Data citations are formal ways to ground the research findings in a manuscript, upon their supporting evidence, when that evidence consists of externally archived datasets.

We propose the creation of an international coalition whose mission is to collectively support those core data resources deemed essential to the work of life science researchers, educators, and innovators worldwide. Through this coalition, funders of the life sciences should commit to the long-term shared responsibility to sustain the open access to core data resources because of their value to the global life science community and adhere to the oversight principles outlined above.

Slides and posters can be shared on the Biocuratio

85. Repurpos.us: A fully open and expandable drug repurposing portal

43. NaviCom: A web application to create interactive molecular network portraits using multi-level omics data Inna Kuperstein, Maturin Dorel, Eric Viara, Emmanuel Barillot and Andrei Zinovyev

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ORCID: 0000-0002-8406-3871

Annotations: 2565

a readily accepted word for it

This study demonstrates for the first time that there exists an association between cytokines and cognition in patients with breast cancer, prior to any treatment.

This study demonstrates for the first time that there exists an association between cytokines and cognition in patients with breast cancer, prior to any treatment.

This study demonstrates for the first time that there exists an association between cytokines and cognition in patients with breast cancer, prior to any treatment.

Results of the primary multivariable analyses and subsequent post-hoc analyses found that higher TNF, as measured by sTNF-RII, predicted reduced memory performance in patients.

Results of the primary multivariable analyses and subsequent post-hoc analyses found that higher TNF, as measured by sTNF-RII, predicted reduced memory performance in patients.

This study demonstrates for the first time that there exists an association between cytokines and cognition in patients with breast cancer, prior to any treatment.

This study demonstrates for the first time that there exists an association between cytokines and cognition in patients with breast cancer, prior to any treatment.

we observed cognitive impairment in newly diagnosed patients with breast cancer at a pretreatment evaluation

Yet there is widespread expectation that access to research data should be supported by the government or academic institutions and be free to the research community.

However, with thousands of grants per year and data sets ranging from megabytes or less to terabytes or more, not all federally funded data can be realistically hosted within a public repository.

accelerate research discovery

In early 2008, Google announced that it would begin to support open-source scientific data sets. By the end of the year, the project was shut down for business reasons (7).

Digital data are ephemeral, and access to data involves infrastructure and economic support. In order to support the downloading of data from federally funded chemistry experiments, astronomy sky surveys, social science studies, biomedical analyses, and other research efforts, the data may need to be collected, documented, organized in a database, curated, and/or made available by a computer that needs maintenance, power, and administrative resources. Access to data requires that the data be hosted somewhere and managed by someone. Technological and human infrastructure supporting data stewardship is a precondition to meaningful access and reuse, as “homeless” data quickly become no data at all.

So who pays for data infrastructure?

To wit

data refereed?

Were permissions obtained to share the data within regulatory requirements?

s it sensitive data that cannot be openly shared?

Scholarly Commons Subworking group

it

No

Do you have the rights to make it open?

no one country alone can afford to effectively monitor the entire Earth

Dating back to formation of the International Meteorological Organization in 1873, nations have recognized the importance of sharing environmental observation data for the development of lifesaving weather forecasts in neighboring nations.

community

Although tiling also occurs in human protoplasmic astrocytes, the spatial domains of these cells are more overlapping and the boundaries are not respected by processes from varicose and interlaminar projecting astrocytes ( Oberheim et al., 2009 and Sosunov et al., 2014).

Astrocytes appear to remain in a restricted region tangential to their site of embryonic origin

owever, a recent study using the severed axons of cultured peripheral sensory neurons showed that metabolically labelled, newly synthesized proteins are trafficked to the plasma membrane44, thus suggesting that the functional equivalent of RER and Golgi apparatus exists in these axons.

These observations were consistent with an overlooked electron microscopy study from 1970

axon as a passive transmitter of information

Second, the ectopic presence of proteins in other parts of the cell during protein transport is avoided.

