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When the President of the United States Writes an Article in Your Journal

When the President of the United States Writes an Article in Your Journal

How do you edit Barack Obama? The Chronicle spoke to the editor in chief of a journal that published the president’s article on the future of health-care reform on Monday.

In First for Sitting President, Obama Publishes a Scholarly Article

In First for Sitting President, Obama Publishes a Scholarly Article

Obama Just Did Something No President Has Ever Done: Call him scholar-in-chief

The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it's like a 1960s time capsule

The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it's like a 1960s time capsule

Many of the comments in the Apollo Guidance Computer code go beyond boring explanations of the software itself. They’re full of light-hearted jokes and messages, and very 1960s references.

Back to the thesis

Back to the thesis

Late nights, typos, self-doubt and despair. Francis Collins, Sara Seager and Uta Frith dust off their theses, and reflect on what the PhD was like for them.

Some things you need to know about Google Scholar

Some things you need to know about Google Scholar

Google Scholar is great, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value.

The number games

The number games

In our global survey on innovations in scholarly communication, we asked researchers what tools they use for a large number of activities across the research cycle.

You Probably Won't Get Tenure. Get Your Ph.D. Anyway.

You Probably Won't Get Tenure. Get Your Ph.D. Anyway.

The one broadly marketable skill a humanist might acquire in graduate school is the ability to teach.

He Thinks He’s Untouchable

He Thinks He’s Untouchable

Michael Katze, famous for his studies of Ebola and the flu, ran a lab at the University of Washington where intoxication and sexual harassment went unchecked, and where he misused public resources for personal gain, according to two investigations obtained by BuzzFeed News.

What Is the Problem for Which Interdisciplinarity Is the Solution?

What Is the Problem for Which Interdisciplinarity Is the Solution?

The answer is what I call “epistemic rent-seeking,” namely, the tendency for disciplines to become increasingly proprietary in their relationship to organized inquiry.

Paul Nurse: 'Research needs free movement to thrive'

Paul Nurse: 'Research needs free movement to thrive'

Sir Paul Nurse says UK science will suffer unless any post-Brexit agreement allows the free movement of people.

Don’t change your family-friendly tenure extension policy just yet

Don’t change your family-friendly tenure extension policy just yet

An analysis to the NYT article entitled "A Family-Friendly Policy That’s Friendliest to Male Professors"

Publishing needs more science, fewer stories: Q&A with founders of ScienceMatters

Publishing needs more science, fewer stories: Q&A with founders of ScienceMatters

Ever wish you could just publish an exciting result, without having to wait for the entire string of data that follows in order to tell an entire story, which then gets held up for months by peer review at traditional journals?

A winding path to satisfaction

A winding path to satisfaction

Many feel there is only one path to success and that any deviations will be catastrophic. My own academic path might seem to support this belief. On the surface, it appears quite linear: undergrad, grad student, postdoc, faculty member. But if you look deeper, you will see the series of roadblocks and revised plans that led me to where I am today.

Where are the female science professors?

Where are the female science professors?

Almost 300 years after Laura Maria Caterina Bassi became the first woman to earn a professorship at a university in Europe, women still comprise less than one fifth of professors across the continent.

Research into the sex life of the screwworm turned out to be very, very important

Research into the sex life of the screwworm turned out to be very, very important

A scientific study into the “sex life of the screwworm” – once ridiculed as a waste of money – is to be given a US award designed to recognise research that might sound silly or odd but is actually important. Its findings led to the development of “the only truly original innovation in insect control” of the 20th century, credited with the eradication of the screwworm fly from North and Central America.

100 Examples of President Obama’s Leadership in Science, Technology, and Innovation

100 Examples of President Obama’s Leadership in Science, Technology, and Innovation

“We’ll restore science to its rightful place." President Obama’s Inaugural Address, 2009

Sci-Hub: access or convenience? A Utrecht case study (part 1)

Sci-Hub: access or convenience? A Utrecht case study (part 1)

Sci-Hub has gained fame and notoriety for enabling free access to over 45 million paywalled articles and book chapters, purportedly collected through use of institutional log-in credentials.

If science is going to save the world, we need to make it open

If science is going to save the world, we need to make it open

The last few weeks have been a momentum time in the sciences: not because of a breakthrough in gene therapy or quantum computing, but because world leaders have twice called for scientific papers to be made freely available to all.

Reproducibility: Archive computer code with raw data

Reproducibility: Archive computer code with raw data

Software tools such as knitr and R Markdown allow the description and code of a statistical analysis to be combined into a single document, providing a pipeline from the raw data to the final results and figures. Outputs are updated by re-running the scripts using version-control tools such as Git and GitHub.