Moedas' speech at the opening of the academic year and the 375th Anniversary of Helsinki University.

You can’t measure human skills the way you do engineering systems, Robert Dingwall and Mary Byrne McDonnell observe.

Interdisciplinarity is often framed as an unquestioned good within and beyond the academy, one to be encouraged by funders and research institutions alike. And yet there is little research on how interdisciplinary projects actually work—and do not work—in practice.

Paper showing that increasing research investments, resulting in an increasing knowledge base, have not yielded comparative gains in certain health outcomes over the last five decades. [Closed Access]

Institutions and funders should be alert to unfeasibly prolific authors when measuring and creating incentives for researcher productivity.

The involvement of online discussion sites in the identification of errors, anomalies and worse in the published literature continues to demonstrate the usefulness of post-publication review. It also highlights the ambiguous power of anonymity.

Today’s patent regime operates in the name of progress. Instead, it sets innovation back. Time to fix it.

Peer review may not spot fraud – so universities need to be vigilant in tackling any wrongdoing among their staff.

"Making non-attachment a central part of science education would beat the hell out of ethics classes and regulations about the use of Photoshop in preparing figures."

Positive results are exciting, but the interest in positive results is skewing what we know about science.

Contrary to what some think, the battle against sexism in STEM has not been won, let alone reversed in favor of women.

Microbiologists show it's possible to achieve gender equity in scholarly presentations

Many academics have internalised the pressure to police disciplinary boundaries, and keep their heads down and in their faculties.

Hiring a few research stars uses up resources that might otherwise support a number of promising younger researchers.

Consultants think they can make publicly funded research more efficient. But they’re in danger of ignoring existing analyses – and real-life experience.

In the UK, in 2014, 46% of research grants awarded included non-academic partners, up from 38% the year before.

Kurt Deketelaere looks at the battles, and progress, of the Juncker Commission's first nine months, and sees more of both to come.

Harness Horizon 2020 to maximise the impact and benefit of EU funds, argue Mike Galsworthy and Martin McKee.

Europe’s researchers have access to super-fast networks, common data storage facilities, and shared computing resources. The challenge now is to link them all together into a single science cloud.

What are the right lessons to draw from the rise in scientific retractions?

What if I told you that half of the studies published in scientific journals today - the ones upon which news coverage of medical advances is often based - won't hold up under scrutiny?

Scientists on social media debate a call to require PhD students to replicate research before they can graduate.

Is public money being thrown away on scientific research whose results won’t hold up to scrutiny?

Active problem-solving confers a deeper understanding of science than does a standard lecture. But some university lecturers are reluctant to change tack.

Working longer hours leads to poorer productivity. If you’re trying to impress people and move up the ranks, the solution isn’t to work longer, but to work smarter.

To drive discovery, scientists heading up research teams large and small need to learn how people operate, argue C. Leiserson and C. McVinney.

What can go wrong when governments use research to make a country look good.

Metrics play a growing role in managing research. But to understand their limitations, we need to draw on the humanities.

Statistics still show some fields of science remain heavily male-dominated.

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH has come up with a new system for funding researchers. Will the new Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award prove beneficial?