subsidiary of the UnitedHealth Group Inc. The company will help Great Britain's National Health Service (NHS) in providing patient care by commissioning at-home care for elderly patients and improving data management for clinicians and health care managers. Smith says the new company aims to strengthen the NHS by helping it coordinate health care services, although critics see Blair's reforms as a step toward privatizing British health care.

Presents information on the apparent decline in clinical medicine in Britain, one of Britain's traditional strengths. Analysis by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI); Clinicians staying out of research because of decline in salaries; Increase in `soft money' from drug companies and small charities accounting for drop in quality and jump in output, according to Edinburgh gastroenterologist Ian Bouchier.

The article discusses scientific publishing and calls for reform in Great Britain's libel laws in the aftermath of lawsuits brought against British researchers for documenting or discussing controversial subjects. It notes a libel suit brought against British cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst after he presented a technical paper at a cardiology meeting in Washington, D.C. His presentation included allegedly libelous statements regarding so-called Star-Flex devices manufactured by NMT Medical that were used to treat heart defects called patent foramen ovales (PFO).

The article reports that the executive board of the Research Councils U.K. (RCUK), an umbrella organization for government funding bodies in Great Britain, has approved that all peer-reviewed journal papers produced by publicly funded research must be made available for free soon after they're completed. But the RCUK left each research council to set its own rules. The most stringent policy came from the Medical Research Council. The council declared that any papers accepted by a peer-reviewed journal must be deposited at the earliest in the PubMed Central , the free public archive run by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. However the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council adopted a softer line. It maintained that papers should be submitted only at the earliest opportunity and placed in a proper e-print repository.

This article presents information about an online exhibit of trailblazing scientific papers from Britain's Royal Society. The oldest paper dating from 1666 is by Robert Boyle about blood transfusions between dogs. The newest paper is from 2005 and it analyzes techniques for geoengineering to curb climate change. Other papers include Newton's discovery that white light consists of a blend of other colors and van Leeuwenhoek's discovery of bacteria in rainwater.

This article reports that supporters of "open access" scientific publishing— in which authors pay the cost of publication sand accepted papers are freely available online — have received a public setback and a private boost in Great Britain in the past few days. On the other hand, the Wellcome Trust — the largest funder of basic biomedical research in the United Kingdom& mdash; threw its considerable weight behind open-access publishing. It also called for British universities to set up online repositories for their researchers' preprints and published papers, which would be posted at some agreed point after publication in a journal, and called for the government to set up a body to coordinate these archives. It declined for now to require that government-funded researchers deposit their published papers in open repositories or to establish a fund to pay authors' publication fees. The House of Commons committee published the government's response on 8 November, along with its own commentary accusing Great Britain's Department of Trade and Industry of neutralizing dissenting voices within the government. While the government was urging caution on open-access publishing, the Wellcome Trust was stepping up its support.

The article discusses governmental incentives for researchers to publish their findings in international journals, arguing that the lack of increase in the number of articles published by U.S. scientists is attributable to international competition created by changes in incentives. The authors of the study looked at the number of papers submitted to the journal "Science" by scientists in the U.S. as well as in countries such as Great Britain, New Zealand, and China which reward publications with cash bonuses, funding, and career-based incentives. They conclude that such incentives are positively correlated with the number of both submissions and publications.

An interview with Great Britain Chief Scientific Adviser David King is presented. When asked about the biggest disappointment or failure in life, he referred to his terms of advice in producing the white paper on energy aiming to reduce carbon dioxide by 60% in 2050. King inferred that they could not manage the project without new nuclear architecture. He noted that by putting climate change as top problem to tackle was the greatest success he ever encountered.

Presents news briefs related to various scientific explorations around the world as of June 6, 2003. Explanation provided by a team at the University of Manchester in England regarding creation of a powerful, reusable adhesive tape; Events associated with rescue of Boxgrove, the site of the oldest human fossil ever found in Great Britain from reburial; Effect of creation of the Great Wall of China on gene flows between plants.

