ScienceGeist

The recent fashion for “transformative” Read-and-Publish agreements - are they really what’s needed to deliver affordable open access? An opinion piece.

Having early and rapid access to research findings accelerates the pace of science and is paramount for advancing discovery. Springer Nature considers itself ideally placed to help facilitate this and making great research available as quickly as possible to the research community. 

Gene therapy is about to achieve a milestone. Drug giant Novartis expects to win approval to launch what it says will be the first “blockbuster” gene-replacement treatment. A blockbuster is any drug with more than $1 billion in sales each year. The treatment, called Zolgensma, is able to save infants born with spinal muscular atrophy.

Do Swiss researchers share their data with other researchers and with the public? And if not, why? Which data repositories and other channels do they use for data sharing? A large-scale survey by the SNSF and swissuniversities offers some answers.

There has recently been a significant amount of media concern surrounding the poor mental health of academics. This extended paper sets out the scale of the problem and examines the factors which academics have identified as key causes of stress.

A brief review of studies linking social media and article-level performance.

The region already hosts some of the world's leading scientific countries, and some of its smaller states are quickly catching up.

ELife announces their roadmap towards an open, scalable infrastructure for the publication of computationally reproducible articles.

Published peer review is now an available option for all PLOS journal submissions.

Nature asked nine leading Europeans to pick their top priority for science at this pivotal point. Love, money, and trust got most votes.

Language, cultural differences and expense are common downsides in some European countries, but researchers who land there love the opportunities to learn new techniques, work in a diverse setting and polish their confidence.

The first international meeting on postgraduate mental health opens this week, but much more is needed to solve academia's crisis.

It is undeniable that preprints are a growing force in the scholarly communication landscape - but what does their future look like?

Proactive, cosmopolitan and open, the European Union is filling a leadership void on the global stage, argue James Wilsdon and Sarah de Rijcke.

Frequent rejection and a loss of control are making university staff isolated and ill, new research shows

I attended csv,conf,v4 in Portland, Oregon in May 2019. Here are a few reflections about the conference and a bit about my talk where I shared progress from the Openscapes Champions.

To the companies selling tests, the ever-evolving nature of ancestry reports is more of a feature than a bug. To consumers, it can mean an identity crisis.

Despite repeatedly expressing public support for children’s health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is ending funding for a network of research centers focused on environmental threats to kids, imperiling several long-running studies of pollutants’ effects on child development.

The European Union's cross-border collaborative programmes offer lessons for the rest of the world.

Former EuroScience Secretary General Peter Tindemans, argues that it is good news that the European Parliament and European Council have reached a partial agreement on the contours of Horizon Europe, the next EU R&D programme.

On the eve of the European Union's parliamentary elections, a special issue examines the prospects for science across the region.

Wie die Innovationsförderung des Bundes in ein bürokratisches Ungetüm verwandelt wurde.

The hunger for these offsets is blinding us to the mounting pile of evidence that they haven't - and won't - deliver the climate benefit they promise.

Atomic Age would mark the start of the current geologic time unit, if proposal receives final approval.

Gran Sasso lab plans to shut down two of its large experiments in 2020.

We need to let non-scientists know that science isn't based on "proof," but rather on the practice of testing and checking one another's work.

The surveys are rife with bias, and educational and legal considerations are upping the pressure to change them and maybe even eliminate them.

Support from mainstream diversity initiatives would create a virtuous circle of visibility and benefit science for all, urges Jon Freeman.

The world's first and longest-running scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society began publishing in 1665, and it…