Enemy of the good
Who are the outstanding mentors of young researchers? Since 2005, Nature has awarded an annual prize for scientific mentoring, rotating through a variety of countries.
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3 ways to blow the whistle
Reporting suspicions of scientific fraud is rarely easy, but some paths are more effective than others.
LHC plans for open data future
When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is humming along, the data come in a deluge.
The missing piece to changing the university culture
A new type of initiative is empowering graduate students and postdocs to reshape their academic training, providing another avenue to express their passion for research.
The risks of the replication drive
The push to replicate findings could shelve promising research and unfairly damage the reputations of careful, meticulous scientists, says Mina Bissell.
PLOS profits prompt revamp
Elizabeth Marincola, PLOS's chief executive, says that the future of science publishing is not in branded, highly selective titles. Instead, she sees a world in which article metrics and community judgements help the cream of research to rise to the top.
SpotOn Conference London 2013
SpotOn Conference London 2013
A collection of talks given last week at the London SpotOn conference 2013 on science communication and peer review.
Large NIH projects cut
Big science is under big pressure at the NIH. Gone are the glory days of the early 2000s, when a doubling of the agency's budget over five years allowed it to establish dozens of programmes with their own large, dedicated budgets.
Preprints come to life
What are biologists so afraid of? Physicists, mathematicians and social scientists routinely post their research to preprint servers such as arXiv.org before publication, yet few life scientists follow suit. A website that goes live this week is hoping to change that.
SpotOn London 2013
Join us at this year's SpotOn London conference on Friday 8th and Saturday 9th November. Now celebrating its sixth year, SpotOn London is an annual two-day conference hosted by Nature Publishing Group for anyone interested in how science is communicated and carried out online.
Points of view
Points of view
Relate your data to the world around them using the age-old custom of telling a story.
Set research priorities in a time of recession
Rigorous analyses are needed to establish the benefits of the knowledge economy, says former Irish government science adviser Patrick Cunningham.
High maintenance
The next president of the European Research Council will face the dual challenge of preserving the agency’s reputation for excellence while trying to address funding inequalities.
PubMed opens for comment
Research repository launches comment platform for post-publication peer review.
Peer review needs to expand so that more scientists are reviewing papers
Peer review needs to expand so that more scientists are reviewing papers
A new tool that selects peer reviewers by algorithm could make the peer review process more reliable, says Richard Price
The maze of impact metrics
So much science, so little time. Amid an ever-increasing mountain of research articles, data sets and other output, hard-pressed research funders and employers need shortcuts to identify and reward the work that matters.
Research evaluation: Impact
Every organization that funds research wants to support science that makes a difference. But there is no simple formula for identifying truly important research. And the job is becoming more difficult.
Superpowered invention
Leonid Gokhberg and Dirk Meissner compare accounts on the trajectory of innovation in two towering economies.
Sao Paulo's success story
The success of Sao Paulo's way of funding science has made it a model throughout Brazil: Sao Paulo produces 50 per cent of Brazilian science through FAPESP which receives one per cent of state tax revenue. The model allows for long-term planning and other states are now emulating it.
Bridging the market gap
Physicists and engineers must do more than peddle ideas if their technologies are to translate effectively beyond the lab, says Hans Zappe.
Research: A standard for policy-relevant science
The increasing concern about unreliability in scientific literature is a problem for people like me - I am the science adviser to DEFRA, the UK government department for environment, food and rural affairs. To counsel politicians, I must recognize systematic bias in research.
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