Grant reviewers favour 'broad' words used more often by men, but proposals using those terms don't produce better research.

The dominant academic publishers are busy positioning themselves to monetize not only on content, but increasingly on data analytics and predictive products on research assessment and funding trends. Their growing investment and control over the entire knowledge production workflow, from article submissions, to metrics to reputation management and global rankings means that researchers and their institutions are increasingly locked into the publishers' "value chain".

Matthew Cobb asks who owns research. Scientists, publishers or the public?

Analysis of 30 leading institutions found that just 17% of study results had been posted online as required by EU rules.

Analysis commissioned by advocacy group documents how major companies' business strategies could help them lock up research and learning data that colleges and scholars need.

A new survey reveals the alarming extent of a practice that is universally considered unethical.

Digital continuity in the personal archives of scientists.

There’s a new publishing trend in town, says Mario Biagioli: Faking co-authors’ names. Biagioli, distinguished professor of law and science and technology studies and director of the Center for Innovation Studies at the University of California, Davis, writes that it’s “the emergence of a new form of plagiarism that reflects the new metrics-based economy of scholarly publishing.” We asked him a few questions about what he’s found, and why authors might do this.

Conference talks are a key element in scholarly communication. It is the primary mechanism for sharing research results and getting feedback. However, conferences in most disciplines never reached the same level of maturity as traditional journal publications in terms of quality management, which led to challenges like fraudulent conferences. There is need for a better control mechanism that can deliver credible information about conferences. 

Threats to reproducibility, recognized but unaddressed for decades, might finally be brought under control. The four horsemen of the reproducibility apocalypse being: publication bias, low statistical power, P-value hacking and HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known).

Transcript of a debate held at the 2019 Researcher to Reader Conference, on the resolution 'Sci-Hub Does More Good Than Harm to Scholarly Communication.'

On Friday, Ithaka S+R released the latest cycle of our long-standing US Faculty Survey which has tracked the changing research, teaching, and publishing practices of higher education faculty members on a triennial basis since 2000.  Here, some of the key findings around open access are higlighted. Especially among early career researchers, real-world incentives remain misaligned — and indeed appear to be moving further out of alignment — with the drive towards open access.

Modern data science requires reproducible and functional work environments, not just ephemeral re-execution for validation.

In more than a dozen academic fields-largely STEM related-not a single black student earned a doctoral degree in the US in 2017.

Networking is a crucial skill for all scientists. Ruth Gotian offers tips for those who struggle to make it work.

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.  

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?

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.

As journals, societies, and funders have engaged with the reproducibility movement, we are starting to see early signs that university policies are moving in the right direction as well.

A workshop run by DORA identified a number of ways to reduce bias in hiring and funding decisions.

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.

IndiaRxiv is the latest of several preprint servers set up to host research from a particular region.

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. 

Supportiveness and working style are key factors for Ph.D. student satisfaction and success.

David Goodsell's scientifically precise watercolor paintings of the cells and microbes he studies grace journal covers and impress colleagues.

Nature Human Behaviour and the Behavioural and Social Sciences Community invite researchers across all career stages and disciplines to share their thoughts on publishing while training for a PhD. A broad selection of submissions will be published as World Views in Nature Human Behaviour or will be posted on the Behavioural and Social Sciences community page. Send us a short presubmission enquiry now!

As open access Plan S draws closer editors start to re-evaluate the business case of academic publishing, and their role in it. A major investigation reveals that editors at academic journals can make up to five figure salaries.

Work-life balance is not a detriment to excellent research, or an optional bonus, but an integral part of it.

Over the last years, many organizations have been working on infrastructure to facilitate sharing and reuse of research data - but what is needed to make data count?

A pilot program gives authors another way to publish OA while enjoying the benefits of an established journal.