ScienceGeist

Discrepancies between pre-specified and reported outcomes are an important source of bias in trials. Despite legislation, guidelines and public commitments on correct reporting from journals, outcome misreporting continues to be prevalent. We aimed to document the extent of misreporting, establish whether it was possible to publish correction letters on all misreported trials as they were published, and monitor responses from editors and trialists to understand why outcome misreporting persists despite public commitments to address it.

Kelvin Droegemeier starts work 2 years into administration facing many challenges

Advance knowledge in service of equitable and open scholarship is the mission of the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship. CREOS seeks evidence about the best ways disparate communities can participate in scholarship with minimal bias or barriers. 

Invited talk by Jon Tennant delivered at the NFAIS 2019 Annual Conference.

The Elon Musk-backed nonprofit company OpenAI declines to release research publicly for fear of misuse

A planned $35-million upgrade could enable LIGO to spot one black-hole merger per day by the mid-2020s.

NISO and NFAIS announced a planned merger yesterday, designed to better serve their members during a time of rapid change.

On the five-year anniversary of an uprising that propelled Ukraine away from Russia and towards Europe, scientists say things are improving too slowly.

Gender and Precarious Research Careers aims to advance the debate on the process of precarisation in higher education and its gendered effects, and springs from a three-year research project across institutions in seven European countries. Examining gender asymmetries in academic and research organisations, this insightful volume focuses particularly on early careers. It centres both on STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and SSH (Social Science and Humanities) fields.

Current efforts to make research more accessible and transparent can reinforce inequality within STEM professions.

Despite growing awareness of predatory publishing and research on its market characteristics, the defining attributes of fraudulent journals remain controversial. The authors aimed to develop a better understanding of quality criteria for scholarly journals by analysing journals and publishers indexed in blacklists of predatory journals and whitelists of legitimate journals and the lists’ inclusion criteria. 

Following these guiding principles for sharing data can help researchers get ahead.

A new study shows that little teams are more likely to take their research in radically new directions.

A project to assess the reproducibility of findings in biomedical science published by researchers based in Brazil.

According to a study of 628 awards given over five decades, men still win the most prestigious scientific prizes.

February 11th was International Women and Girls in Science Day, but despite the best efforts of many parents, teachers, and policymakers over the last two decades the numbers are still dismal.

EUA has published a preview of the results of the latest edition of its Big Deals survey.

In a new study, researchers uncovered female programmers who made important but unrecognized contributions to genetics.

With thousand of pages of feedback on the Plans S implementation guidance, what themes emerged that might guide next steps?

Research needs an authoritative forum to hash out collective problems, argue C. K. Gunsalus, Marcia K. McNutt and colleagues.

  This article by Dr Hélène Draux, Research Data Scientist at Digital Science, and Dr Suze Kundu, Head of Public Engagement at Digital Science takes note of 11th February, the annual International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

On 11 February, the United Nations, partners worldwide, women and girls will mark the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

PLOS welcomes Plan S as a 'decisive step towards the realisation of full open access'1, in particular the push it provides towards realization of a research process based on the principles of open science.

The social-media platform is often a tool for procrastination, says Jet-Sing M. Lee. But what else can it be?

February 11 was the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. This year, it was marked by a joint statement celebrating women’s achievements in science from Europe’s eight EIROforum laboratories.

We are inspired that our children, spurred on by the noble actions of Greta Thunberg and other striking students, are making their voices heard, say 224 academics

Access to expert commentary and insight - and an invitation to co-create the system of the future

Universities are at long last undertaking efforts to collect and disseminate information about student career outcomes, after decades of calls to action. Organizations such as Rescuing Biomedical Research and Future of Research brought this issue to the forefront of graduate education, and the second Future of Biomedical Graduate and Postdoctoral Training conference (FOBGAPT2) featured the collection of career outcomes data in its final recommendations, published in this journal (Hitchcock et al., 2017). More recently, 26 institutions assembled as the Coalition for Next Generation Life Science, committing to ongoing collection and dissemination of career data for both graduate and postdoc alumni. A few individual institutions have shared snapshots of the data in peer-reviewed publications (Mathur et al., 2018; Silva, des Jarlais, Lindstaedt, Rotman, Watkins, 2016) and on websites. As more and more institutions take up this call to action, they will now be looking for tools, protocols, and best practices for ongoing career outcomes data collection, management, and dissemination. Here, we describe UCSF's experiences in conducting a retrospective study, and in institutionalizing a methodology for annual data collection and dissemination. We describe and share all tools we have developed, and we provide calculations of the time and resources required to accomplish both retrospective studies and annual updates. We also include broader recommendations for implementation at your own institutions, increasing the feasibility of this endeavor.

Study finds failure of English language medical journals to comply with international ethical standards.