There's no love lost between open access PLoS (Public Library of Science) and print journals. Nature doesn't think much of PLoS, for example, and PLoS says they created the company to make science less insular so it isn't any surprise that that a new PLoS essay by Neal Young, John Ioannidis and Omar Al-Ubaydli claims that the current system of publishing medical and scientific research provides "a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic."

They apply shade-tree-mechanic economics principles to support their idea of the distortion. There is an "extreme imbalance," they say, between the abundance of supply (science laboratories and clinical investigations) and the limited venues for publication (journals with sufficiently high impact to be valuable to the authors - let's come back to that part later). Scientific information, they say, is an economic commodity and the 'consumers' are other scientists, patients, funding agencies, etc.

The result of the imbalance, they note accurately, is that only a small proportion of all research studies are chosen for publication in the best journals, and these results are unrepresentative of scientists' overall work.

Countries with strict social rules and behavioral etiquette may foster unruly drinking cultures and characteristic bad behavior, according to a new report on alcohol and violence released today by International Center for Alcohol Policies (ICAP). The report also lists 11 cultural features that may predict levels of violence such as homicide and spousal abuse.

And the culprit is, of course, not just alcohol, but men.

We cannot change the male propensity for aggression, but we can channel it into appropriate and socially acceptable forms. In particular, we need rites of passage for young people that offer challenge and a route to adult status and recognition. The aim should not be to completely suppress male aggression, but to utilize and channel it constructively.

But alcohol and men together make things worse. Apparently, lacking big animals to hunt, a night at the bar starts to resemble gay porn.