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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced the world’s strongest policy in support of open research and open data. If strictly enforced, it would prevent Gates-funded researchers from publishing in well-known journals such as Nature and Science. On 20 November, the medical charity, based in Seattle, Washington, announced that from January 2015, researchers it funds must make open their re

Nature Methods | Methagora How to write a rebuttal letter27 Sep 2013 | 10:51 AM | Posted by Nicole Rusk | Category: General Interest, Journal Policy A well written rebuttal letter is critical in any resubmission. Once the initial reaction, be that joy, anger or frustration,  to receiving feedback from editors and reviewers about one’s work has subsided, it’s time for our authors to make one of two

Yoshiki Sasai, one of Japan’s top stem-cell researchers, died this morning (5 August) in an apparent suicide. He was 52. Sasai, who worked at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, was famous for his ability to coax embryonic stem cells to differentiate into other cell types. In 2011, he stunned the world by mimicking an early stage in the development of the eye — a three

Nature Methods | Methagora How to write a cover letter27 Sep 2013 | 10:52 AM | Posted by Allison Doerr | Category: General Interest, Journal Policy Part one of our 3-part series on the dos and don’ts of communicating with editors and reviewers. A good cover letter is a crucial part of the manuscript submission package to Nature Methods. It is not simply an archaic form of communication that is bec

Reports of a new kind of stem cell, produced by simply stressing mature mouse cells, kicked up a storm of controversy soon after their publication in Nature on 30 January. Duplicated and manipulated images as well as plagiarism were found in the two papers, which led to a verdict of misconduct for the lead author, Haruko Obokata of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan. There h

Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski. The RIKEN institute today confirmed reports out yesterday that it would turn down Haruko Obokata’s request for a re-examination of her case, and advised her to retract two Nature papers she published in January. In the Nature papers she co-authored, Obokata, a researcher at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, presented a new method to reprogram

News blog Acid-bath stem-cell scientist apologizes and appeals09 Apr 2014 | 18:55 BST | Posted by Shaoni Bhattacharya | Category: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, stem cells, Uncategorized Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski Haruko Obokata, the Japanese scientist at the centre of a controversy over studies purporting to turn mature cells to stem cells simply by bathing them in acid or

Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski. Beleaguered Japanese researchers are wavering over whether to retract two stunning but controversial papers that detailed a simple acid-bath method of reprogramming mature cells to an embryonic state. At a marathon press conference held in Tokyo today, officials from RIKEN, Japan’s largest research institute and home to several of the papers’ authors, announced

News blog Acid-bath stem-cell team releases tip sheet05 Mar 2014 | 18:17 GMT | Posted by David Cyranoski | Category: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, stem cells A group of Japanese researchers whose revolutionary method to  produce stem cells simply drew questions from other biologists has published more details of their protocol. The authors, who developed an ‘acid-bath’ technique th

News blog Self-confessed liar publishes more dubious stem-cell work14 Jun 2013 | 17:21 BST | Posted by David Cyranoski | Category: Biology & Biotechnology, Ethics, Publishing He’s back. Last autumn, Hisashi Moriguchi stunned the world of stem-cell science by claiming he had become the first person to transfer induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells into patients. In a now infamous front-page spread i

If enough eminent people stand together to condemn a controversial practice, will that make it stop? That’s what more than 150 scientists and 75 science organizations are hoping for today, with a joint statement called the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). It deplores the way some metrics — especially the notorious Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — are misused as quick and dirty

Nature Chemistry | The Sceptical Chymist Nature Chemistry by the numbers – 201223 Dec 2012 | 16:48 BST | Posted by Stuart Cantrill | Category: Stuart Cantrill As 2012 is winding down, I thought I’d take a look back at volume 4 of the journal. This isn’t a terribly in-depth analysis, and it’s based on what we’ve published rather than what was submitted, but you might find it a little bit interestin

News blog What were the top papers of 2012 on social media?21 Dec 2012 | 12:35 BST | Posted by Richard Van Noorden | Category: Lab life, Science communication, Technology One of the promises of altmetrics — an approach to measuring attention on research papers that relies on alternative measures to citations, such as downloads, social media mentions and collections in online libraries — is that it

News blog Osaka Bioscience Institute fights for survival22 May 2012 | 18:18 BST | Posted by Mark Peplow | Category: Biology & Biotechnology, Health and medicine, Policy Posted on behalf of David Cyranoski. On 5 April, Shigetada Nakanishi, the director of the Osaka Bioscience Institute (OBI) in Japan, received some very bad news: the city of Osaka planned to terminate its support for the institute

News blog Plutonium spotted far from Fukushima08 Mar 2012 | 14:11 BST | Posted by Geoffrey Brumfiel | Category: Fukushima, Health and medicine, Natural disasters A paper out today in the journal Scientific Reports shows evidence that radioactive plutonium spread tens of kilometres from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The new work could lead people to believe that there is a health risk, but t

The OPERA collaboration, which made headlines in September with the revolutionary claim to have clocked neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, has identified two possible sources of error in its experiment. If true, its result would have violated Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, a cornerstone of modern physics. OPERA had collected data suggesting that neutrinos generated at C

Nature’s news team is no longer updating this newsblog: all articles below are archived and extend up to the end of 2014. Please go to www.nature.com/news for the latest breaking news from Nature. Stem cells that were claimed to be created simply by exposing ordinary cells to stress were probably derived from embryonic stem cells, according to the latest investigation into an ongoing scientific sc

In a moderate tone that belies the seriousness of their allegations, a group of anthropologists last week made the case that the giant of evolutionary biology, historian of science, much-loved author and Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould, had falsified criticisms of skull measurements originally reported by 19th century American physician Samuel Morton. Like many 19th century intellectuals, Mort