ScienceGeist

An ERC Grant is the most prestigious award for excellent European research projects. A team with three researchers from the ETH Domain had also applied for such a grant. Today, Gabriel Aeppli from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, Henrik Rønnow from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne EPFL and Nicola Spaldin from ETH Zurich, together with their colleague Alexander Balatsky from Nordita, Stockholm University, received the contract signed by the EU confirming the extraordinary 14 million euro funding.

The annual United Nations climate talks have to kick the Paris agreement up a gear.

Peer review is lauded in principle as the guarantor of quality in academic publishing and grant distribution. But its practice is often loathed by those on the receiving end. Here, seven academics offer their tips on good refereeing, and reflect on how it may change in the years to come

In 2012, psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan published a paper in the journal Science reporting a series of experiments that suggested engaging in analytical thinking could reduce someone’s religious belief. It sounded vaguely plausible, but five years later, another group of researchers attempted to replicate the finding. A lot has happened since then.

Press release for launch of ORCID funders open letter. ORCID is pleased to announce the launch of an open letter in support of the use of ORCID identifiers (iDs) in the grant application and reporting process. Nine funding bodies around the world have signed the letter and invite others to join them.

Officials pledge support for European-led 'Plan S' to tear down journal paywalls - but it's unclear whether China will adopt its policies.

The change is intended to enable researchers to access structural funds for projects reviewers say are excellent, but which don’t make the cut for Horizon Europe grants.

Commission concedes it will need more time to resolve long-term budget negotiations – but it remains committed to its plan boosting R&D subsidies

OCLC Research and euroCRIS, the international organization for research information, partnered to develop a survey and synthesize the results to examine how research institutions worldwide are applying research information management (RIM) practices.

Any scientist publishing a claim should quantify their confidence in it with a probability, argues Steven N. Goodman.

Despite the position being billed as a stepping stone on the way to tenure-track academic employment, many postdocs, discouraged by their poor prospects, are questioning their career choices and instead looking to non-academic jobs as an alternative. However, as Chris Hayter and Marla A. Parker reveal, making this transition is not as easy as it might first appear.

Scholars say their field is coming under increasing pressures from forces outside the academy who want to delegitimize it.

The 14th Berlin Open Access Conference, hosted by the Max Planck Society and organized by the Max Planck Digital Library on behalf of the Open Access 2020 Initiative (oa2020.org), has just come to an end after two intense days with 170 participants from 37 countries around the world discussing where the research organizations and their library consortia stand in their negotiations with scholarly publishers in transitioning scholarly publishing to open access. The participants represented research performing and research funding organizations, libraries and government, associations of researchers and other umbrella organizations, many of them holding high-level positions at their organizations. In his welcoming address, Max Planck Society President Martin Stratmann captured the spirit of the meeting when he stated: "Open Access is the responsibility of all of us."

The Netherlands will radically shake up how academics are assessed and promoted, including a shift away from relying on citations and journal impact factors.

If democracy depends on informed citizens, democracy is in trouble. This is a moment of crisis for many institutions, including higher education, especially in disciplines such as English, philosophy, and history, which promise to prepare students as citizens. To prepare students for a world where information is filtered by computers, we will need a stronger alliance between the humanities and math. This alliance has two reciprocal parts: cultural criticism of the mathematical models shaping our world, and mathematical inquiry about culture.

In 2019, innovation funding will be increasingly randomised.

The proposed strategy relies on manipulating with high precision an unimaginably huge number of variables

By helping scientists gamify the crowdsourcing of data analysis, SwipesForScience will engage the community to speed up research.

How innovation in search engines needs renewing with open working and open indexes.

Better editorial oversight, not more flawed papers, might explain flood of retractions

The alleged creation of the world's first gene-edited infants was full of technical errors and ethical blunders. Here are the 15 most damning details.

A study evaluating two aspects of the selection process of the top-ranked applicants to the EMBO Long-Term Fellowship program in 2007.

Online letter argues that Plan S will not impinge on academic freedom, as some critics claim.

Plan S implementation guidance has not provided reassurance to anxious society publishers.

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

 If science is growing exponentially, then the major technological advancements and upheavals of the past 200 years are only the tip of the iceberg.

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.

A spate of bullying allegations have rocked several high-profile science institutions. Here's how researchers, universities, funders and others are dealing with the issue.

Misleading terminology and arbitrary divisions stymie drug trials and can give false hope about the potential of tailoring drugs to individuals, warns Stephen Senn.