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Breaking the Ice Well, Part 2

Breaking the Ice Well, Part 2

2017 marked the first year of the AAAS Community Engagement Fellows Program (CEFP), funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Sustainable Development of Science and Scientists

Sustainable Development of Science and Scientists

Academic training, where senior scientists transfer their knowledge and skills to junior scientists through apprenticeship, plays a crucial role in the development of scientists. This study focuses on two aspects of academic training, autonomy and exploration.

How to Make Career Advancement in Economics More Inclusive

How to Make Career Advancement in Economics More Inclusive

Men are overrepresented in senior academic positions in Economics. What factors can explain this phenomenon, and how can we make the academic environment more inclusive?

Why I Became a Mental-health First-aider at My Research Institute

Why I Became a Mental-health First-aider at My Research Institute

Research group leaders should learn how to recognize if colleagues are experiencing problems at work, says James Turner.

How to Save Space and Stick to the Limit when Writing Research Funding Applications

How to Save Space and Stick to the Limit when Writing Research Funding Applications

Research funders impose length limits on applications for practical reasons: to discourage epic submissions, and to ease the burden on reviewers. It’s also true that concise ideas are generally stronger ideas. But sticking to these limits can often seem a difficult and frustrating task.

Google Scholar to Overshadow Them All? Comparing the Sizes of 12 Academic Search Engines and Bibliographic Databases

Google Scholar to Overshadow Them All? Comparing the Sizes of 12 Academic Search Engines and Bibliographic Databases

Information on the size of academic search engines and bibliographic databases (ASEBDs) is often outdated or entirely unavailable. Hence, it is difficult to assess the scope of specific databases.

The Million-dollar Drug

The Million-dollar Drug

UBC scientists spent decades developing Glybera, the world's first approved gene therapy. But market forces needed just two years to make the potentially life-saving drug disappear.

Five Ways Academics Can Contribute to Wikipedia

Five Ways Academics Can Contribute to Wikipedia

Contributing to Wikipedia is rewarding, but it can be a significant commitment of time and effort; there are, however, plenty of other ways you can help that don’t involve one-off editing events

The Main Obstacles to Better Research Data Management and Sharing Are Cultural. But Change is in Our Hands

The Main Obstacles to Better Research Data Management and Sharing Are Cultural. But Change is in Our Hands

Appointing data stewards and data champions can be key to improving research data management through positive cultural change.

Science Should Not Pay for Overpaid CEOs of Academic Publishers

Science Should Not Pay for Overpaid CEOs of Academic Publishers

Gerard Meijer closed the first open access (offsetting) deals with the major scientific publishers. As his fellow scientists now oppose the new 'Plan S' he looks on with surprise and disappointments.

Boosting the Number of Students from Underrepresented Groups in Physics

Boosting the Number of Students from Underrepresented Groups in Physics

Programmes from high school through to graduate school are aiming to keep more women and people from underrepresented groups in the physical sciences.

The House Science Committee May Soon Become... Pro-Science

The House Science Committee May Soon Become... Pro-Science

House Science Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith retired this year and Democrats won control of the House on Tuesday. Now some on Capitol Hill say that the anti-climate science spell may be broken.

Current Visa Restrictions a Threat to UK Establishing Itself As a Global Hub for Health and Science

Current Visa Restrictions a Threat to UK Establishing Itself As a Global Hub for Health and Science

A letter was sent to UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid MP expressing ‘grave concern about the current visa application process for international academics and scholars to visit the UK for academic conferences’.

Equality: a Question of Openness

Equality: a Question of Openness

The social scientist Marita Haas explored the interdependence of female career paths and institutional norms by melding gender, profession and biography. Leaving behind traditional role models requires an encouraging environment and structural measures, concludes the expert. 

Open Data Are a Boon for Underfunded Researchers

Open Data Are a Boon for Underfunded Researchers

Open-access data from repositories around the world have enabled a clinical researcher working in Jordan to make a bigger contribution to science.

Women Innovators Prize 2019 Opens for Applications

Women Innovators Prize 2019 Opens for Applications

The European Commission launched today the sixth edition of the EU Prize for Women Innovators. The Prize sheds light on the outstanding work of female entrepreneurs who have brought their ideas to market, and aims to inspire the next generation of innovators.

Why the Bank of England Should Put a Female Scientist on Its Next £50 Note

Why the Bank of England Should Put a Female Scientist on Its Next £50 Note

Featuring a woman in science on the highest denomination banknote would celebrate her achievements and offer an inspiring role model.

When You're the Only Woman: The Challenges for Female Ph.D. Students in Male-dominated Cohorts

When You're the Only Woman: The Challenges for Female Ph.D. Students in Male-dominated Cohorts

Without peers of the same gender, female Ph.D. students are less likely to graduate, according to a new study.

Semantically Mapping Science (SMS) Platform

Semantically Mapping Science (SMS) Platform

Up to now, STI (Science, Technology, Innovation) studies are either rich but small scale (qualitative case studies) or large scale and under-complex. However, progress in the STI research field depends in our view on the ability to do large-scale studies with often many variables specified by relevant theories: There is a need for studies which are at the same time big and rich. To enable that, combining and integration of STI data and beyond is needed – in order to exploit the huge amount of data that are ‘out there’ in an innovative and meaningful way.
The aim of the Semantically Mapping Science (SMS) platform as the technical core within the RISIS EU project is to produce richer data to be used in social research – through the integration of heterogeneous datasets, ranging from tabular statistical data to unstructured data found on the Web.

The Growing, High-stakes Audit Culture Within the Academy Has Brought About a Different Kind of Publishing Crisis

The Growing, High-stakes Audit Culture Within the Academy Has Brought About a Different Kind of Publishing Crisis

The spate of high-profile cases of fraudulent publications has revealed a widening replication, or outright deception, crisis in the social sciences. To Marc Spooner, researchers “cooking up” findings and the deliberate faking of science is a result of extreme pressures to publish, brought about by an increasingly pervasive audit culture within the academy.

Jeff Havig Explaining the Timeline for a Typical Academic Tenure Track Hire to Someone Not in Academia

Jeff Havig Explaining the Timeline for a Typical Academic Tenure Track Hire to Someone Not in Academia

Jeff Havig was explaining the timeline for a typical academic tenure track hire to someone not in academia the other day, and they were completely flabbergasted, so here it is for those that are unfamiliar. This is specifically for an R1 institution. Others may deviate significantly.

OpenAIRE Becomes a Fully Fledged Organisation

OpenAIRE Becomes a Fully Fledged Organisation

OpenAIRE is happy to announce today the formation of its legal entity, OpenAIRE A.M.K.Ε., a non-profit partnership, to ensure a permanent presence and structure for a European-wide national policy and open scholarly communication infrastructure.

The Cart Before the Horse

The Cart Before the Horse

The article is a call to go back to basics, to re-examine the drivers of our projects. My main aim here is to provide a few helpful tips to increase the chances of success and long-term adoption of data-science projects.