We also found that axonal mRNA translation continues in adulthood, when regulators of neurotransmission and axon survival are locally translated.

t is not known, however, which mRNAs are axonally translated and which specific aspects of visual circuit assembly they affect.

rational interpretation of these results is that specific subsets of mRNAs are coordinately translated when required whereas most axonally localized mRNAs remain translationally repressed. Thus, to understand the function of axonal mRNA translation, it is important to carry out a comprehensive and unbiased global analysis of the mRNAs that are specifically translated in the axonal compartment in vivo.

stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy

exclusively in presynaptic interneurons, most likely in axons.

Despite decades of research, the molecular basis of long-term changes in neurotransmitter release remains unsolved.

immunopanning

These aberrant cells simultaneously displaying both astrocytic and microglial markers are surprising because such a phenotype has not been described previously in any neurodegenerative disease.

months without undergoing replicative senescence.

aberrant astrocyte-like cell (AbA cells)

aken together, studies suggest a model in which mutant SOD1 induces primary motor neuron damage and distal axonopathy making glial cells active contributors to neuronal loss, thereby driving disease progression

Open access advocates might be concerned about some of these directions, but my sense is that many of these scientists and librarians remain largely focused on trying to compete with, or at least influence, scientific publishing.

To enable this magic, an app that people can use to annotate regions in web pages is necessary but not sufficient. You also need an API-accessible service that enables computers to create and retrieve annotations. Even more fundamentally, you need an open web standard that defines how apps and services work not only with atomic resources named and located by URLs, but also segments of interest within them.

The potential of BBD is hindered (similar to that of money) when it accumulates, but does not flow.

Currently, a full video record of a rodent's lifespan (~24 months) in a standard cage (millimeter resolution), at VGA resolution, day and night (infrared LED illumination) and lossy, yet sufficient, compression, can be acquired with a $50 webcam and stored on a hard drive.

Fortunately, driven by consumer interest in documenting the behavior of their children, cats and extreme sports mishaps, this technology has become much more accessible.

It is the unifying space in which genes, neural structure, neural function, body plan, physical constraints and environmental effects converge.

natural selection acts on behavior

In their pursuit of a tractable problem, neuroscientists have tended to reduce the complexity of behavior by favoring highly constrained experimental preparations that allow them to focus on the complexity of the brain itself.

to fight for LA

The take-home message I want to convey here is that we should not forget that when humans learn, you do not need to feed thousands of training examples, you just feed 3, or even 1, and you have a new concept or category.

hird, inhibitory projections to pyramidal neurons in mature neocortex appeared to be different from the developing neocortex. In this study, we did not identify any connection from BPCs to L23 or L5 pyramidal neurons or from BTCs to L5 pyramidal neurons (Figs. 4 and ​and6C6C and fig. S14), but these types of connections have been frequently identified in the developing neocortex (5)

Interneuron-targeting interneurons also received very little input from local pyramidal neurons and specific inhibitory inputs, very different from other groups of interneurons (Fig. 5, C and D). ISIs thus may act primarily as disinhibitors of the local cortical microcircuit and may be primarily controlled by long-range inputs.

Maturation of GABAergic interneurons takes longer than for pyramidal cells, and their continuous development throughout adolescence into adulthood often further obscures our understanding

Despite specific connection patterns for each cell type, we found that a small number of simple connectivity motifs are repeated across layers and cell types defining a canonical cortical microcircuit.

Figure 2.

In fact, we find that, in supragranular cortical layers, 5-HT3AR interneurons are the predominant interneuron population.

Gonchar et al., 2007

(McBain and Fisahn, 2001;

Activation of both excitatory and inhibitory neurons establishes a simple disynaptic circuit that provides powerful, local feedforward inhibition because of stronger and faster TC excitation to FS interneurons than to excitatory neurons, which are mainly spiny stellate and star pyramidal neurons

TC afferents directly contact both excitatory and inhibitory neurons in L4 and deep L3 in the cortex

We used a mouse line expressing EGFP under the control of the 5Htr3aR-promoter (5HT3aR-BACEGFP ) provided by the GENSAT project at Rockefeller University.

