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Nature Walks Back Mentorship Prize for Spanish Scientist with Nine Retractions

Nature Walks Back Mentorship Prize for Spanish Scientist with Nine Retractions

Carlos Lopez-Otin Nature is rescinding an award to a Spanish researcher whose group has at least nine retractions for problems with their published images. 

Briefing Paper on Open Access to Academic Books

Briefing Paper on Open Access to Academic Books

The Science Europe Briefing Paper identifies the key issues at stake in implementing a policy of Open Access to academic books, and outlines recommendations for different stakeholder groups to facilitate and accelerate such a policy.

Down with Tenure, Equal Rights for All

Down with Tenure, Equal Rights for All

All contracts for academic posts should be open-ended, and liable to termination: this is the opinion of the President of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences Antonio Loprieno.

How US Sanctions Are Crippling Science in Iran

How US Sanctions Are Crippling Science in Iran

Besieged Iranian researchers say that currency collapse, scientific isolation and psychological strain are hindering almost every aspect of their work.

Project: Adopting Open Science Practices: Researcher Perspectives on Incentives and Disincentives: A Symposium

Project: Adopting Open Science Practices: Researcher Perspectives on Incentives and Disincentives: A Symposium

An ad hoc planning committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will organize a public symposium in conjunction with the September 2019 meeting of the Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science. The symposium will explore current barriers to adopting open science practices and how they might be addressed.

If World Leaders Choose to Fail Us, My Generation Will Never Forgive Them | Greta Thunberg

If World Leaders Choose to Fail Us, My Generation Will Never Forgive Them | Greta Thunberg

We are in the middle of a climate breakdown, and all they can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth, says climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Turning Science into Business is About Recognising Opportunity

Turning Science into Business is About Recognising Opportunity

Scientists need to work more closely with entrepreneurs and financiers to ensure groundbreaking research in Europe can be turned into successful business opportunities, according to the recently appointed chair of the European Innovation Council's pilot advisory board.

43 Percent of White Students Harvard Admits Are Legacies, Jocks, or the Kids of Donors and Faculty

43 Percent of White Students Harvard Admits Are Legacies, Jocks, or the Kids of Donors and Faculty

A new study shows how affirmative action for white people works at America's most prestigious university.

Myth-busting: All Open Access Journals Can Be Listed in DOAJ

Myth-busting: All Open Access Journals Can Be Listed in DOAJ

This is a myth. People think that DOAJ exists to index all open access journals. A journal can only be indexed if it passes all of our criteria. The Directory of Everything Open Access The Director…

Evaluating FAIR Maturity Through a Scalable, Automated, Community-governed Framework

Evaluating FAIR Maturity Through a Scalable, Automated, Community-governed Framework

Transparent evaluations of FAIRness are increasingly required by a wide range of stakeholders, from scientists to publishers, funding agencies and policy makers. We propose a scalable, automatable framework to evaluate digital resources that encompasses measurable indicators, open source tools, and participation guidelines, which come together to accommodate domain relevant community-defined FAIR assessments. The components of the framework are: (1) Maturity Indicators - community-authored specifications that delimit a specific automatically-measurable FAIR behavior; (2) Compliance Tests - small Web apps that test digital resources against individual Maturity Indicators; and (3) the Evaluator, a Web application that registers, assembles, and applies community-relevant sets of Compliance Tests against a digital resource, and provides a detailed report about what a machine "sees" when it visits that resource. We discuss the technical and social considerations of FAIR assessments, and how this translates to our community-driven infrastructure. We then illustrate how the output of the Evaluator tool can serve as a roadmap to assist data stewards to incrementally and realistically improve the FAIRness of their resources.

Landmark 'United in Science' Report Informs Climate Action Summit

Landmark 'United in Science' Report Informs Climate Action Summit

The world's leading climate science organizations have joined forces to produce a landmark new report for the United Nations Climate Action Summit, underlining the glaring - and growing gaps - between agreed targets to tackle global warming and the actual reality.

Scientists Worldwide Join Strikes for Climate Change

Scientists Worldwide Join Strikes for Climate Change

From Bangkok to Brisbane, researchers were among those who protested to urge action on global warming.

Guidelines on Criteria of Good Practice for Strenghtening Gender Equality Policies

Guidelines on Criteria of Good Practice for Strenghtening Gender Equality Policies

GENDERACTION developed specific “criteria of good practice” which can be used to assess national ERA Roadmaps and individual gender equality policies.

Can We Assess the Wider Effects of Public Engagement?

Can We Assess the Wider Effects of Public Engagement?

The extent to which researchers can assess the impact of their public engagement is often under-analysed and limited to success stories. Drawing on the example of development aid, it is argued that we need to widen the parameters for assessing public engagement.

What to Consider when Asked to Peer Review a Manuscript

What to Consider when Asked to Peer Review a Manuscript

 The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) discuss what you should consider when you are asked to peer review a manuscript.

Sweden's New Read & Publish Agre­e­ment

Sweden's New Read & Publish Agre­e­ment

The Bibsam Consortium in Sweden signed a new tranformative Read & Publish agreement with academic publisher Springer Nature. It covers rights to publish in over 1,800 hybrid journals at no extra cost for the author as well as reading rights for over 2,100 journals since 1997.

Quality in Peer Review: An Interview with Tracey Brown, Sense About Science

Quality in Peer Review: An Interview with Tracey Brown, Sense About Science

Continuing our celebration of Peer Review Week 2019, today Alice Meadows interviews Tracey Brown, OBE, Director of Sense about Science, which has been involved in Peer Review Week from the start.

Politicians and R&D Funders 'Finally Pushing in Same Direction' on Science Publishing

Politicians and R&D Funders 'Finally Pushing in Same Direction' on Science Publishing

A major push by science funding agencies in Europe to make the research they back freely available at the point of publication is the world's best chance of fundamentally altering scientific publishing, says the new coordinator of Plan S, Johan Rooryck.

Elsevier Investigates Hundreds of Peer Reviewers for Manipulating Citations

Elsevier Investigates Hundreds of Peer Reviewers for Manipulating Citations

The publisher is scrutinizing researchers who might be inappropriately using the review process to promote their own work.

Citecorp: Working with Open Citations - ROpenSci - Open Tools for Open Science

Citecorp: Working with Open Citations - ROpenSci - Open Tools for Open Science

citecorp is a new (hit CRAN in late August) R package for working with data from the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC). OpenCitations, run by David Shotton and Silvio Peroni, houses the OCC, an open repository of scholarly citation data under the very open CC0 license. The I4OC (Initiative for Open Citations) is a collaboration between many parties, with the aim of promoting "unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data". Citation data is available through Crossref, and available in R via our packages rcrossref, fulltext and crminer.