Many papers in basic biomedical science do not contain the information that is needed to determine what statistical tests were used and to verify the results of these tests.

Despite growing awareness of predatory publishing and research on its market characteristics, the defining attributes of fraudulent journals remain controversial. The authors aimed to develop a better understanding of quality criteria for scholarly journals by analysing journals and publishers indexed in blacklists of predatory journals and whitelists of legitimate journals and the lists’ inclusion criteria. 

Gender and Precarious Research Careers aims to advance the debate on the process of precarisation in higher education and its gendered effects, and springs from a three-year research project across institutions in seven European countries. Examining gender asymmetries in academic and research organisations, this insightful volume focuses particularly on early careers. It centres both on STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and SSH (Social Science and Humanities) fields.

Universities are at long last undertaking efforts to collect and disseminate information about student career outcomes, after decades of calls to action. Organizations such as Rescuing Biomedical Research and Future of Research brought this issue to the forefront of graduate education, and the second Future of Biomedical Graduate and Postdoctoral Training conference (FOBGAPT2) featured the collection of career outcomes data in its final recommendations, published in this journal (Hitchcock et al., 2017). More recently, 26 institutions assembled as the Coalition for Next Generation Life Science, committing to ongoing collection and dissemination of career data for both graduate and postdoc alumni. A few individual institutions have shared snapshots of the data in peer-reviewed publications (Mathur et al., 2018; Silva, des Jarlais, Lindstaedt, Rotman, Watkins, 2016) and on websites. As more and more institutions take up this call to action, they will now be looking for tools, protocols, and best practices for ongoing career outcomes data collection, management, and dissemination. Here, we describe UCSF's experiences in conducting a retrospective study, and in institutionalizing a methodology for annual data collection and dissemination. We describe and share all tools we have developed, and we provide calculations of the time and resources required to accomplish both retrospective studies and annual updates. We also include broader recommendations for implementation at your own institutions, increasing the feasibility of this endeavor.

The Report of the Expert Group to the European Commission proposes a vision for the future of scholarly communication. It examines the current system and its main actors and puts forward recommendations.

 Selected content, organised by theme and published across the Lancet family of journals, on issues related to gender equity and the advancement of women in science, medicine, and global health.

Societal issues such as poverty, water scarcity, and food insecurity make it more important than ever for science to produce knowledge that is relevant to address serious challenges on the ground.

An analysis of papers in which two or more authors shared first-author position found that male authors were more likely than female authors to appear first in the author list.

This paper addresses the integration of a Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) service within a group of open access (OA) publishing digital platforms and considers its potential impact on both research and scholarly publishing.

Completed revised second draft of a document that aims to agree on a broad, international strategy for the implementation of open scholarship that meets the needs of different national and regional communities but works globally.

The gender gap in research productivity varies widely from study to study. This paper looks at how (and why) measuring productivity in different ways provides different pictures of the gender gap.

You can restore credibility to Congress and lead on issues from opioid addiction to clean water

Despite some notable progress in data sharing policies and practices, restrictions are still often placed on the open and unconditional use of various genomic data after they have received official approval for release to the public domain or to public databases.

The spread of fake news on social media became a public concern in the United States after the 2016 presidential election. This article examines exposure to and sharing of fake news by registered voters on Twitter.

The EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowships selection process undergoes analysis.

To increase transparency in science, some scholarly journals have begun publishing peer review reports. Here, the authors show how this policy shift affects reviewer behavior by analyzing data from five journals piloting open peer review.

A new analysis of biomedical awards over five decades shows men receive more cash and more respect for their research than women do, report Brian Uzzi and colleagues.

Much of the debate on Plan S seems to concentrate on how to make toll access journals open access, taking for granted that existing open access journals are Plan S compliant. We suspected this was not so, and set out to explore this using DOAJ's journal metadata. We conclude that an overwhelmingly large majority of open access journals are not Plan S compliant, and that it is small HSS publishers not charging APCs that are least compliant and will face major challenges with becoming compliant. Plan S need to give special considerations to smaller publishers and/or non-APC-based journals.

Though the popularity and practical benefits of preprints are driving policy changes at journals and funding organizations, there is little bibliometric data available to measure trends in their usage. This study collected and analyzed data on all preprints that were uploaded to bioRxiv.org in the past five years.

This study presents a review of international evidence on best practice in organisational design of research and innovation funding bodies.

The Global State of Peer Review is one of the largest ever studies into the practice of scholarly peer review around the world. Discover the findings here.

For the last 12 years, I have had the pleasure and privilege to serve as the Director of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) and as a professor at the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH) Zurich and Lausanne (EPFL). My affiliations have afforded me a rare opportunity to observe the structure and governance of academic institutions and to reflect on my own experience in institutional leadership. I have attempted to place my experience in the context of the literature on leadership, particularly that relating to women and academia. On the basis of my experience and reading, I make some recommendations for women faculty, for women in positions of institutional leadership in academia, and for academic institutions. I am deeply convinced that greater participation by women (and members of other under-represented groups) in institutional leadership is needed if academia is to make a meaningful contribution to addressing the huge challenges that face humanity.

Mentorship in academia facilitates personal growth through pairing trainees with mentors who can share insight and expertise.Expertise can be purely academic, on work‐life balance, personal branding and networking, or general career advice. Mentoring has been shown to be beneficial for mentees, both in terms of objective research productivity and subjective outcomes. Several institutions/organizations have formal in‐person mentoring programs that pair early‐ to mid‐career researchers with mentors who are not their direct supervisors. With global integration in science, however, geographical proximity between mentors and mentees is relevant to a lesser degree.

Women researchers are underrepresented in almost all research fields. There are disciplinary differences in the phase in which they tend to quit their academic career: in the natural and technical sciences (STEM), it is in the postdoctoral phase, whereas in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) it is during the doctoral phase.

New approach to peer review proves popular with authors, with very similar acceptance rates for male and female last authors, but with higher acceptance rates for late-career researchers compared to their early- and mid-career colleagues.

Scientists waste substantial time writing grant proposals, potentially squandering much of the scientific value of funding programs. This Meta-Research Article shows that, unfortunately, grant-proposal competitions are inevitably inefficient when the number of awards is small, but efficiency can be restored by awarding funds through a modified lottery, or by weighting past research success more heavily in funding decisions.

The potential costs for early-career researchers in adopting practices to improve reproducibility as well as ways in which they can nontheless achieve their career goals.

The postdoctoral community is an essential component of the academic and scientific workforce, but a lack of data about this community has made it difficult to develop policies to address concerns about salaries, working conditions, diversity and career development, and to evaluate the impact of existing policies. A recent study aims to address this gap.

In 1856, Eunice Foote had to listen to a man present her paper because of her sex. In 2019, women undoubtedly have greater access to academic training, support, and mentorship than in the mid-19th century. But the ultimate and fundamental sex equality that Foote and her colleagues called for in 1848 has yet to be achieved in medicine, nursing, public health, and the sciences.