In fact, nearly all interneurons that do not express parvalbumin (PV) or somatostatin (SST) are 5-HT3AR expressing.

Buzsáki et al., 2004)

The profound influence of these neuromodulators on the cortex, likely in part stems from their preferential targeting of inhibitory cortical interneurons releasing GABA (Beaulieu and Somogyi, 1991; Smiley and Goldman-Rakic, 1996).

Prospective data

No

Do you have the rights to make it open?

What type of data will you be working with?

Soaking the foot in a hypertonic solution once at the time an abscess is drained may also have some merit. However, in order for any solution to draw infection or clean up the affected area, the solution must be hypertonic which can be achieved by saturating it with a salt. To make a saturated solution, MgSO4 (Epsom salts) is added to hot water until no more salt can be dissolved.

hichever poultice is used, it must be held in place with a bandage. An ideal foot bandage is a medium-sized disposable diaper covering the enclosed medication. For more padding, use multiple diapers. For a sweating effect, use plastic-covered diapers and duct tape. For more breathing, use non-plastic covered diapers and gauze bandage.

The poultice provides a warm moist hydroscopic environment which stays in contact with the foot twenty-four hours a day but does not have the detrimental effects of continuous soaking.

Chronic foot soaking for an abscess can actually prolong the healing process. In many cases, the pocket resulting from the accumulation of exudate from the abscess will be prevented from draining and drying up as the softened structures of the chronically soaked foot compress the affected area.

Practicesprinciples of notice and consent continue to be necessary, but are no longer sufficient. Campusdata governance mechanisms must address the uses and reuses of data about individuals in our community

Few “big data” predictive analytics run afoul of currentlaw and policy, for example, even as the expectations of our community may delineate different boundaries.

One mustfirstdiscover the existence of a database or other store of data. Discovery may require a directory or index of campus data resources. No such directory currently exists, and to create and maintain one is a complex and expensive process. If individuals inside or outside the University can determine easily where information about individuals exists, that directory itself becomes a target for cyberattack, for legal discovery, and for all manner of research and administrative questions. Conversely, if no inventory of available data resources on campus exists, it is difficult to draw boundaries around what data must be governed.

information entrusted

Theseproperties characterize the need for governance mechanisms focused on appropriateuse of data rather than on particular data elements or owners, thusassuringthat University principlesare applied to data governance.

Datathat may not appear to be sensitive at the time of collection, such as student traffic to a course website, may become extremely rich when combined with other data such as a student’s grades, medical records, library usage, foodpurchases, and social media habits.

Opting out of data collectionis rarely an option in university environments, because access to basic university and public services depends upon myriad uses of data for teaching, learning, library services, travel, personnel, payroll, recreation, and well beyond.

nd consent, that data collected for one purpose should not be used for another purpose without the express permission of the person who is the data subject.

e t a fundamental concern that led to the creation of this Ta s kForce is the growing number of data-generating activities involving our students, faculty, and staff that fall outside of IRB purview.

whether or not those data meet any existing legal or policydefinition of personally identifiable information (PII).

nitial set of principles by which governance decisions can be considered, a UCLA data governance structure, and necessary surrounding processes.

“Big data” analytics and the routine sharing of data with a diverse array of third parties have accelerated concerns for reconsidering ourpolicy, funding, and technology frameworksforthe appropriate use and protection of data

Moreover, each of the above-mentioned tools can be used by somebrain scientists, but most tools are de-signed for data scientists, so the learningcurve can be incredibly steep.

We are proposing to design, build, anddeploy an instance of ‘‘cloud neurosci-ence,’’ meaning that the data, the code,and the analytic results all live in the cloudtogether. Cloud neuroscience can bethought of as an operating system, a setof programs that run on it, a file systemthat stores the data, and the data itself,all designed to run in a scalable fashionand to be accessible from anywhere.

