nodalpoint.org

One of the most spectacular flameouts in science happened last year. In a short letter (barely over 300 words long) published in Science in the very last issue of 2006, Geoffrey Chang, a crystallographer, retracted 3 Science articles, a Nature article, a PNAS article and a JMB article. The sum of 5 years of work was destroyed, apparently, over a single sign error in a data-processing program. Read more...

Goal-oriented research(Sub only)
A nice editorial about science funding. This comes in a time of discussion about the future European Research Council that, if it ever gets of the paper, will someday fund basic research in Europe.

"High-quality science will give rise to more unexpected and therefore valuable

The Royal Society has set up a working group on best practice for publishing research. It's pretty wide-ranging and covers issues such as inadequacies in peer review, ethics, corporate interests and more. Quote from the BBC story: "(Bateson) said it had also been suggested the process (peer review) had been used by the Establishment to prevent unorthodox ideas methods and views, regardless of their merit, from being made public".