A growing number of open-access journals of questionable reputation are offering to publish "seemingly anything" for a fee and are preying on researchers to lend them credibility, The New York Times reports today.

One doctor who submitted two articles to The Journal of Clinical Case Reports was billed $2,900 for their publication, a fee he had not been told about. When he tried to withdraw the papers, they were published anyway, and his fee was waived after a year of back-and-forth.

A plant pathologist at Rutgers University agreed to join the editorial board of another journal, Plant Pathology & Microbiology, only to find himself listed by the publisher as an organizer and speaker for a conference called Entomology-2013."I am not even an entomologist," he told the Times. The conference is trying to mimic a well-known meeting called Entomology 2013.

Up to 4,000 such "predatory journals" exist today – at least a quarter of all open-access journals – according to Jeffrey Beall, a research librarian at the University of Colorado, who keeps a blacklist of them called "Beall's list."

The US Supreme Court recently heard arguments in Maryland v. King concerning whether obtaining DNA samples from people as they are arrested violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In The Nation, Jason Silverstein writes that a factor beyond privacy comes into play with the collection of DNA samples upon a person's arrest. "Because people of color are disproportionately stopped, searched and arrested, they will disproportionately bear the burden of this genetic dragnet," he writes. "And because DNA samples can be used to establish family relationships, it has the potential to widen the surveillance to entire communities."

Indeed, the Los Angeles Police Department has said that it was able to make an arrest in the 'Grim Sleeper' serial killer case because of a familial search. Christopher Franklin was arrested in conjunction with a weapons charge and his DNA test showed a similarity to samples from the serial killer case; his father Lonnie Franklin, Jr., was subsequently arrested and charged in the Grim Sleeper case.

However, Silverstein notes that such police DNA databases likely contain a significant portion of samples from people who were never convicted or sometimes even charged with a crime. The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that about 19 percent of people arrested in California for a felony were never charged with a crime, Silverstein writes. Getting removed from the database is also difficult, with the procedures differing from state to state.

The Court is expected to rule on the case this summer. How the Court votes, Silverstein says, may be unusual. "When Maryland's chief deputy attorney general, Katherine Winfree, recited the number of convictions won through DNA matches, Justice Antonin Scalia fired back, 'If you conducted a lot of unreasonable searches and seizures, you'd get more convictions, too. That proves absolutely nothing.'" On the other hand, Justice Stephen Breyer pushed back against King's attorney, saying DNA tests are "no more intrusive" than fingerprints but "much more accurate."

The American Association for Cancer Research honored James Watson's 85th birthday at its annual meeting this weekend with a special session that included a round of "Happy Birthday to You" and a birthday cake.

After blowing out his candles, Watson spoke about his recent work investigating the hypothesis that antioxidants play a role in cancer. He published a paper earlier this year in Open Biology outlining his views on the subject, but apparently that journal wasn't his first choice.

He said during his talk on Saturday that he initially submitted the paper – his first since 1972 – to the New England Journal of Medicine, but was rejected because, he said he was told, NEJM "doesn't publish ideas, only facts." Several other journals also turned him down.

This experience, he said, led him to believe that journal publishers see it as their mission to reject papers rather than publish them. "I hate the editors of these journals more than I hate Republicans," he said. "They're anti-science."

He wrapped up by calling for a more concerted research effort into the role that antioxidants play in cancer, noting that the cancer research community can make faster progress if it considers new ideas. "We can do it if we don't spend all our money investigating RAS," he said.

Big science can lead to big reactions, and Greg Miller at Wired has put together a poll comparing reactions to the announcement of the Human Genome project to those in response to the new brain mapping initiative, conveniently called BRAIN.

"Today [the Human Genome Project] is widely viewed as a success, but in the early days it too was controversial," Miller writes. "Just because the critics of the genome project got it wrong doesn’t mean that the critics of the brain project aren't raising good points, but there's a similar ring to many of the arguments for and against the two projects."

For example, respondents to the poll split 48 to 52 that this phrase referred to the brain project or the genome project: "Arguments are made that the ... project will give birth to a new generation of technologies. What good will that do in the absence of individuals trained and capable of applying these technologies?"

For the answer, and more comparisons, take Miller's poll.

There are parts of the body that people tend to scrub well and others that may only get a passing wash. The belly button, Rob Dunn from North Carolina State University tells NPR's Talk of the Nation, might not be the cleanest spot, but it is home to tens of bacterial species in the average person, though across the population the navel is home to thousands of species.

"They're kind of a nature reserve when it comes to our body," says Dunn, who leads the Belly Button Biodiversity Project. "And so I think that the better indication of, you know, what our body is like in terms of microbes and those places we don't scrub all the time."

Dunn and his colleagues recently reported in PLOS One that, within a group of 60 volunteers, they uncovered more than 2,000 types of bacteria and archaea, with each person harboring an average of 67 different bacteria, through sequencing of 16S rDNA libraries.

"We're finding not only whole new species in belly buttons but whole new lineages …," Dunn tells NPR. "You know, they don't have names — even their families often don't have names. And so it's really a pretty amazing time."

As non-invasive prenatal tests for genetic abnormalities are adopted in the clinic, the Wall Street Journal says that there may be confusion among doctors and patients regarding what the results of those tests mean. In fact, the Journal points out, the American College of Genetics and Genomics is working on a statement urging such tests to be called "screens" to emphasize that they predict risk rather than give definitive results. Four US companies, Ariosa Diagnostics, Natera, Sequenom, and Verinata Health, which is part of llumina, offer such tests.

Non-invasive screens appeal to many pregnant women as they avoid the small miscarriage risk associated with amniocentesis. Jeff Chapa, the head of obstetrics and maternal-fetal medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, tells the Journal that doctors there perform half as many invasive tests.

"All patients want to hear that you don't need to have something invasive," says Laura Limone, genetic-counseling supervisor New Jersey Perinatal Associates in Livingston and a member of Sequenom's speakers bureau. "Those who understand the technology find it very promising, but we also know it isn't perfect yet."

Indeed, the screens can yield false-positive or false-negative results, and positive results should be followed up on with invasive procedures, the Journal says. Athena Cherry, who heads the cytogenetics lab at Stanford University Medical Center, tells the Journal that case studies like one of a patient who terminated a pregnancy after only the screening — and the fetus was subsequently found to be normal — indicate that the message to follow up on positive results may not be "driven home enough."

False-negative results also may occur, as one instance was recounted at the ACMG annual meeting last month, as our sister publication GenomeWeb Daily News reported. The test, from Verinata, indicated that the fetus did not have Down syndrome but an amniocentesis performed after unusual ultrasound findings found that the fetus did have Down syndrome — the company's test had boasted a 100 percent sensitivity for detecting the syndrome; it now indicates a sensitivity greater than 99.9 percent, the Journal adds.

"Noninvasive prenatal [testing] as a whole has the potential to someday replace invasive procedures," says Jonathan Sheena, Natera's chief technology, adding that "the field has taken a giant leap forward … but we believe it is important to understand they don't replace invasive tests yet."