O’s digest.
L‘editoriale di Nature parla degli Stati Uniti dove migliaia di ditte vendono “kit diagnostici” (per non parlare di presunte “terapie”) non regolamentate. A dimostrarne l’affidabilità, ci doveva pensare il libero mercato:
The FDA announced its intentions to change this policy at least as early as 2010. Opposition was swift and fierce, and came from both industry and academia. The long delay in the release of the FDA’s new policy prompted rumours of political interference. In July, five US senators wrote a letter to the Office of Management and Budget, which has to review proposed regulations, to question the delay in releasing the FDA’s guidance.
But in another letter sent last month, a host of academic testing labs decried efforts to regulate the field, saying that the tests should be considered services rather than devices. It is easy to understand some of their concerns. The FDA is famously overcommitted and under-resourced, and adding to its remit raises fears that the agency will be slow to issue approvals, becoming a roadblock to innovation just as the technologies are beginning to build up speed...
Siccome alcuni accademici continuano a protestare, in cauda all’editoriale c’è una bella dose di veleno (link aggiunto):
But in 2010, Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, ended three clinical trials designed to determine whether gene-expression profiles could predict patient responses to lung-cancer therapies. The trials were based on results from cancer researcher Anil Potti, and were terminated well after other scientists reported flaws in his analyses. Those flaws might have been acknowledged earlier if the FDA had been consulted before the trials started.
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Ewen Callaway ha una buona notizia. I dati finlandesi sul calo della resistenza agli antibiotici conseguente alla vaccinazione
contro polmonite, meningite e altre malattie letali causate dallo Streptococcus pneumoniae
sono confermati da uno studio del Wellcome Trust in Kenya.
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Richard Van Noorden scrive che il Directory of Open Access Journals sta facendo pulizia:
Now, following criticism of its quality-control checks, the website is asking all of the journals in its directory to reapply on the basis of stricter criteria. It hopes the move will weed out ‘predatory journals’: those that profess to publish research openly, often charging fees, but that are either outright scams or do not provide the services a scientist would expect, such as a minimal standard of peer review or permanent archiving.
“Troppo poco, troppo tardi” dice Jeffrey Beall che compila la lista nera degli editori “discutibili“ e riviste idem, ormai il DOAJ è discreditato, insieme alle riviste oneste che figurano nel suo elenco:
But will any kind of whitelist help vulnerable researchers to avoid publishing in substandard journals? Beall doesn’t think so. “There’s no evidence that the whitelist approach has been helpful in encouraging researchers not to become victims of scams,” he says. “Bad open-access publishers are still growing like crazy.”
Solito dilemma: black list o white list? Direi entrambe, ma nessuno me lo chiede…
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Fra i papers, segnalo quello di Brian Enquist et al. Calcolano l’incidenza dei cambiamenti climatici nella “produzione primaria netta” (PPN) di vegetazione, i loro effetti sul metabolismo delle piante, rispetto a quella dei fattori locali: la PPN sta diventando la stessa ai vari gradienti termici, stazionaria o in calo fra i Tropici dov’era maggiore, in aumento alle latitudini (quelle nord, soprattutto) più elevate.
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Su Current Biology, una meta-analisi del British Antarctic Survey sulle 18 specie di pinguini conferma che oggi le popolazioni stanno declinando innanzitutto per la perdita dell’habitat, l’inquinamento e la pesca. In passato venivano ammazzati solo gli adulti, per venderne l’olio, la pelle e le piume. Com stampa del BAS.