The Costs of Reproducibility
The potential costs for early-career researchers in adopting practices to improve reproducibility as well as ways in which they can nontheless achieve their career goals.
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The potential costs for early-career researchers in adopting practices to improve reproducibility as well as ways in which they can nontheless achieve their career goals.
BMC Biology's 'portable peer review' policy aims to save editors and researchers time and effort, but academics question whether authors will want to share details of past rejections.
Workshop concludes that early-career researchers can make important contributions to policy decisions and experimenting with various forms of communication (i.e. opinion pieces, youtube channels, and tweeting at MPs) had the potential to improve knowledge transfer.
Despite the expansion of global Internet coverage and open access journals, research from outside of the United States and Europe is underrepresented. Open science could improve access and representation.
But it will likely lack the broad powers favored by supporters of a Green New Deal.
The postdoctoral community is an essential component of the academic and scientific workforce, but a lack of data about this community has made it difficult to develop policies to address concerns about salaries, working conditions, diversity and career development, and to evaluate the impact of existing policies. A recent study aims to address this gap.
The FAIR principles were published in 2016 in a Scientific Data article titled 'FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship'. These were developed to aid in the discovery and reuse of research data.FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Data that meet these principles are more optimal for reuse and discoverability and in turn increase your research's exposure.Here's how your data is more FAIR when it's on Figshare.Illustration by Jason McDermott of RedPenBlackPen.
From a self-sampling scientist to the downfall of a leading stem cell scientist, here's our naughty list.
While 18,000 retractions may sound like a lot, that amount is clearly just a fraction of the total number of papers that are a problem, as surveys indicate.
Promising immunizations for diseases that affect mostly people in low- and middle-income countries need help getting to market.
As some editors are moving to 'flip' their journal the publishing giant offers considerable compensations to change their minds.
The Max Planck Society is going to discontinue their Elsevier subscription. By doing so the Society joins nearly 200 universities and research institutions in Germany who have already cancelled their agreements with Elsevier.
The University of California is re-negotiating its systemwide licenses with some of the world's largest scholarly journal publishers, including Elsevier, to provide additional open access options for UC authors. In these negotiations, the UC is seeking a single, integrated contract with each publisher that covers both the university's subscriptions and open access publishing of UC research in their journals - what are often known as "publish and read" agreements.
Visionaries thought technology would change books. Instead, it's changed everything about publishing a book.
If you're looking to move labs, countries or sectors this year, or seeking general career inspiration, here's some advice from five researchers who featured in Nature Careers in 2018.
CWTS announces the launch of the new course called "Responsible Metrics for Research Evaluation".
The funder-driven push for freely accessible scholarly literature has divided the scientific community.
Offending researchers could face restrictions on jobs, loans and business opportunities under a system tied to the controversial social credit policy.
Many land-grant schools have submitted bids despite objections by researchers
Particles associated with a blazar kick-start the field of neutrino astronomy.
A team of astronomers has discovered the most-distant body ever observed in our Solar System. It is the first known Solar System object that has been detected at a distance that is more than 100 times farther than Earth is from the Sun. It was announced Monday by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. Carnegie's Scott S. Sheppard, the University of Hawaii's David Tholen, and Northern Arizona University's Chad Trujillo made the discovery.
Three new members of the European Research Council (ERC)'s governing body, the Scientific Council, have been appointed by the European Commission. The Scientific Council annonced two new ERC Vice Presidents.
Elsevier, the information analytics business specializing in science and health, has acquired Science-Metrix Inc., a research evaluation firm that provides science research evaluation and analytics to assess science and technology activities
Ten people who mattered in science in 2018. Picks include a rogue gene-editor, a wunderkind physicist and a DNA detective who helped catch a serial killer.
In 1856, Eunice Foote had to listen to a man present her paper because of her sex. In 2019, women undoubtedly have greater access to academic training, support, and mentorship than in the mid-19th century. But the ultimate and fundamental sex equality that Foote and her colleagues called for in 1848 has yet to be achieved in medicine, nursing, public health, and the sciences.
Mansplaining is the tip of the iceberg Many of the experiences of women in the workforce are so patterned and commonplace they have spawned an emerging vocabulary, which includes terms like mansplaining (explaining something in a condescending or patronising way, typically to a woman), bropropriation (when a man takes credit for a woman's idea), manel (a panel of speakers populated entirely by men), and himpathy (the "inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide, and other misogynistic behavior"). Here, we propose a number of additions to the vernacular, which are likely to remain relevant for the foreseeable future.
To date, the majority of authors on scientific publications have been men. While much of this gender bias can be explained by historic sexism and discrimination, there is concern that women may still be disadvantaged by the peer review process if reviewers' unconscious biases lead them to reject publications with female authors more often. One potential solution to this perceived gender bias in the reviewing process is for journals to adopt double-blind reviews whereby neither the authors nor the reviewers are aware of each other's identities and genders. To test the efficacy of double-blind reviews, we assigned gender to every authorship of every paper published in 5 different journals with different peer review processes (double-blind vs. single blind) and subject matter (birds vs. behavioral ecology) from 2010-2018 (n = 4865 papers). While female authorships comprised only 35% of the total, the double-blind journal Behavioral Ecology did not have more female authorships than its single-blind counterparts. Interestingly, the incidence of female authorship is higher at behavioral ecology journals (Behavioral Ecology and Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology) than in the ornithology journals (Auk, Condor, Ibis), for papers on all topics as well as those on birds. These analyses suggest that double-blind review does not currently increase the incidence of female authorship in the journals studied here. We conclude, at least for these journals, that double-blind review does not benefit female authors and may, in the long run, be detrimental.
I’m not the first to come up with a personal story about the importance of open access and I’m not going to tell my story right now. I want to tell two other stories from the past couple of weeks that have reinforced for me why I do what I do every day in advocating for full and immediate open access to research.
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.
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.