Open Access mega-journals have in some academic disciplines become a key channel for communicating research. In others, however, they remain unknown. This article explores how authors’ perceptions of mega-journals differ across disciplines and are shaped by motivations associated with the multiple communities they function within.

Reporting results from a comprehensive survey of publishers in the German-speaking world, Christian Kaier and Karin Lackner explore the attitudes of smaller publishers towards open access, finding …

Despite the position being billed as a stepping stone on the way to tenure-track academic employment, many postdocs, discouraged by their poor prospects, are questioning their career choices and instead looking to non-academic jobs as an alternative. However, as Chris Hayter and Marla A. Parker reveal, making this transition is not as easy as it might first appear.

Getting the most out of your Google Scholar profile, creating some old-fashioned table of contents alerts, and simply setting aside time to periodically review key journal titles will ensure you rarely miss out on important research.

Ensuring we focus our definition of success around valuable contributions - instead of around the final output - would recognise and reward good research and researchers.

The active use of metrics in everyday research activities suggests academics have accepted them as standards of evaluation, that they are “thinking with indicators”. Yet when asked, many academics profess concern about the limitations of evaluative metrics and the extent of their use.

Social media can promote openness in research as international partnerships and collaborations are jeopardised, while increased adoption by scientists can also redress the balance that has shifted towards ill-evidenced news on some platforms.

Sarah Quarmby takes a look inside a knowledge broker organisation, the Wales Centre for Public Policy, to see how its day-to-day workings tally with the body of knowledge about evidence use in policymaking.

One way to push back against the pressure to “publish or perish” is to randomly audit a small proportion of researchers and take time to assess their research in detail. Auditors could examine complex measures of quality which no metric could ever capture such as originality, reproducibility, and research translation.

A short list of seven functionalities that academic publishers looking to modernize their operations might invest in; from unencumbered access and improved social components, to dynamic data visualisations and more precise hyperlinking.

Research impact is often talked about, but how clear is it what this term really means? The authors highlight four core elements that comprise most research impact definitions and propose a new conceptualisation of research impact relevant to health policy.

The Neuroskeptic commentary on a new paper by Chris Drummond about the ‘reproducibility movement’. Assuming that what really matters is the testability of a given hypothesis, how fundamental is reproducibility to science?

SciComm: Why it is essential, and how we can do it better.

The profit motive is fundamentally misaligned with core values of academic life, potentially corroding ideals like unfettered inquiry, knowledge-sharing, and cooperative progress.

The bibliometric system and the rules which accompany it have created an environment in which many if not most researchers can be identified as transgressors.