The article presents information on a survey conducted by Great Britain-based Committee on Publications Ethics (COPE) of its 346 member biomedical journals. Some 13% lack a procedure for handling conflict of interest, and 28% have no system to ensure that a paper has gone through an ethics approval. Feedback mechanisms are also weak: 60% had no complaint procedure for authors, and 9% did not publish letters to the editor, which COPE considers an important postpublication peer-review mechanism. And 64% of journals have no policy for dealing with a potential case of research misconduct.

The article focuses on an investigation arising from a suit brought by molecular biologist Prim Singh, who charges that Ian Wilmut, a researcher at the Roslin Institute in Midlothian, Great Britain, bullied him and stole his ideas. A hearing into a scientist's claim that he was the target of harassment and racial discrimination has put under a microscope the lab where Dolly the sheep was cloned. It also has prompted the man widely recognized as Dolly's creator, Wilmut, to give detailed evidence on who deserves credit for the successful experiment. Seeking $1.74 million, Singh claims that Roslin passed him over for promotions because of his race and forced him to quit after he lodged a complaint against Wilmut in 2003. An employment tribunal in Edinburgh began hearing testimony from Singh and other witnesses in November 2005, but it was testimony last week from Wilmut himself that caught wider attention. Singh's lawyers questioned Wilmut about the famous paper describing Dolly, published in the journal "Nature," in 1997.

The British government is requesting public comment on a proposal that could require museums and academic collections to return human remains collected around the world. Department for Culture officials last month released a white paper recommending that scientists identify how bones or tissues became part of their collections and seek permission from living descendants to keep identifiable remains for study. It also calls for licensing institutions that collect human remains. Indigenous groups have long campaigned for such measures, saying that anthropologists and others have collected remains without permission.

The article presents information about Charles Darwin, who was famous as the author of a popular travelogue and a heap of scientific publications. Thanks to historian John van Wyhe of the University of Cambridge, Great Britain, one can browse most of Darwin's oeuvre at this site, which holds transcripts of papers, letters, books and other writings. The collection includes lesser known works such as the unpublished 1842 and 1844 essays in which he first sketched his ideas on evolution through natural selection.

Great Britain's Royal Society (RS) has called for the creation of an independent scientific body that would help give teeth to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. The treaty, which came into force in 1975, has been called a paper tiger because it failed to prevent signatories such as the Soviet Union and Iraq from pursuing advanced weapons programs. RS argues that a science panel could advise governments on developing new countermeasures to threats and improving approaches for verifying treaty compliance.

Government officials on both sides of the Atlantic are stoking the debate over free access to electronic scientific journals. In Great Britain, a government body announced last month that it will pay the publication costs of any British university researcher who submits a paper to open-access journals published by BioMed Central, a London-based company. And last week a member of the U.S. Congress introduced a bill aimed at preventing private publishers from monopolizing information by denying copyright protection to work produced with substantial government funding. Some open-access advocates welcome both moves as a means to improve the flow of scholarly information. Some researchers and academic librarians have long complained that the public pays twice for science once when the government funds a study and again when universities use public funds to buy journals that publish the results. Several groups have responded with free Web journals financed by page charges paid by authors. The U.S. legislation, introduced on June 26, 2003 by Representative Martin Sabo, would bar copyright protection for any work produced pursuant to scientific research substantially funded by the federal government. The Great Britain government has now given BioMed Central a major boost by agreeing to pay article fees for academic researchers who publish in its open-access journals.

The article presents information related to science. The U.S. government needs a more systematic way of dealing with bioscience megaprojects, according to a new report from the Institute of Medicine. The report outlines seven recommendations for scientists who are tackling big projects such as untangling how genes and proteins interact to make cells work. Great Britain wants to pour more than $80 million into genetic research over the next 3 years. The government this week released a white paper that outlines plans to boost funding for everything from genetic testing and counseling to gene therapy and studies of gene-drug interactions.

Presents a list of the top-ranked departments of universities in the United Kingdom for 1991-1995, ranked by citations per paper in various fields including Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and others. Schools including the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford.