It was Black History Month - and one of my projects was a tweet thread, adding an African-American women scientist every day, each with a great photo. Scroll through these amazing women in the twitter thread or the blog post with a little more about each of them at Missing Sci Faces.
And at last, after a year of digging out information, photos, and over 150 PhDs pre-1975 - and writing or improving lots of Wikipedia pages along the way, I posted an extensive Wikipedia overview of African-Americans in mathematics. Read my post about it here at Absolutely Maybe - Black History Month: Mathematicians Powerful Stories.
And I live-blogged the ASAPbio meeting on peer review, supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and Wellcome Trust: Transparency, Recognition, & Innovation. It was my first visit to the pretty sumptuous HHMI campus in Chevy Chase (not far from the NIH in Bethesda). This is what tributes to the founder looks like when he was a movie producer:
This month was all about open access! My fifth annual open access roundup - Open Access 2017: A Year of Stand-Offs, Showdowns, & Funders' Own Journals.
And Principles, Open Access, & Everyday Choices at Absolutely Maybe.
First up was a much-needed installment in Statistically Funny on effect size: A Science Fortune Cookie. A piece of the puzzle I needed to complete 6 Tips for Deciphering Outcomes in Health Studies. (It's trickier than you might think!)
And then a look at the evidence on infographics versus text.
Happy 2018! My 3 most-visited blog posts for 2017.
First up this month, at Absolutely Maybe, Peak Gender Gap: Women at the Top of Science Agencies. In which I find the track record on gender and race in those who have held the peak position at major science agencies is often impossible to unearth online - and the number with unbroken all-male lineups is shockingly high. Hoping to prod a few more agencies into putting their lists of previous leaders online. Thanks to Wellcome Trust, who came to the party - so now we know Bridget Ogilvie, an Aussie scientist, became their first woman director in 1991.
At Wikipedia, I created a page for Audrey S. Penn, the first African-American woman to serve as director of an NIH Institute. The NIH (National Institute of Health) and NSF (National Science Foundation) in the US were the only major science funding agencies I could find that have had black women serving in peak positions. (Audrey Penn was the only one of them who didn't yet have a Wikipedia page.) Lots more inspiring women still missing, though!
I ended the month writing a post tackling the argument being made for changing the name of retractions and introducing new categories for them: Rebranding Retractions and the Honest Error Hypothesis. In which I conclude rebranding retractions isn't feasible and can't alone solve problems.
First up was re-visiting the issue of women, children, and clinical trials at Absolutely Maybe: Catch-22, Clinical Trials Edition. The goal of protecting women and children from harm has left them vulnerable to another kind of harm: being exposed to drugs and other treatments that haven't been tested for them.
Next up, after a couple of years of reading and thinking about peer review at journals, I've shifted position on a key issue: The Fractured Logic of Blinded Peer Review at Journals.
A blast from the past: the ancient wisdom of Significus the Obscure!
This month, too, a comment at PubMed Commons about a paper evaluating a method for constructing search strategies for systematic reviews.
Over at Wikipedia, a new page for an African-American educator who died at the age of 46: Ira David Pinson. A 1920 Yale graduate, he pulled a historically black university back from the brink it got to in the great Depression. A powerful and beloved orator, I've included a quote: "Humanity needs a faith that love is at the heart of life, that love is superior to hate, that men must become brotherly or they will perish, that a law of service and sacrifice underlies life..." Read more!
