The Price of Precaution and the Ethics of Risk

For once, I'll post some self-promotion here. After  quite an intense week of work, I today sent off the final manuscript for my forthcoming book, The Price of Precaution and the Ethics of Risk, due to be published  by Springer, in its International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology series, later this year. This is a partial explanation why you haven't seen any substantial posts here for a while, and I'm sorry to say that this will continue for a while, since I now move on to revising the manuscript to mine and Niklas Juth's forthcoming book on the ethics of screening in health care and medicine. But I hope to able to post a snippet or two now and then, and be back in full force in a few months.

Scientific discourse and social media

A few days ago, Nature published this interesting piece on how social media, blogs and particularly Twitter has quickly changed the context of academic publishing and "open review" (what we academics outside of natural science and biomedicine call public debate). Going by the article, it seems to me that the scientific world has a surprisingly hard time coming to grips with the situation that criticism of scientific publications can no longer be screened by editors and that scientific discussion, as a result, is no longer an activity reserved for a chosen few. Nevertheless, an interesting read with several engaging examples and opinions worth considering.

Article retraction in academic journals

Pertaining to my earlier post on an article retracted due to (what in all respects that matter is) plagiarism in a bioethics journal, here's an interesting piece by Ben Goldacre in today's Guardian on the general topic of the (lack of) policies for retraction notes.