The April 7 deadline is rapidly approaching for submitting all publications based on NIH-funded work to PubMed Central. But some publishers are still grumbling about how the NIH plans to implement the public access mandate, which was put in place in linkurl:January.;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54028/ linkurl:Last month,;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54372/ Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter asked NIH director Elias Zerhouni in a letter whether the NIH had adequately di

A linkurl:microRNA;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/25713/ mechanism may lie at the heart of why some skin cell growth goes unchecked, according to a paper published linkurl:today; in Nature. The authors found that one microRNA regulates the differentiation of progenitor skin cells into the stratified outer layers of the skin. linkurl:Elaine Fuchs,;http://www.rockefeller.edu/labheads/fuchs/intro.php from Rockefeller University, led the study and tracked the expression of each skin-as

Credit: Alfred Pasieka / Photo Researchers, Inc." /> Credit: Alfred Pasieka / Photo Researchers, Inc. The paper: R.B. Jones et al., "A quantitative protein interaction network for the ErbB receptors using protein microarrays," Nature, 439:168–74, 2006. (Cited in 98 papers) The finding: Gavin MacBeath's team at Harvard University wanted to find the proteins that get recruited to receptors in the first step of epidermal growth factor

Credit: Dustin Fenstermacher / Wonderful Machine" /> Credit: Dustin Fenstermacher / Wonderful Machine Zemer Gitai likes to say of his thus far short, but fruitful, science career that he is devolving. Since he studied cancer in mice as an undergraduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has been transitioning his work to increasingly simpler biologic systems. For now, he has settled on bacteria. As a PhD student at the University of California, San Fra

Big tobacco is pulling its money out of academic research -- kind of. Tobacco company Philip Morris told researchers in September of last year that it was ending its controversial extramural research program, Science linkurl:reported;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/319/5867/1173a today. But some funding from the company remains. The news of the ended sponsorship spread this month when University of California President Robert Dynes noted in a February 5 letter to the UC chancell

A California biotech announced at the Stem Cell Summit in New York City on Tuesday that they have successfully reprogrammed human skin, kidney, and retina cells to a stem-cell-like state without using potentially cancer-causing retroviruses. But experts say their claims are impossible to evaluate since the work has not been peer-reviewed. The company researchers did not say these new cells produced teratomas -- the sign that cells are truly pluripotent. The company, PrimeGen Biotech based in

One of three stem cell patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) is valid, according to a non-final ruling issued on Monday by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The three WARF patents have been under examination by the USPTO, beginning in linkurl:October, 2006,;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/home/25037/ when challenges were brought by the Public Patent Foundation in New York and the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) in Los Angeles. Decisio

More questions have come up over the new National Institutes of Health public access mandate and its fairness to journal publishers. Two weeks ago Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter sent a letter to NIH director Elias Zerhouni questioning whether the NIH had adequately discussed the mandate with journal publishers before implementing it. Specter is a ranking member of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees NIH funding. The NIH public access mandate was passed with the congressional app

linkurl:Autoimmune;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/53106/ diseases may not stem from defects in the immune system alone. Rather, developmental genetic abnormalities in organ tissues may make those organs more susceptible to autoimmune disorders, according to a linkurl:paper;http://www.nature.com/icb/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/icb20086a.html published online today in Immunology and Cell Biology. "The former explanations of how these [autoimmune] diseases occur weren't totally

The sanctity of peer review is under scrutiny again. Last month Pfizer filed a motion in federal court to force the New England Journal of Medicine to turn over confidential peer review documents for two of their products, Celebrex and Bextra. The company said they need the reviews to help defend themselves in lawsuits involving the two painkillers. But linkurl:Donald Kennedy,;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54292/ editor-in-chief of Science, writes in an linkurl:editorial;http://ww

Another microbicide to prevent linkurl:HIV;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23586/ transmission has been deemed ineffective. The Population Council, a nonprofit research organization, which has been developing the microbicide Carraguard, announced today that phase III clinical results show it ineffective in linkurl:preventing HIV;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/daily/53516/ transmission. The trial, which ended in March of last year, involved 6,202 women and cost around $40 mil

All papers by Harvard scholars accepted for publication as of today will be freely available to the public. The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously passed a linkurl:motion;http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~secfas/February_2008_Agenda.pdf last night (February 12) that requires all arts and sciences faculty articles to be made publicly available. Harvard is the first US university to mandate open access to its faculty publications, Peter Suber, open access advocate, wrote on his linkurl:b