ScienceGeist

Keynote at PyData LondonJuly 14, 2019https://pydata.org/london2019/schedule/presentation/47/DescriptionTech has spent millions of dollars in efforts to diversify workplaces. Despite this, it seems after each spell of progress, a series of retrograde events ensue. Anti-diversity manifestos, backlash to assertive hiring, and sexual misconduct scandals crop up every few months, sucking the air from every board room. This will be a digest of research, recent events, and pointers on women in STEM.AbstractTwo years ago, a Google engineer attended a diversity program. He had such an adverse reaction to it, that he proceeded to write a 10-page anti-diversity manifesto that he circulated on internal channels. It later became public, furor ensued, and the engineer was fired. Far from being the end of the story, this engineer played the victim of political correctness and became a darling of conservative media outlets. What happened here? One tech company's attempts to educate its employees and improve the internal culture mightily backfired and as a result the cause for women in STEM was choked back. While a general sense that moving toward gender parity is desirable (though some still disagree with this premise), what actions to take remains unclear. Diversity trainings have been scarcely evaluated, and when they have, they seem to change awareness but not behavior. Sometimes, they create a backlash. More assertive action, like quotas, engender open resentment. Women in science and technology are underestimated by peers and teachers, pressed by stereotypes, disadvantaged in hiring and career progression, sexually harassed, disheartened as their expertise is ignored…and now they are resented for diversity initiatives. Science and technology needs its leaders to be fully committed to diversity and in frank understanding of the social-justice underpinnings. Two vehicles for change are: men leaders who are allies, and more women in leadership. The recent DataCamp debacle shows that a whole community's action was needed to right the wrongs of one harasser and one company's reticence to make him accountable. I aim to elicit your commitments to hire and promote women affirmatively, and to get educated and empower activism with evidence.

Elsevier, the world's largest publishers of academic journals, just stepped up its fight with the University of California by cutting off UC's access.

Science journalist attends a predatory conference and interviews scientists involved.

While research data support units now exist in many universities, these are typically not able to provide discipline-specific expertise or resources. This article focuses on the Data Champion Programme at the University of Cambridge, which empowers discipline-specific expertise already embedded within each unit to advocate for good RDM and to deliver support locally.

Article shows that the Citation-Ratio is more consistent across disciplines than total numbers of citations.

Blog post encourages using more specific terms to decrease ambiguity in discussions around open science.

An examination of introductory psychology textbooks suggests that prospective psychological researchers may learn to interpret statistical significance incorrectly in their undergraduate classes.

Preprint examines whether having a preprint on bioRxiv.org was associated with the Altmetric Attention Score and number of citations of the corresponding peer-reviewed article.

Article postulates that a clear definition of use and reuse is needed to establish better metrics for a comprehensive scholarly record of individuals, institutions, organizations, etc. Hence, this article presents a first definition of reuse of research data.

New research finds that even under blind review, women score lower than men when applying for grants. The reason? The words they use.

The Research Misconduct Board is one of the first national agencies tasked with investigating serious research misconduct.

The 10,000-hour rule says intense, dedicated practice makes perfect - at that one thing. But what if breadth actually serves us better than depth?

Studies that provide access to underlying data are cited 25% more often than those that don't.

At the University of North Carolina, specialized counselors serve the school's biomedical Ph.D. students.

This dataset provides a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. It is found that these costs range from less than US$200 per article in modern, large scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US$1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. The additional non-publication cost items that make up the difference between publication costs and final price are discussed. The dataset refers to calculations about the scenarios described in a publication about that topic.

Publisher Elsevier halts UC's access to new articles but UC Berkeley Library can connect readers with what they need. 

In the coming months, Scholastica will be introducing product improvements to help journals comply with the Plan S guidelines. In this post, we overview steps journals using Scholastica's open access publishing platform can take to start preparing for Plan S.

LIBER appreciates the latest guidance, which matches its strategic goal of making Open Access the main form of scholarly communication by 2020. At the same time, it recognises the complexities and challenges faced by research libraries to implement publishing or update services to follow Plan S.

To boost inclusivity, we need to do better at tracking data and holding institutions accountable.

The distinct burden of being a climate scientist.

The Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) is a community of 60+ not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects. One of the aims of the collective is to legitimise scholar-led publishing as an important alternative model for open access.

It was tough for Lia Paola Zambetti to leave the bench after dreaming for more than a decade of becoming a scientist, and reaching her goal. But now she enjoys her work's broader impact.

The impacts of grief are long-lasting, but support from colleagues provides some relief.

University of Geneva Professor Daphne Bavelier explores how individuals learn and adapt to changes in experience, whether induced by nature or by training.

As lecturers, we're protesting today to persuade the university to pay its PhD teaching staff proper wages

The German science organisations express their concerns regarding the plans of the Hungarian government to install new legislation affecting the freedom and autonomy of science in Hungary.

The classification of science into disciplines is at the heart of bibliometric analyses. While most classifications systems are implemented at the journal level, their accuracy has been questioned, and paper-level classifications have been considered by many to be more precise.

The crisis of academic freedom in Europe emerged as the main theme at the recent "Bologna Process Beyond 2020: Fundamental values of the EHEA" conference in Bologna. More than 200 university rectors and 800 other stakeholders participated.

Efforts to make research results open and reproducible are increasingly reflected by journal policies encouraging authors to provide data availability statements. As a consequence of this, there has been a strong recent uptake of data availability statements, but it is still unclear what proportion of these statements actually contain well-formed links to data, and if there is an added value in providing them.