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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

How does EU research funding compare with UK domestic research funding?

The former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the U.S. National Institutes of Health has a new job. On July 1st, biochemist Jeremy Berg will take the helm as the editor-in-chief of Science.

Science has become a lot bigger and faster. Join us now to make it better! Participate @ «We Scientists Shape Science»Eventforum, Berne, 26/27 January 2017

A confidential internal email has come into my hands, from Bristol University, regarding the UK’s national negotiations with Elsevier. I think it’s of general interest.

We interviewed Mark Hahnel, founder of figshare to discuss Collections, a new, free resource developed by the figshare team, and how researchers can use this.

We paid for the research with taxes, and Internet sharing is easy. What's the hold-up?

Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2016 by Jeffrey Beall, January 5, 2016. Each year at this time I formally release my updated list of predatory publishers. Because the list is now very la…

PrePubMed indexes preprints from arXiv q-bio, PeerJ Preprints, Figshare, bioRxiv, and F1000Research.

The STM statement on the Open Science Council conclusions

Placing trust in science can be easier when findings are confirmed, but a new survey finds that most scientists believe there is a reproducibility "crisis."

The controversies surrounding Sci-Hub touch on many hot-button topics in librarianship. This primer lays out multiple perspectives on the issues.

A report suggests that internal discord may tear apart the National Association of Science Writers, a near century-old professional journalism organization.

Discovery is the pathway to context. Context of an article is all about how research fits into increasingly complex domains, and using structured networks to decipher its value. With the power of the internet at our disposal, putting research in context should be of key importance in a world where there is ever more research being published that is impossible to manually filter.

Every research project financed by the SNSF between 2006 and 2015 has been compiled into an infographic.

What does it take to get ordinary people to fund your science? This is the third in a series of posts that will explore the brave new world of scientific crowdfunding from the inside.

Marketing is you telling others about yourself. Public relations is having someone else tell others about you.

Following the approach for the datasets in 2013 and 2014, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) is making the publication costs spent in 2015 (esp. for Open Access) publically available.

A series of studies across countries and disciplines in higher education confirm that student evaluations of teaching (SET) are significantly correlated with instructor gender, with students regularly rating female instructors lower than male peers.

Duke University biologist Sheila Patek has faced criticism from lawmakers over her research into mantis shrimp and trap-jaw ants, with some calling her government-funded studies a waste of taxpayer money. But according to Patek, not only do her findings have important practical applications, but scientific inquiry is most fruitful when knowledge is sought for its own sake, not to justify budgets.

Over the years, the nation has looked toward different kinds of science for its salvation, and science fairs have changed with the times.

Climate Feedback, a scientist-led effort to “peer review” the world’s climate journalism, is closing in on its $30,000 crowdfunding target.

How many people are actually using Sci-Hub to download publications while they are in universities?

Three of my projects appeared last week on a senator's list of questionable research. Allow me to explain...

To put it simply, Elsevier have distorted the widely recognized concept of open access...