ScienceGeist

Last Friday, hundreds of thousands of students in the United States and around the world were out in the streets rather than in their classrooms, demanding that our political leaders address the climate crisis with the urgency and focused action that the science so clearly demands.

Due a to a misconfigured server, a researcher found a constant stream of Elsevier users' passwords.

The MIT community is invited to comment on ways to increase sharing of research, data, software, and more.

Robert P. Crease harks back to the shapers of our scientific infrastructure and what they can tell us about how to handle the threat we now face.

How can academic libraries "vote with their dollars"?

There is a wealth of advice and 'how to' guides available to academics on the subject of how research can have an impact on policy and practice. In this post Kathryn Oliver and Paul Cairney assess the value of this literature, arguing that unless researchers seek to situate research impact within processes of policymaking and academic knowledge production, this advice can ultimately reinforce current inequalities in research impact.

Study shows that peer review of grant applications at the SNSF may be prone to biases stemming from different applicant and reviewer characteristics. Based on this study, the SNSF abandoned nomination of reviewers by applicants, and made members of panels aware of the other systematic differences in scores.

Young people will be greatly impacted by the effects of climate change, so it is critical that their voices are heard.

Der Nationalfonds ist der wichtigste Förderer hiesiger Forschung.

The ETH Zurich Executive Board is submitting a request to the ETH Board for the dismissal of a professor, while simultaneously launching a package of measures to improve the quality of leadership and supervision at ETH.

The 2010 reform of the Italian university system introduced the National Scientific Habilitation (ASN) as a requirement for applying to permanent professor positions. Since the CVs of the 59149 candidates and the results of their assessments have been made publicly available, the ASN constitutes an opportunity to perform analyses about a nation-wide evaluation process.

The mental health crisis extends into the ways counseling and psychological services are provided and into the intrinsic nature of graduate education.

Young people are going on a climate strike and researchers are supporting their cause. Reto Knutti discusses the issues.

ETH Zurich has submitted a request to the ETH Board to terminate the employment relationship with a professor in the former Institute for Astronomy. To avoid as far as possible similar cases from escalating in future, ETH Zurich is adapting its structures and processes.

Research findings based on HeLa cells cannot always be reproduced by other scientists. To get to the bottom of this lack of reproducibility, a group of system biologists working with ETH Professor Ruedi Aebersold has embarked on a massive project: molecular cell measurement.

As the publishing arm of the University of California system, UC Press supports the UC libraries in their cancellation of the Elsevier "big deal" package. As small to medium-sized publishers of largely humanities and social sciences (HSS) journals, university presses (including UC Press) have had to compete for diminishing library resources to support our publishing programs.

With an analysis of DNA from nearly 300 fossilized remains, scientists are peering into human prehistory in the region.

Online survey BOS

The concerns of the young protesters are justified.

New guides for researchers and project coordinators will be presented during the webinar on 29 March 2019. 

Eric Lander, Françoise Baylis, Feng Zhang, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Paul Berg and specialists from seven countries call for an international governance framework on genome editing.

The article explores the conceptual frameworks, methods, and data sources used in bibliometrics to study the nature of the humanities, and its differences and similarities in comparison with other scientific domains.

Hindawi partners with Publons to improve and speed up the peer review process.

As President Trump requests deep budget cuts on science spending, he is likely to meet strong opposition in Congress.

The changing world of scholarly communication and the emergence of 'Open Science' or 'Open Research' has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly-debated topics. Yet, evidence-based rational debate is regularly drowned out by misinformed or exaggerated rhetoric, which does not benefit the evolving system of scholarly communication.

Robert Harington interviews Daniel Hook, CEO of Digital Science, discussing openness and findings from his recent report entitled The Ascent of Open Access.

For those trained in the sciences and the practice of law, where skepticism, logical reasoning and critical thinking are the most closely held tools to guide them through life, it's vexing to witness seemingly intelligent people duped by pseudo-scientific nutrition advice and treatments for illnesses with no evidence of effectiveness.

Policymakers need to be encouraged to take a scientic approach when drawing up legislation to boost food security, according to a panel of experts.

Contrary to first impressions, Congress has done a decent job standing up for scientific research.

New software enables the rapid submission of manuscripts for initial assessment.