Some recent news from around the internet…

• For those unable to make it out to Chicago, the ASCO meeting videos are available online. Check out the free series of brief Highlights of the Day organized by specialty.
• Kevin Smith of Duke discusses attempts by publishers to control where authors may post and link to their own work during embargo periods. He then goes on to explain why this concept translates poorly into the real academic publishing world. According to Smith;

It appears that Elsevier is making a distinction between an author’s personal website or blog and the repository at the institution where that author works. Authors are, I think, able to post final manuscripts to the former for public access, but posting to the latter must be restricted only to internal users for the duration of the newly-imposed embargo periods. – See more

Here is just a sampling of the coverage of the chocolate study shenanigans:

• Last week on io9, a science journalist explained how he, at the behest of some documentary film makers, ran a scam nutrition study, had the results published for a fee, and rolled it out with press releases to get the results into the mainstream media. His description of how he gamed the system is here. While his piece does explain a number of important issues for people to be aware of – tricky statistics, exceptionally small sample sizes, etc. – there are some glaring ethical issues.
• NPR covered the story on The Salt here. The piece touched upon ethics questions and asked a number of people with insights into the science and health media landscape if they felt that the stunt helped or added to the problem it exploited.
• Hilda Bastian’s Tricked: The Ethical Slippery Slope of Hoaxes is a long, well written discussion of the case in terms of journalism and the history of hoaxes. Check it out, even the comments are worth a read.