To the Cloud! A Grassroots Proposal to Accelerate Brain Science Discovery

The editor looks at the title of the paper and sends it to two friends whom the editor thinks know something about the subject. If both advise publication the editor sends it to the printers. If both advise against publication the editor rejects the paper.

The final step was, in my mind, to open up the whole process and conduct it in real time on the web in front of the eyes of anybody interested. Peer review would then be transformed from a black box into an open scientific discourse. Often I found the discourse around a study was a lot more interesting than the study itself. Now that I have left I am not sure if this system will be introduced.

None of the control regions showed this degree of preservation—the thickness of all of them in superagers was intermediate between young adults and typical older adults, or what we call partial preservation.

Ghost authors:This phrase is used in two ways. Itusually refers to professional writers (often paid bycommercial sponsors) whose role is not acknowledged.Although such writers rarely meet ICMJE criteria, sincethey are not involved in the design of studies, or thecollection or interpretation of data, it is important toacknowledge their contribution, since their involvementmay represent a potential conflict of interest. The termcan also be used to describe people who made asignificant contribution to a research project (and fulfilthe ICMJE criteria) but are not listed as authors. TheICMJE guidelines clearly condemn this practice and statethat ‘All persons designated as authors should qualify forauthorship, and all those who qualify should be listed.’

Preregistration of studies involves registering the study design, variables, and treatment conditions prior to conducting the research.

These reasonable concerns aside, pre-registration does present a means for reducing the frequency at which exploratory research masquerades as having an a priori design

- In this paper, we have

“Effect size and confidence interval”.

For example, advisors and administrators used an analysis of courses in which students consistently performed poorly to target supplemental instruction, and to inform a redesign of introductory math courses. GSU has also developed a program targeting small, conditional grants to students who are highly likely to complete a degree but would be forced to drop out for a semester because of a small amount due to the bursar.

lthough rarely as sophisticated as Ithaca’s efforts, such review of social media information is quite common: a 2015 Kaplan Test Prep Survey of 397 admissions officers found that 40 percent of admissions officers visit applicants’ social media profiles, often to verify information presented on their applications

ome institutions, especially community colleges, do not have their own IRB and therefore rely on approval by their president or defer to collaborators instead.

Even when they are known, most education researchers do not have the computer science expertise required to implement them. It is also the case that significant computing power, not accessible to every researcher, is needed to process massive datasets.

For example, it is frequently difficult for researchers to gain access to datasets collected by other researchers or institutions for other purposes.

one to supply their salary

knows the pressures are largely self-generated.

but from chasing an ideal of what makes a good scientist

Old scientists

today’s senior investigators experienced a more comfortable trajectory in science

“Frankly, the job of being a principal investigator and running a lab just looks horrible,” wrote one neuroscientist from the United States.

with little administrative support

“The number of people is at an all-time high, but the number of awards hasn’t changed,”

But are young scientists whining — or drowning?

“There has never been more arrogance and smugness” than in today’s self-congratulatory scientific culture, he asserts.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Roman Ormandy, for example, has criticized the brain-as-processor model. “The more neural research progresses, the clearer it becomes that brain is vastly more complex than we thought just a few decades ago,” Ormandy has noted.

If my mind is running on another computer, it is no longer me.”

gabapentin enacarbil

UC San Diego will transform California and a diverse global society by educating, generatingand disseminating knowledge and creative works, and engaging in public service

The founders of UC San Diego aspired to establish an experimental campus, one that would define the future of education and research at a public university. The success of this vision is unparalleled: UC San Diego is recognized as one of the top public research universities in the country and one of the top twenty universities in the world.

Our review found that 4% of the 271 journal articles assessed did not report the number of animals used anywhere in the methods or the results sections [5].

