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Daily Archives: December 16, 2016

ScienceOpen launches new search capabilities

“At ScienceOpen, we’ve just upgraded our search and discovery platform to be faster, smarter, and more efficient. A new user interface and filtering capabilities provide a better discovery experience for users. ScienceOpen searches more than 27 million full text open access or article metadata records and puts them in context. We include peer-reviewed academic articles from all fields, including pre-prints that we draw from the arXiv and which are explicitly tagged as such The current scale of academic publishing around the world is enormous. According to a recent STM report, we currently publish around 2.5 million new peer reviewed articles every single year, and that’s just in English language journals. The problem with this for researchers and more broadly is how to stay up to date with newly published research. And not just in our own fields, but in related fields too. Researchers are permanently inundated, and we need to find a way to sift the wheat from the chaff. The solution is smart and enhanced search and discovery. Platforms like ResearchGate and Google Scholar (GS) have just a single layer of discovery, with additional functions such as sorting by date to help narrow things down a bit. GS is the de facto mode of discovery of primary research for most academics, but it also contains a whole slew of ‘grey literature’ (i.e., non-peer reviewed outputs), which often interferes with finding the best research. As well as this, if you do a simple search with GS, say just for dinosaurs, you get 161,000 returned results. How on Earth are you supposed to find the most useful and most relevant research based on this if you want to move beyond Google’s page rank, especially if you’re entering this from outside the area of specialisation? Simply narrowing down by dates does very little to prevent being overwhelmed with an absolute deluge of maybe maybe-not relevant literature. We need to do better at research discovery…”

Paper – The Rule of Reason

Hovenkamp, Herbert J., The Rule of Reason (December 16, 2016). Available for download at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2885916 “Antitrust’s rule of reason was born out of a thirty year (1897-1927) division among Supreme Court Justices about the proper way to assess multi-firm restraints on competition. By the late 1920s the basic contours of the rule for restraints… Continue Reading

Statement on Requests for Additional Information on Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election

DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE WASHINGTON, DC 20511 December 16, 2016 “Statement on Requests for Additional Information on Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election – Recently, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has received requests from Members of Congress, several Electors of the Electoral College and the general public for additional information on… Continue Reading

WaPo – Now you can fact-check Trump’s tweets – in the tweets themselves

Washington Post: “Are we talking about the same cyberattack where it was revealed that head of the DNC illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate? Weigel wrote a whole post about the issue — but people who just click through to the link see only Trump’s claim, and none of the context. We made… Continue Reading

Globe at Night – international citizen-science campaign to raise public awareness of the impact of light pollution

“Globe at Night is an international citizen-science campaign to raise public awareness of the impact of light pollution by inviting citizen-scientists to measure & submit their night sky brightness observations. It’s easy to get involved – all you need is computer or smart phone & follow these 5 Simple Steps!” Continue Reading

WaPo – FBI backs CIA view that Russia intervened to help Trump win election

“FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. are in agreement with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the presidency, according to U.S. officials. Comey’s support for the CIA’s conclusion — and officials say that he never changed… Continue Reading

Arrest-Related Deaths Program Redesign Study, 2015-16: Preliminary Findings

“1,200 people were killed by police officers in the U.S. in the 12 months that ended in May 2016.” “Provides preliminary results of the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) redesign of the Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD) collection component of the Deaths in Custody Reporting Program, which was established in response to the Death in Custody Reporting… Continue Reading