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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.”
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 is a crucial skill for all scientists. Ruth Gotian offers tips for those who struggle to make it work.
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.
Swiss funding agency banned applicant-nominated referees after a 2016 study found evidence of bias. Those results are now being made public.
Thousands of Nature referees have chosen to be publicly acknowledged.
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.
A workshop run by DORA identified a number of ways to reduce bias in hiring and funding decisions.
This paper investigates the impact of referee reliability on the quality and efficiency of peer review. We modeled peer review as a process based on knowledge asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias.
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.
Society's new antiharassment policy doesn't include mechanisms for protecting survivors of past abuse if harasser attends meeting.
His 15-year quest to understand how brain cells communicate provided the underlying science for many antipsychotic drugs.
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.
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.
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.
When social scientists think about big data, they often think in terms of quantitative number crunching. However, the growing availability of ‘big’ qualitative datasets presents new opportunities for qualitative research.
This paper investigates the impact of referee behaviour on the quality and efficiency of peer review. We focused on the importance of reciprocity motives in ensuring cooperation between all involved parties. We modelled peer review as a process based on knowledge asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias. We built various simulation scenarios in which we tested different interaction conditions and author and referee behaviour. We found that reciprocity cannot always have per se a positive effect on the quality of peer review, as it may tend to increase evaluation bias. It can have a positive effect only when reciprocity motives are inspired by disinterested standards of fairness.
As an early career researcher (ECR), making the transition from the “traditional” way of doing science into methods that are more open, reproducible, and replicable can be a daunting prospect. We know something needs to change about our workflow, but where do we start?
Although peer review is crucial for innovation and experimental discoveries in science, it is poorly understood in scientific terms. Discovering its true dynamics and exploring adjustments which improve the commitment of everyone involved could benefit scientific development for all disciplines and consequently increase innovation in the economy and the society.
Fourteen universities from five European countries started a collaboration to set up University Journals as an alternative to the current journal system that requires authors to transfer their copyright or charges article processing charges.
Science is never the work of one person; it is the collaborative effort of students, technicians, professors, librarians and the support networks around them. This week, millions of girls and women around the world who have been told science is not for them found a new role model in Bouman - a new data point that told them yes you can.
Peer review is not only a quality screening mechanism for scholarly journals. It also connects authors and referees either directly or indirectly. Thi…
This paper presents an index that measures reviewer contribution to editorial processes of scholarly journals. Following a metaphor of ranking algorit…
Although there is growing concern about the urgent need for a better life-work balance when doing science, there are not many examples about how this could be achieved in practice. In this article, 10 simple rules are introduced to make the working environment of research labs more nurturing, collaborative, and people-centered.