MF: Comparative Political Studies conducted this pilot as a special issue of the journal devoted to results-free review. As special issue editors, we understand that the current editors do not intend to make results-free review a mandatory practice, nor will it be allowed as a regular manuscript submission track. The Journal of Experimental Political Science plans to make results-free review a standing manuscript submission track (see forward to Lin and Green 2016 here).  

Second, contrary to fears that greater emphasis on transparency creates more incentives for clever research designs and methodological perfection, reviewers placed an overwhelming emphasis on theoretical consistency and substantive importance. In this regard, results-free review worked better than we could have hoped in incentivizing theory and research design over narrow concerns about novelty of methodology or empirical causal identification. Atheoretical work stood very little chance of publication in our pilot: referees consistently asked for meaningful tests of theoretically important hypotheses.

Likewise, Cambridge mathematician Tim Gowers argues that researchers should get recognition for advancing science broadly through informal idea sharing — rather than only getting credit for what they publish. "We’ve gotten used to working away in private and then producing a sort of polished document in the form of a journal article," Gowers said. "This tends to hide a lot of the thought process that went into making the discoveries. I'd like attitudes to change so people focus less on the race to be first to prove a particular theorem, or in science to make a particular discovery, and more on other ways of contributing to the furthering of the subject."

The simplest way to deposit a manuscript on bioRxiv is to upload a single PDF including the text and any figures/tables.

describe experimental work that is not performed in accordance with the relevant ethical standards for research using animals or human subjects.

Authors retain copyright and choose from several distribution/reuse options under which to make the article available (CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-ND, CC-BY-NC-ND, or no reuse). By posting on bioRxiv, authors explicitly consent to text mining of their work (e.g., by search engines or researchers).

nor grant arXiv the right to grant any specific rights to others.

arXiv is an openly accessible, moderated repository for scholarly papers in specific scientific disciplines.

The endorsement system verifies that arXiv contributors belong to the scientific community in a fair and sustainable way that can scale with arXiv's future growth.

2. A fundamentally new approach towards optimal reuse of research data. Data sharing and stewardship is the default approach for all publicly funded research. This requires definitions, standards and infrastructures.

When reporting: › published information: please provide the complete reference (authors lists with initials, journal, volume, page range and year) or a PubMed identifier › unpublished information: please provide the name of the people associated with a particular item of information Note that you don't have to be the original author to submit us updates, and can therefore report anybody's work.

The UniProt Consortium UniProt: a hub for protein information Nucleic Acids Res. 43: D204-D212 (2015)

New South Wales (NSW)

However, there has been surprisingly little research exploring the actual use of primary healthcare services around the time of hospitalisation, which requires linkage of primary care and hospital data for individuals.

Setting 266 950 participants in the 45 and Up Study, New South Wales (NSW) Australia

2.2 Acceptable Conditions

No one can read everything.  We rely on filters to make sense of the scholarly literature, but the narrow, traditional filters are being swamped. However, the growth of new, online scholarly tools allows us to make new filters; these altmetrics reflect the broad, rapid impact of scholarship in this burgeoning ecosystem. We call for more tools and research based on altmetrics.

We reaffirm the principle that only the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which a candidate’s work is published, will be considered in appointments, promotions, merit awards or grants.

Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now.

Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers.

A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).

The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship[2], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

Open access contributions include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material.

A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.

Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely and readily available to society.

Posting of units of information smaller than research papers should be encouraged, as long as the data reporting allows others to replicate the work. The value of sharing review articles and commentaries as preprints is less clear.

Important questions are (i) whether preprint submissions should be screened for adherence to scientific and ethical standards and (ii) how to handle data that raise ethical concerns or that contravene national policy or guidance.

However, the majority of attendees felt that peer review orchestrated through journals still plays a valuable role in providing in-depth analysis and scrutiny. Surveys also show that many researchers believe that their own work often improves through the peer-review process (7).

Benefits.

