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'Flattening the Curve' May Be the World's Best Bet to Slow the Coronavirus

'Flattening the Curve' May Be the World's Best Bet to Slow the Coronavirus

Experts say by taking aggresive measures, governments have a shot at stamping out new chains of transmission of the coronavirus.

Making a Plan When Planning Is Impossible

Making a Plan When Planning Is Impossible

Travel bans, office closures, and conference cancellations have publishers and societies thinking about how best to ensure that scholarly content continues to be reviewed and distributed. This post by Angela Cochran looks at some of the impacts and questions whether.

A Disease Tracker Backed by Gates and Zuckerberg Tackles Covid-19 in Cambodia

A Disease Tracker Backed by Gates and Zuckerberg Tackles Covid-19 in Cambodia

The two tech titans funded an effort to bring metagenomic sequencing and software to poor countries. Now, it's helping trace the spread of the new coronavirus.

Does Closing Schools Slow the Spread of Coronavirus? Past Outbreaks Provide Clues

Does Closing Schools Slow the Spread of Coronavirus? Past Outbreaks Provide Clues

A researcher who forecasts epidemic spread argues that proactive closures, though disruptive, could help.

Savants Ou Militants ? Le Dilemme Des Chercheurs Face à La Crise écologique

Savants Ou Militants ? Le Dilemme Des Chercheurs Face à La Crise écologique

Ils signent pétitions et tribunes pour alerter sur le réchauffement climatique et la dégradation de la biodiversité, pourtant, leur incursion dans le débat public n'a rien d'évident. A l'heure des " fake news ", la communauté scientifique questionne le bien-fondé de son engagement.

Mutations Can Reveal How the Coronavirus Moves-but They're Easy to Overinterpret

Mutations Can Reveal How the Coronavirus Moves-but They're Easy to Overinterpret

Real-time analysis of hundreds of viral genomes helps scientists understand how the virus is spreading - but overinterpretation is a real danger.

Get Political Reporters off the Coronavirus Story Because They Don't Distinguish Between Right and Wrong

Get Political Reporters off the Coronavirus Story Because They Don't Distinguish Between Right and Wrong

News organizations should take political reporters – and perhaps even more importantly, political editors – entirely out of the loop on this story. It’s too important to be covered as a two-sided battle over who’s winning the narrative.

#COLA4ALL Shuts Down UC Santa Cruz

#COLA4ALL Shuts Down UC Santa Cruz

Graduate students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shut down campus Thursday as part of their ongoing strike for a cost of living adjustment, and all other system campuses saw their own one-day protests. Santa Cruz graduate assistants went on a grade strike in December, then a full labor strike this month. Tensions mounted last week when the university fired or disqualified 80-some grads from spring assistantships for continuing to withhold undergraduate grades. Graduate assistants blocked all entrances to the Santa Cruz campus before dawn, forcing the university to cancel classes, except those offered online. Many faculty and undergraduate supporters joined the picket lines on that campus and across the UC system starting midmorning. As of last week, graduate assistants at the Santa Barbara campus are also on a labor strike for a COLA, and assistants at the Davis campus are on a grade strike. Systemwide, graduate instructors make about $2,400 pre-tax, per month, for nine months out of the year. Strikers say that they need between $1,400 and $1,800 extra per month to be able to secure housing in California's expensive rental markets and have anything left over for utilities and food. The United Auto Workers, with which UC's graduate workers are affiliated, has urged the university to reopen their contract to bargain for a COLA. This week it authorized a systemwide strike vote for April on the grounds that the university has committed unfair labor practices. The university has filed a similar claim against graduate workers. The system said in a statement that it "values all our graduate students, including academic student employees (ASEs) who are essential to UC's teaching mission, supporting the university as teaching assistants, readers and tutors. However, that mission is in jeopardy when ASEs refuse to fulfill their teaching obligations." The system noted that these assistants are striking in violation of their union contract, negotiated in 2018, and said it's "unfortunate that the UAW has resorted to announcing a strike authorization vote as the university continues pursuing opportunities to engage productively with graduate students on housing affordability and other issues."

Research Data Management As a National Service

Research Data Management As a National Service

The volume of data stored in research institutions is growing, and the rate at which it is growing is accelerating. Spending and effort and resources are being duplicated needlessly, and so this opinion piece argues for the establishment of a national infrastructure for research data management.

Strategies to Improve Equity in Faculty Hiring

Strategies to Improve Equity in Faculty Hiring

This article focuses on proven strategies that departments and research institutions can develop to increase equity in faculty hiring and promotion to address the lack of racial and gender diversity among their faculty.

Airlines Are Burning Thousands of Gallons of Fuel Flying Empty 'ghost' Planes So They Can Keep Their Flight Slots During the Coronavirus Outbreak

Airlines Are Burning Thousands of Gallons of Fuel Flying Empty 'ghost' Planes So They Can Keep Their Flight Slots During the Coronavirus Outbreak

Airlines are running empty "ghost" flights because of European rules forcing operators to run their allocated flights or risk losing their slots.

The [R]evolution of Open Science Book Now Available for Free

The [R]evolution of Open Science Book Now Available for Free

Jonathan Tennant's latest book, The [R]evolution of Open Science, is now available online for free.

Building a More Sustainable World Will Need More Women Engineers

Building a More Sustainable World Will Need More Women Engineers

Women are seriously under-represented in the engineering world - but they can problem-solve from a uniquely impactful perspective.

Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing

Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: Big Data Analytics, New Technology, and Proactive Testing

This Viewpoint describes the outbreak response infrastructure developed by the Taiwanese government following the SARS epidemic in 2003 and actions in response to COVID-19, including dedicated hotlines for symptom reporting, mobile phone messaging and case tracking, and the ramping up of facemask...

How the Academic Publishing Oligopoly Skews Debates on the Cost of Publishing

How the Academic Publishing Oligopoly Skews Debates on the Cost of Publishing

We should be nurturing the kinds of publishing cultures we want to see: those that value the labour needed to care for publishing and that work in harmony with research communities rather than extract from them, argues Samuel Moore.

Empfehlungen für eine nationale Open-Science-Strategie in Österreich

Empfehlungen für eine nationale Open-Science-Strategie in Österreich

Die Arbeitsgruppe Open-Science-Strategie des Open Science Network Austria (OANA) hat Empfehlungen für eine nationale Open Science Strategie in Österreich erarbeitet und lädt ein, das Dokument bis zum 05.04.2020 online zu annotieren bzw. zu kommentieren.

The Busy Lives of Academics Have Hidden Costs - and Universities Must Take Better Care of Their Faculty Members

The Busy Lives of Academics Have Hidden Costs - and Universities Must Take Better Care of Their Faculty Members

Hilal A. Lashuel's experiences have taught him that maintaining good mental health and balancing life and work is a struggle everywhere in academia.

The Simplest of Models for Open Access to Research Proves Itself: Welcome to Subscribe-to-Open

The Simplest of Models for Open Access to Research Proves Itself: Welcome to Subscribe-to-Open

What if libraries agreed to continue paying the subscription fees to journals that they were already subscribing to, only the journals flipped to open access?