Why It's Crucial to Get More Women Into Science
The number of women in scientific research continues to lag behind the number of men, even though women make up half the nation's workforce. The question is, What difference does it make?
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Academic Journal Publishing Is Headed for a Day of Reckoning
In our institutions of higher education and our research labs, scholars first produce, then buy back, their own content. With the costs rising and access restricted, something's got to give.
Newly Released AI Software Writes Papers for You
This week, we received a press release that caught our attention: A company is releasing software it claims will write manuscripts using researchers’ data.
7 Major Experiments That Still Haven’t Found What They’re Looking For
Nature seems to have a regular penchant for mocking scientists’ hopes and expectations.
Trends in Open Access Book Publishing
A survey on open access books, revealed that of the 99 authors, 55.5% self-archived their chapters.
A Journal Is a Club: A New Economic Model for Scholarly Publishing
While part of the original motivation of the first research publication in serial form — the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665 — was to make money, the early history of scholarly publishing is largely one of community subsidy to cover losses or breaking even.
The OA Effect
How does open access affect the usage of scholarly books? A white paper by Springer Nature.
Tech Giants Protest Looming US Pirate Site Blocking Order
Google, Facebook and Microsoft are protesting a looming injunction that would require search engines, ISPs and hosting companies to stop linking to or offering services to several "pirate" sites.
A Link between Author Gender and Attention to Gender and Sex Analysis
An analysis of a large database of medical research papers shows a correlation between women's authorship and the likelihood of a study including gender and sex analysis.
A Prestigious Research Publisher Gives in to China's Censorship
The Financial Times disclosed that Springer Nature has blocked access in China to at least 1,000 articles from the websites of two of its journals in response to Beijing’s censorship demands.
Making Medicine, Not Money: How One U of T Researcher's Startup Is Rethinking Big Pharma's Business Model
Making Medicine, Not Money: How One U of T Researcher's Startup Is Rethinking Big Pharma's Business Model
The latest medical innovation to spring from Aled Edwards’s University of Toronto lab isn’t a new protein structure or potential drug target – it’s a business model.
What Happens When You Put 500,000 People's DNA Online
Huge genetic databases are changing how scientists study disease.
Access vs. Accessibility in Scholarship and Science
Ideally, we want science and scholarship to be not only available to the general public, but also comprehensible to them. But the challenges to doing so are real, and may vary both by discipline and by study type.
US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub
The American Chemical Society was granted an unprecedented injunction which requires search engines and ISPs to block Sci-Hub.
NIH Awards to Test Ways to Store, Access, Share, and Compute on Biomedical Data in the Cloud
NIH Awards to Test Ways to Store, Access, Share, and Compute on Biomedical Data in the Cloud
NIH Data Commons Pilot Phase to seek best practices for developing and managing a data commons.
Donald Trump Accused of Obstructing Satellite Research into Climate Change
Donald Trump Accused of Obstructing Satellite Research into Climate Change
Republican-controlled Congress ordered destruction of vital sea-ice probe.
If Funders and Libraries Subscribed to Open Access
Considerations of open access models that can work across disciplines. The case of ELife, PLoS, and BioOne.
The Titans of AI Are Getting Their Work Double-Checked by Students
A challenge investigating reproducibility of empirical results submitted to the 2018 International Conference on Learning Representations.
Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability
Data from several lines of evidence suggest that the methodological quality of scientific experiments does not increase with increasing rank of the journal.
Republican Tax Proposal Gets Failing Grade From Higher-Ed Groups
The planned overhaul would place new tax burdens on colleges and students, and some critics argue that it could undermine charitable giving to the institutions.
Metrics: Human-Made, but Humane?
Metrics are notoriously inappropriate for evaluating humanistic scholarship. HumetricsHSS is an initiative to embed metrics with humanistic values.
NSF selects Anne Kinney to head Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate
W. M. Keck Observatory chief scientist to lead investments in astronomy, chemistry, physics, materials science and mathematics research.
Why 'Statistical Significance' Is Often Insignificant
Researchers who want professorships are sometimes driven to publish suspect findings.
Plans to Promote German Research Excellence Come Under Fire
Critics say selection process for high-stakes funding programme is flawed.
DNAinfo and Gothamist Are Shut Down After Vote to Unionize
Reporters and editors at the local news sites joined a union last week. On Thursday, their billionaire owner closed the sites.
The Running Costs of eLife 2.0
Paul Shannon, Head of Technology, looks at the costs of running eLife’s own continuous publication platform four months after the launch of eLife 2.0.
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