Next, preprints provide reviewers with an opportunity to see—in real time—reactions from the community and how the researcher responds to thes

Preprints enable reviewers to assess an applicant's ideas by scrutinizing the research findings, rather than using the journal name (or its impact factor) as a proxy for quality. Funders are keen to uphold the principle that funding decisions should be based on the merit of the research.

They have taken a step toward embracing a new culture of science communication by posting a preprint this year, most of them for the first time.

Some suggested that the archive could be flooded with weak papers meant only to assert priority. But decades of experience have demonstrated that scientists do not post poor-quality work on arXiv because of the impact on their reputations; we expect professional biologists to behave similarly.

Posting preprints has the added benefit of democratizing the flow of information and making it available to all investigators across the globe, while allowing journals to make their own judgments of appropriateness and interest after peer review. Publicly available preprints provide an opportunity for authors to obtain feedback beyond the few scientists who see the manuscript during peer review.

These differences between lots and the possibility that the lot that we used was subject to precipitation during the experiment raises the possibility that the differences between our results and those of Erschbamer et al. are due to differences between lots of PD168393. For example, it is possible that the compound precipitated somewhat in our experiments, perhaps clogging the intra-spinal cannulae whereas the lot used by Erschbamer did not precipitate. Erschbamer et al. do not indicate the lot number for the PD168393 that they used in their paper, but subsequent discussions reveal that the lot number for the original study was B61311. According to the manufacturer, the differences in the numbering indicate that lot B61311 and D00069257 were synthesized at different times, whereas lot D00069257 and D00078517 were synthesized at the same time but packaged at different times. Unfortunately, the company has been unable or unwilling to provide material from previous batches, so it has not been possible to carry out direct head-to-head comparisons between different lots.

There are major differences in the physicochemical properties of commercially available EGFR inhibitors.

“There’s not a lot of research on how best to socially, emotionally, environmentally, support Alzheimer’s patients, that might ameliorate their own anxiety, their own stress — maybe the disease, as horrible as it is, would be less horrible through a better care structure, but we do very little research on that.”

In the future, the most valuable science institutions will be closely linked to the people and places whose urgent problems need to be solved; they will cultivate strong lines of accountability to those for whom solutions are important; they will incentivize scientists to care about the problems more than the production of knowledge. They will link research agendas to the quest for improved solutions — often technological ones — rather than to understanding for its own sake. The science they produce will be of higher quality, because it will have to be. The current dominant paradigm will meanwhile continue to crumble under the weight of its own contradictions, but it will also continue to hog most of the resources and insist on its elevated social and political status.

The Artemis Project is different from science-as-usual in many ways. It is small, collaborative, and focused not on producing good science for its own sake, nor on making a profit, but on solving a problem. It takes its research agenda from patient advocates, not from scientists.

So Visco and her colleagues decided that NBCC would shoulder that burden and start managing the science itself. “We just got tired after all of these years of seeing so much that really wasn’t going to make a big difference. We have no interest in the continued funding of these things.”

In short, he made his research accountable to the end-user rather than to his scientific peers.

The beautiful lie insists that scientists ought to be accountable only to themselves. Marqusee’s advice to his staff was precisely the contrary: “Have no constituency in the research community, have it only in the end-user community.”

The scientific knowledge necessary to solve these sorts of problems would never be spontaneously generated by “the free play of free intellects.”

If people expect scientific research — even basic, long-term research — to contribute to a larger goal, there must be some mechanism of accountability for driving it toward that goal

“The data that we now generate overwhelm our abilities of interpretation, and the attempts of the new discipline of ‘systems biology’ to address this shortfall have to date produced few insights into cancer biology beyond those revealed by simple, home-grown intuition.”

given the limits of predictive science to solve problems in complex natural phenomena

specially through mapping of the human genome, which pretty much everyone agrees has been an incredibly powerful catalyst for scientific research while generating unfathomably huge amounts of data but, at best, yielding modest health care benefits.

