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EU Students Could Face Higher Fees to Study in UK from 2020

EU Students Could Face Higher Fees to Study in UK from 2020

Higher education groups call on government to clarify its policy on tuition costs

Congress Wants to Protect You from Biased Algorithms, Deepfakes, and Other Bad AI

Congress Wants to Protect You from Biased Algorithms, Deepfakes, and Other Bad AI

Only a few legislators really know what they're talking about, but it's a start.

Open Access Publishing: New Evidence on Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors

Open Access Publishing: New Evidence on Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors

On Friday, Ithaka S+R released the latest cycle of our long-standing US Faculty Survey which has tracked the changing research, teaching, and publishing practices of higher education faculty members on a triennial basis since 2000.  Here, some of the key findings around open access are higlighted. Especially among early career researchers, real-world incentives remain misaligned — and indeed appear to be moving further out of alignment — with the drive towards open access.

Figure Errors, Sloppy Science, and Fraud: Keeping Eyes on Your Data

Figure Errors, Sloppy Science, and Fraud: Keeping Eyes on Your Data

Recent reports suggest that there has been an increase in the number of retractions and corrections of published articles due to post-publication detection of problematic data. Moreover, fraudulent data and sloppy science have long-term effects on the scientific literature and subsequent projects based on false and unreproducible claims. The JCI introduced several data screening checks for manuscripts prior to acceptance in an attempt to reduce the number of post-publication corrections and retractions, with the ultimate goal of increasing confidence in the published papers.

Interview - Brian Nosek on Open Science

Interview - Brian Nosek on Open Science

Jonathan and Chris interview Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology and the co-founder and director of the Center for Open Science. They discuss problems and solutions in modern scientific research, such as committing scientists.

To Save Life on Earth, Here's the $100 Billion-a-year Solution

To Save Life on Earth, Here's the $100 Billion-a-year Solution

There have been five mass extinctions in the history of the Earth. But in the 21st century, scientists now estimate that society must urgently come to grips this coming decade to stop the very first human-made biodiversity catastrophe.

Read-and-publish? Publish-and-read? A Primer on Transformative Agreements

Read-and-publish? Publish-and-read? A Primer on Transformative Agreements

Is it every day or just every week that we see an announcement of a new “transformative agreement” between a publisher and a library or library consortium? Or, if not a press release announcing such an agreement, a statement that such is the goal of a newly opened — or perhaps faltering — set of negotiations? What makes an agreement transformative anyway?

Open Access: 'no Evidence' That Zero Embargo Periods Harm Publishers

Open Access: 'no Evidence' That Zero Embargo Periods Harm Publishers

Debate around embargo periods heightens as Plan S deadline draws near. "Embargoes are just there to serve the interests of the publishers” says Robert-Jan Smits, the former lead architect of Plan S who is now president of Eindhoven University of Technology.  

Sexual Harassment is Pervasive in US Physics Programmes

Sexual Harassment is Pervasive in US Physics Programmes

Survey of undergraduate women finds that most experienced some type of unwanted sexual attention during their physics studies. "A lot of times, people study how women can change to better fit in a field or be more successful. Perhaps physics needs to think about changing itself.”

Opinion: Toward an International Definition of Citizen Science

Opinion: Toward an International Definition of Citizen Science

What exactly qualifies as "citizen science" (CS)? It is interpreted in various ways and takes different forms with different degrees of participation. In fact, the label CS is currently assigned to research activities either by project principal investigators themselves or by research funding agencies.

Networking for Introverted Scientists

Networking for Introverted Scientists

Networking is a crucial skill for all scientists. Ruth Gotian offers tips for those who struggle to make it work.

What Words Are Worth: National Science Foundation Grant Abstracts Indicate Award Funding

What Words Are Worth: National Science Foundation Grant Abstracts Indicate Award Funding

Can word patterns from grant abstracts predict National Science Foundation (NSF) funding? The data describe a clear relationship between word patterns and funding magnitude: Grant abstracts that are longer than the average abstract, contain fewer common words, and are written with more verbal certainty receive more money. 

Is Blinded Review Enough? How Gendered Outcomes Arise Even Under Anonymous Evaluation

Is Blinded Review Enough? How Gendered Outcomes Arise Even Under Anonymous Evaluation

Blinded review is an increasingly popular approach to reducing bias and increasing diversity in the selection of people and projects. We explore the impact of blinded review on gender inclusion in research grant proposals submitted to the Gates Foundation from 2008-2017. Despite blinded review, female applicants receive significantly lower scores.

Rare Case of Gender Parity in Academia

Rare Case of Gender Parity in Academia

The results of this study strongly suggest that when male and female authors publish articles that are comparably positioned to receive citations, their publications do in fact accrue citations at the same rate. This raises the question: Why would gender matter “everywhere but here”? 

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) IF/THEN Ambassadors

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) IF/THEN Ambassadors

The AAAS IF/THEN Ambassadors program furthers women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics by empowering current innovators and inspiring the next generation of pioneers.

The "impact" of the Journal Impact Factor in the Review, Tenure, and Promotion Process

The "impact" of the Journal Impact Factor in the Review, Tenure, and Promotion Process

The authors of the preprint "Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations" discuss their investigation and their findings on how the flawed metric is currently used in tenure and promotion decisions in universities across North America.

How many reviewers are required to obtain reliable evaluations of NIH R01 grant proposals?

How many reviewers are required to obtain reliable evaluations of NIH R01 grant proposals?

The National Institutes of Health uses small groups of scientists to judge the quality of the grant proposals that they receive, and these quality judgments form the basis of its funding decisions.  In order for this system to fund the best science, the subject experts must, at a minimum, agree as to what counts as a “quality”proposal.  We investigated the degree of agreement by leveraging data from a recent experiment with 412 scientists.

Paul Greengard, 93, Nobel Prize-Winning Neuroscientist, Is Dead

Paul Greengard, 93, Nobel Prize-Winning Neuroscientist, Is Dead

His 15-year quest to understand how brain cells communicate provided the underlying science for many antipsychotic drugs.

The Peer Review Game: an Agent-based Model of Scientists Facing Resource Constraints and Institutional Pressures

The Peer Review Game: an Agent-based Model of Scientists Facing Resource Constraints and Institutional Pressures

This paper looks at peer review as a cooperation dilemma through a game-theory framework. We built an agent-based model to estimate how much the quality of peer review is influenced by different resource allocation strategies followed by scientists dealing with multiple tasks, i.e., publishing and reviewing.

OAI11 - CERN-UNIGE Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (19-21 June 2019)

OAI11 - CERN-UNIGE Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (19-21 June 2019)

The CERN-UNIGE Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication will be held at University of Geneva in June 19th-21st 2019. The main theme of this edition is: Open Science - its impact and potential as a driver for radical change.

Assessing Peer Review by Gauging the Fate of Rejected Manuscripts: the Case of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation

Assessing Peer Review by Gauging the Fate of Rejected Manuscripts: the Case of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation

This paper investigates the fate of manuscripts that were rejected from JASSS- The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, the flagship journal of social simulation. We tracked 456 manuscripts that were rejected from 1997 to 2011 and traced their subsequent publication as journal articles, conference papers or working papers.