Ebola fears hamper U.S. meetings

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA | Fears of the Ebola virus are barring researchers from two scientific meetings in New Orleans. Several scientists—including representa- tives of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—had to cancel their trip to the annual meeting of the American Society
of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene this week after the state of Louisiana barred attendees who had treated Ebola patients or been in Guinea, Sierra Leone, or Liberia in the previous 3 weeks. The same rules will affect the annual convention of the American Public Health Association (APHA), held in New Orleans from 15 to 19 November, says APHA Executive

Director Georges Benjamin. Meanwhile, two infectious diseases meetings in Europe went ahead as planned this week because no Ebola travel restrictions applied in their host cities, Vienna and Stockholm. http:// scim.ag/Ebolamtgban, http://scim.ag/EbolaEur
Germans boost research funding
BERLIN | After months of deadlock, German politicians agreed on 30 October to a €25.3 billion ($31.6 billion) funding package for universities and research insti- tutes through 2020. The bulk of the new money, €19.3 billion, will go to universities. Nonuniversity research organizations like the DFG funding agency, the Max Planck Society, and the Leibniz Association will receive 3% annual budget increases from 2016 through 2020, down from recent 5%

yearly increases. Funding for overhead costs—a long-simmering issue—will rise from 20% to 22%. The country’s Excellence Initiative, a competition between universi- ties for extra funding, will also continue, though details won’t be worked out until after an evaluation of the program is fin- ished in early 2016.
Badges clarify co-authors’ roles

LONDON | A collection of science, publishing, and software groups is devel- oping a solution to the problem of how to identify the contributions of each of a paper’s authors: digital “badges”—such as “computation,” “investigation,” and “data visualization”—that detail what each author did for the work. Authors can link the badges to their profiles elsewhere on the Web. The collaboration, which includes BioMed Central, the Public Library of Science, Mozilla Science Lab, and ORCID (an effort to assign researchers digital identifiers), presented the project at the Mozilla Festival in London late last month. Early prototypes are scheduled to launch next year, according to Amye Kenall, journal development manager of open data initia- tives and journals at BioMed Central. http://scim.ag/_digitalbadges

 Science’s memory deepens

BOSTON | Today’s scientists are standing on the shoulders of giants, relying on the work of their predecessors—to whom they give a nod by citing their papers. But is the work of those predecessors becom-
ing obsolete, as scientists choose to cite more recent work? In a paper posted on arXiv, the team behind Google Scholar weighed in this week with a study of their own massive data set. The team analyzed papers published between 1990 and 2013 and compared the publication dates of citations listed in them. The results should give older scientists reason to cheer:
The fraction of citations that are at least 10 years older than the paper citing them has increased steadily, from 28% in 1990 to 36% in 2013, the team reports. http://scim.ag/papercites
Climate report sounds alarm
COPENHAGEN | Climate change is taking hold and will bring worrying impacts— but there is still time to limit the dam- age. That is the message delivered by
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Synthesis Report, released this week, which caps work on three massive studies issued by IPCC over the past year, comprising the group’s fifth assessment of climate science and mitigation since 1990. “The core message from the IPCC is the growing urgency of action,” said Bob Perciasepe, president of the Arlington, Virginia–based Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, in a state- ment. “The scientists have done their job. Now it’s up to governments to do theirs.”

New research chief touts dowsing

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA | Larry Marshall, the next CEO of Australia’s leading research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), is in hot water after suggesting in a

recent radio interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that CSIRO investigate water divining, or dows- ing. Although it is “a little out there,” he tolCdapAtiBoCn ,heitr’esotfhtehisagency’s job to “push the enpvheoltoopaeb.”ovCeScIaRptOionscientists are keeping theheirehteoacdoms ed.own in the wake of a 5.45% (AU$111.4 million) budget cut that will see

up to 420 jobs eliminated by June 2015, along with the closure of eight research facilities. But experts outside the agency decried the interest in dowsing expressed by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with a doctorate in physics. “I’m appalled,” says John Williams of the Wentworth Group

of Concerned Scientists and former chief of CSIRO Land and Water. http://scim.ag/CSIROdowsing