ScienceGeist

In 2018, there has been a drop in the number of fully OA journals published by Elsevier, from 416 to 328 journals. The majority of Elsevier’s fully OA journals are still non-charging.

M4K Pharma was incorporated to launch an open science drug discovery program that relies on regulatory exclusivity as its primary intellectual property and commercial asset, in lieu of patents. In many cases and in key markets, using regulatory exclusivity can provide equivalent commercial protection to patents, while also being compatible with open science. The model is proving attractive to government, foundation and individual funders, who collectively have different expectations for returns on investment compared with biotech, pharmaceutical companies, or venture capital investors.In the absence of these investor-driven requirements for returns, it should be possible to commercialize therapeutics at affordable prices. M4K is piloting this open science business model in a rare paediatric brain tumour, but there is no reason it should not be more widely applicable.

University of California System is playing hardball with Elsevier in negotiations that could transform the way it pays to read and publish research. But does the UC system have the clout to pull it off?

The "commons of the mind" must be preserved, says James Boyle of Duke Law School, on the 50th anniversary of "The tragedy of the commons"

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) reiterates its support for the goal of Plan S to achieve “immediate Open Access to all scholarly publications from research”.

Preservation is an imperative for our community, yet the Digital Preservation Network is disbanding. What lessons can we learn from its struggle?

DNA tests can have a placebo effect.

If we believe data should be valued like other research outputs, we must take action to achieve this. Supporting the open data movement means providing proper support for data citations.

In the 21st Century, research is increasingly data- and computation-driven. Researchers, funders, and the larger community today emphasize the traits of openness and reproducibility. In March 2017, 13 mostly early-career research leaders who are building their careers around these traits came together with ten university leaders (presidents, vice presidents, and vice provosts), representatives from four funding agencies, and eleven organizers and other stakeholders in an NIH- and NSF-funded one-day, invitation-only workshop titled “Imagining Tomorrow’s University.” Workshop attendees were charged with launching a new dialog around open research – the current status, opportunities for advancement, and challenges that limit sharing.

The workshop examined how the internet-enabled research world has changed, and how universities need to change to adapt commensurately, aiming to understand how universities can and should make themselves competitive and attract the best students, staff, and faculty in this new world. During the workshop, the participants re-imagined scholarship, education, and institutions for an open, networked era, to uncover new opportunities for universities to create value and serve society. They expressed the results of these deliberations as a set of 22 principles of tomorrow's university across six areas: credit and attribution, communities, outreach and engagement, education, preservation and reproducibility, and technologies.

The burden on the peer review community is increasing as the volume of published research articles grows. Research output is rising exponentially and this is putting pressure on the system, with many academics inundated with requests to peer review. The recent Global State of Peer Review report highlights a growing “reviewer fatigue”.To help address this, Springer Nature and Publons, part of Clarivate Analytics, have announced a partnership to improve the peer review process and enable peer reviewers to receive recognition for their contribution.

Many undergraduates in the natural sciences will never take part in research, despite a willingness to learn. But their presence can teach others how to lead.

What are the underlying mechanisms that cause disciplines to vary in their OA publishing practices.

Contemporary science has been characterized by an exponential growth in publications and a rise of team science. At the same time, there has been an increase in the number of awarded PhD degrees, which has not been accompanied by a similar expansion in the number of academic positions.

Funders and publishers have a lot to gain from sharing and aligning peer reviews.

Scientific prizes confer credibility to persons, ideas, and disciplines, provide financial incentives, and promote community-building celebrations. The authors examine the growth dynamics and interlocking relationships found in the worldwide scientific prize network. They focus on understanding how the knowledge linkages among prizes and scientists' propensities for prizewinning relate to knowledge pathways between disciplines and stratification within disciplines. Their data cover more than 3,000 different scientific prizes in diverse disciplines and the career histories of 10,455 prizewinners worldwide for over 100 years. They find several key links between prizes and scientific advances. First, despite an explosive proliferation of prizes over time and across the globe, prizes are more concentrated within a relatively small group of scientific elites, and ties among elites are highly clustered, suggesting that a relatively constrained number of ideas and scholars push the boundaries of science. For example, 64.1% of prizewinners have won two prizes and 13.7% have won five or more prizes. Second, certain prizes strongly interlock disciplines and subdisciplines, creating key pathways by which knowledge spreads and is recognized across science. Third, genealogical and coauthorship networks predict who wins multiple prizes, which helps to explain the interconnectedness among celebrated scientists and their pathbreaking ideas.

Philip Ball looks at whether prizes and awards help or hinder scientific progress.

What does the accelerated death of insects mean for the rest of life on Earth?

In academia, assessment of grant proposals is the forward‐looking review, the laying out and checking of your research plan, while peer reviews in journals are the final, consolidatory scrutiny before publication. An important difference between these academic checkpoints and my, admittedly somewhat forced fashionista analogy, is that in academia the two stages of review take place independently of each other.

Global team of scientists find ecosystem below earth that is twice the size of world's oceans

The economist William Nordhaus will receive his profession's highest honor for research on global warming that's been hugely influential - and entirely misguided.

This year taught us more about distant planets and our own world, about the ways we're influencing our environment and the ways we're changing ourselves.

Run by queer and transgender scientists, a new program aims to help high school students of similar identities see a future for themselves in science.

What research caught the public imagination in 2018? Check out our annual list of papers with the most attention.

Sea ice was thinner in late 2017 and much of 2018 than at any time in the last 30 years, while wild reindeer and caribou populations continue to decline.

Gene targeted for its role in HIV is linked to increased severity of other infectious diseases - and could affect learning in mice.

CRISPR is indeed an exciting and promising technology that's already affecting the lives of many people. That said, we should be cautious.

The University of California faces a Dec. 31 deadline to reach a renewal deal on subscriptions to 1,500 scientific journals. Here's why it might not regret letting its subscriptions lapse.

The humanities subjects do not benefit from the research excellence framework. They need a better system.