Why scientists must share their research code
'Reproducibility editor' Victoria Stodden explains the growing movement to make code and data available to others
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"We have an epidemic of deeply flawed meta-analyses"
John Ioannidis suggests that the number of systematic reviews and meta-analyses in literature have each increased by more than 2500% since 1991.
The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses
The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses
John P.A. Ioannidis argues that the production of systematic reviews and meta-analyses has reached epidemic proportions.
‘Junior ERC grants’ mooted
The Council of the EU looks set to ask the European Research Council to consider setting up a new category of grants to help student researchers establish their careers.
Lasker Awards Given for Work in Physiology, Virology and Science Education
The Lasker Awards, among the most respected prizes in medicine, will go to six researchers who made major discoveries in physiology and virology, and to a scientist who has tirelessly promoted science education.
How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat
Internal sugar industry documents suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.
Intergovernmental agreement on science boosted
Scientific cooperation between the UK and Russia was boosted in August this year when Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev agreed to extend the UK-Russia Intergovernmental Agreement on Science and Technology cooperation for another 10 years.
Pride and Prejudice and journal citation distributions
Today sees the publication on bioRxiv of a revised version of our preprint outlining “A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions".
Year One of The Open Library of Humanities
September 2016 marks the first year anniversary of the launch of the Open Library of Humanities. To celebrate, we thought we'd share some statistics about the platform and its growth.
Elsevier's Ridiculous Patent on Online Peer Review
Elsevier's Ridiculous Patent on Online Peer Review
I have just learned that Elsevier, after a lengthy review and negotiation process with the US Patent Office, have been awarded a US Patent on “Online Peer Review System and Method”. What is this about and why is it ridiculous to me.
A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions
Although the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is widely acknowledged to be a poor indicator of the quality of individual papers, it is used routinely to evaluate research and researchers. Here, we present a simple method for generating the citation distributions that underlie JIFs.
Why We Should Stop Grading Students on a Curve
Ask people what’s wrong in American higher education, and you’ll hear about grade inflation.
LSE to give female academics pay rises to close gap with men
Internal analysis finds women earn 10.5 per cent less than men of similar experience and research productivity
Open access 'boosts citations by a fifth'
New study looks at what happened when a university made its publications publicly available through an institutional repository
EMBO and Wiley launch the SmartFigures Lab
‘SmartFigures Lab’ is a prototype online publishing website with enhanced data presentation capabilities. The site results from the integration of SmartFigures, an open source application of the EMBO SourceData platform, with Wiley’s Content Enrichment Framework and research & development environment.
Outlook on "Precision Medicine"
A nature Outlook collection of articles on "Precision Medicine"
Where are the data?
Papers accepted for publication in Nature and an initial 12 other Nature titles will be required to include information on whether and how others can access the underlying data.
Gender Bias and the Peer Review Process
Emma Sayer Lecturer, Lancaster University Despite increased efforts to improve gender equality in academia, gender bias still affects many areas of science.
There’s a lot of junk fMRI research out there
It's easy to misrepresent the findings from brain scan studies. Just ask a dead salmon.
Taking the lead in the lab
Eight scientists share the secrets of being a successful principal investigator
Give The Public What It Pays For
When you pay for something, you expect to receive it. Whether a physical good or a service, there is the rightful expectation that you will receive something in exchange for your money. The same should be true for scientific research.
Digital Science Reveals Catalyst Grant Winners
Etalia, Simiary and Writefull, three companies aiming to disrupt the academic space, are the latest recipients of the Catalyst Grant award for innovative startups.
Figshare Partners with The Royal Society
Figshare Partners with The Royal Society
Figshare announced a new partnership with Royal Society to increase research data discoverability.
Advice for early-career peer reviewers
The peer-review system, despite its flaws, is a central component of the publication process. However, relatively little guidance is provided for early-career scientists on 2 important aspects of peer review:
Journal to rank peer reviewers to improve response times
Idea is one of several ways to speed the peer review process, although some think it will annoy academics
Challenge of our generation
Reproducible, transparent and reliable science.
An efficient system to fund science
This paper presents a novel model of science funding that exploits the wisdom of the scientific crowd. Each researcher receives an equal, unconditional part of all available science funding on a yearly basis, but is required to individually donate to other scientists a given fraction of all they receive. Science funding thus moves from one scientist to the next in such a way that scientists who receive many donations must also redistribute the most. As the funding circulates through the scientific community it is mathematically expected to converge on a funding distribution favored by the entire scientific community. This is achieved without any proposal submissions or reviews.
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