The truth can be hard to find with millions of data points and lots of room for error.

Anne Glover, former chief scientific adviser to the president of the European commission, gives a frank account of the highs and lows of her three years in Brussels.

In the 1970s, radical scientists thought they could change the world - if they could change science first.

Some early career scholars feel there is not enough support for academics who reach out, say Richard Watermeyer and Jamie Lewis.

Recent developements in open science.

Another set of ideas for fixing the funding crisis for young researchers.

History shows us that social scientists are essential if we are to get the most out of our engineering and technological innovations.

The government peer-review committees that oversee grants are conservative by design. Given that their job is to put taxpayers’ money to good use, they are often reluctant to take big risks. The opposite is often true for crowdfunded projects.

Holly Else examines European efforts to make academic career paths less challenging to navigate

A perverse focus on research cash and high-impact publications threatens careers and the aims of science itself, says Dorothy Bishop

Ivan Oransky is a medical journalist, global editorial director of MedPage Today and co-founder of Retraction Watch, a site that tracks and reports on retractions in research journals.

Forcing research to fit the mould of high-impact journals weakens it. Hiring decisions should be based on merit, not impact factor.

For all but a small percentage of aspiring researchers, doing a postdoc at a university is a lousy idea because it will neither result in an academic job nor otherwise advance one’s career.

Researchers on social media discuss the potential impact of making peer review more transparent.

The British commentator George Monbiot once compared academic publishers to the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, concluding that the former were more predatory.

How a recent "bad luck" cancer study illustrates failure of science journalism.

A light-hearted opinion piece about the arbitrariness of academic success.

A large research university will pay between $3-3.5 million a year in academic subscription fees...

A patent system that is so broken that almost no patented discoveries ever get used.

The Horizon 2020 programme threatens to siphon away the best scientists from southern Europe.

Comment on Personalized Health

The top 100 list of Altmetrics is fascinating for what it tells us about communication between scientists, the attention paid to science by the general public, and also for what it tells us about altmetrics themselves.

The troubled present and promising future of scholarly communication.

Never thought of being gender biased when performing evaluations? Take the implicit association test.

Able women who set out to make academic careers in math-intensive fields of science have as good a chance of succeeding as men today, keeping in mind that the chances don’t appear great for anyone of either gender.

Opinion article by the founders of PubPeer.com on right to anonymity.

Recent moves by established journals to make research papers freely available signpost the direction of travel in academic publishing

Die EU will das Geld für ihr milliardenschweres Investitionsprogramm aus dem Forschungsbudget entnehmen. Besser als ein kreditfinanziertes Investitionsprogramm wäre es, eine EU-weite Steuererleichterung für Forschungs- und Innovationstätigkeiten der Privatwirtschaft einzuführen.

Research must be reliable and publication is part of our quality control system. Scientific articles get reviewed by peers and they get screened by editors. Reviewers ideally help improve the project and its presentation, and editors ideally select the best papers to publish.

Separating the true signal from the gigantic amount of noise is neither easy nor straightforward, but it is a challenge that must be tackled if information is ever to be translated into societal well-being.