The difficulty with this way of doing science is that for any large body of data pertaining to a complex problem with many variables, the number of possible causal links between variables is inestimably larger than the number a scientist could actually think up and test. For example, researchers have identified more than a hundred variables that may influence obesity, from genes to education to job stress to how fast you eat to whether you were breastfed.

Sometimes the problem is not that it is hard to come up with facts, but that it is all too easy. This is why science almost never provides a solution to politically controversial issues. Usually it does the opposite, providing peer-reviewed and thus culturally validated truths that can be selected and assembled in whatever ways are necessary to support the position and policy solution of your choice. If this observation seems implausible or overstated, consider that after forty years of research on the risks and benefits of mammograms, their effectiveness is more contested than ever; similarly, after more than twenty-five years and $15 billion of research to assess the safety of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository site in Nevada, nothing has resulted beyond political gridlock. In neither case does the science add up to a unitary truth. What we have, instead, is trans-science that “weaves back and forth across the boundary between what is and what is not known and knowable.”

If both scientific research and political debates over such questions seem to drag on endlessly, surely one reason is that we have the wrong expectations of science. Our common belief is that scientific truth is a unitary thing — there is one fact of the matter, that’s why the light always goes on when I flip the switch. But trans-scientific questions often reveal multiple truths, depending in part on what aspects of an issue scientists decide to do research on and how they go about doing that research.

In fact, the great thing about trans-science is that you can keep on doing research; you can, as Fitzpatrick says, create “the sense that we’re gaining knowledge when we’re not gaining knowledge,” without getting any closer to a final or useful answer.

Fitzpatrick thinks that such reasoning is not justified when using mouse brains to model human neurodegenerative disease.

But in the meantime, the paper has been cited in about 500 other papers, many of which may have been cited multiple times in turn. In

it got more and more money,

“science is so large that many of us begin to worry about the sheer mass of the monster we have created.” In his book Little Science, Big Science (1963), Price noted presciently that the number of scientists was growing so fast that it could only lead to a “scientific doomsday” of instability and stress, and that exponential growth of the scientific enterprise would bring with it declining scientific originality and quality, as the number of truly great scientists was progressively drowned out by the much more rapidly increasing number of merely competent ones.

scientific publishing industry exists not to disseminate valuable information

The professional incentives for academic scientists to assert their elite status are perverse and crazy, and promotion and tenure decisions focus above all on how many research dollars you bring in, how many articles you get published, and how often those articles are cited in other articles.

You will need forty hours a week to perform teaching and administrative duties, another twenty hours on top of that to conduct respectable research, and still another twenty hours to accomplish really important research.... Make an important discovery, and you are a successful scientist in the true, elitist sense in a profession where elitism is practiced without shame.... Fail to discover, and you are little or nothing.

But if there is nothing by which to measure scientific progress outside of science itself, how can we know when our knowledge is advancing, standing still, or moving backwards?

Vannevar Bush’s beautiful lie makes it easy to believe that scientific imagination gives birth to technological progress, when in reality technology sets the agenda for science, guiding it in its most productive directions and providing continual tests of its validity, progress, and value. Absent their real-world validation through technology, scientific truths would be mere abstractions.

If, as Visco says, “at some point you really have to save a life,” it will be a technology, perhaps a vaccine or drug, that does the job.

The National Science Foundation funded basic research into this new, technology-created realm, including grants to two graduate students in computer science at Stanford University who wanted to understand how best to navigate the novel and expanding landscape of digital information.

The electronics industry and semiconductor physics progressed hand-in-hand not because scientists, working “in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown,” kept lobbing new discoveries over the lab walls that then allowed transistor technology to advance, but because the quest to improve technological performance constantly raised new scientific questions and demanded advances in our understanding of the behavior of electrons in different types of materials.

“And what? And what is there to show? You want to do this science and what?” “At some point,” Visco says, “you really have to save a life.”

What seemed to drive many of the scientists was the desire to “get above the fold on the front page of the New York Times,” not to figure out how to end breast cancer.