Monday – time to check out PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, as well as, of course, PLoS ONE.
As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week – you go and look for your own favourites:
Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing by Stuart M. Shieber:
Scholars write articles to be read–the more access to their articles the better–so one might think that the open-access approach to publishing, in which articles are freely available online to all without interposition of an access fee, would be an attractive competitor to traditional subscription-based journal publishing.
But open-access journal publishing is currently at a systematic disadvantage relative to the traditional model.
I propose a simple, cost-effective remedy to this inequity that would put open-access publishing on a path to become a sustainable, efficient system, allowing the two journal publishing systems to compete on a more level playing field. The issue is important, first, because academic institutions shouldn’t perpetuate barriers to an open-access business model on principle and, second, because the subscription-fee business model has manifested systemic dysfunctionalities in practice. After describing the problem with the subscription-fee model, I turn to the proposal for providing equity for open-access journal publishing–the open-access compact.
Prolonged Grief Disorder: A Problem for the Past, the Present, and the Future:
In systematically, and to me at least, persuasively establishing prolonged grief disorder (PGD) as a uniquely identifiable illness that requires specific treatments, Holly Prigerson and colleagues have separated PGD from normal grief and from other forms of pathologic grief responses [2]. Is it useful to include it in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)? I believe it is for several reasons. First, treatment for PGD is effective and substantially different from treatment for other forms of psychiatric illnesses that can be triggered by or arise with grief and loss.
The Validation and Assessment of Machine Learning: A Game of Prediction from High-Dimensional Data:
In applied statistics, tools from machine learning are popular for analyzing complex and high-dimensional data. However, few theoretical results are available that could guide to the appropriate machine learning tool in a new application. Initial development of an overall strategy thus often implies that multiple methods are tested and compared on the same set of data. This is particularly difficult in situations that are prone to over-fitting where the number of subjects is low compared to the number of potential predictors. The article presents a game which provides some grounds for conducting a fair model comparison. Each player selects a modeling strategy for predicting individual response from potential predictors. A strictly proper scoring rule, bootstrap cross-validation, and a set of rules are used to make the results obtained with different strategies comparable. To illustrate the ideas, the game is applied to data from the Nugenob Study where the aim is to predict the fat oxidation capacity based on conventional factors and high-dimensional metabolomics data. Three players have chosen to use support vector machines, LASSO, and random forests, respectively.