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Meet the Scientist Painter Who Turns Deadly Viruses into Beautiful Works of Art

Meet the Scientist Painter Who Turns Deadly Viruses into Beautiful Works of Art

David Goodsell's scientifically precise watercolor paintings of the cells and microbes he studies grace journal covers and impress colleagues.

Exposing DOI Metadata Provenance

Exposing DOI Metadata Provenance

DOI metadata provenance is describing the history of a particular DOI metadata record, i.e. what changes were made when and by whom. This information is now stored and provided via an API for all DOI registrations since March 10, 2019. 

World Impact Rankings

World Impact Rankings

The Times Higher Education University Impact Rankings assess universities against the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. Calibrated indicators are used to provide comprehensive and balanced comparisons across three broad areas: research, outreach, and stewardship. This first edition includes more than 450 universities from 76 countries.

A Belief in Meritocracy Is Not Only False: It's Bad for You

A Belief in Meritocracy Is Not Only False: It's Bad for You

Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal.

Brazil's Government Freezes Nearly Half of Its Science Spending

Brazil's Government Freezes Nearly Half of Its Science Spending

The decision could derail multi-million-dollar research projects such as the Sirius synchrotron.

Launch of the Global Alliance of Open Access Scholarly Communication Platforms to Democratize Knowledge

Launch of the Global Alliance of Open Access Scholarly Communication Platforms to Democratize Knowledge

A new momentum is emerging in the dissemination of scientific knowledge worldwide.  The GLOALL carries a vision to promote the development of multilingual scholarly communication standards, products and services.

So What About Editor Compensation?

So What About Editor Compensation?

As open access Plan S draws closer editors start to re-evaluate the business case of academic publishing, and their role in it. A major investigation reveals that editors at academic journals can make up to five figure salaries.

Use of the Journal Impact Factor in Academic Review, Promotion, and Tenure Evaluations

Use of the Journal Impact Factor in Academic Review, Promotion, and Tenure Evaluations

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) was originally designed to aid libraries in deciding which journals to index and purchase for their collections. Over the past few decades, however, it has become a relied upon metric used to evaluate research articles based on journal rank. Surveyed faculty often report feeling pressure to publish in journals with high JIFs and mention reliance on the JIF as one problem with current academic evaluation systems.

Is It Publish or Perish for PhD Students?

Is It Publish or Perish for PhD Students?

Nature Human Behaviour and the Behavioural and Social Sciences Community invite researchers across all career stages and disciplines to share their thoughts on publishing while training for a PhD. A broad selection of submissions will be published as World Views in Nature Human Behaviour or will be posted on the Behavioural and Social Sciences community page. Send us a short presubmission enquiry now!

Few Open Access Journals Are Compliant with Plan S

Few Open Access Journals Are Compliant with Plan S

Much of the debate on Plan S seems to concentrate on how to make toll-access journals open access, taking for granted that existing open access journals are Plan S-compliant. This question was examined using Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) metadata. The conclusion was that a large majority of open access journals are not Plan S-compliant, and that it is small publishers in the SSH that will face the largest challenge with becoming compliant. 

Gender Bias in Teaching Evaluations

Gender Bias in Teaching Evaluations

Paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. Despite the fact that neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor’s gender, it was found that women receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than their male colleagues.

How Can Publishers and Librarians Work Together to Increase Engagement to Digital Collections?

How Can Publishers and Librarians Work Together to Increase Engagement to Digital Collections?

UKSG Breakout session: Increasing Engagement with Digital Collections.

What Are Mirror Journals, and Can They Offer a New World of Open Access?

What Are Mirror Journals, and Can They Offer a New World of Open Access?

A pilot program gives authors another way to publish OA while enjoying the benefits of an established journal.

Bringing Citations and Usage Metrics Together to Make Data Count

Bringing Citations and Usage Metrics Together to Make Data Count

Over the last years, many organizations have been working on infrastructure to facilitate sharing and reuse of research data - but what is needed to make data count?

In Academia, Hard Work is Expected-but Taking a Break is Effort Well Spent, Too

In Academia, Hard Work is Expected-but Taking a Break is Effort Well Spent, Too

Work-life balance is not a detriment to excellent research, or an optional bonus, but an integral part of it.

Making Progress Towards Gender Parity and Increased Diversity

Making Progress Towards Gender Parity and Increased Diversity

Many previous attempts at achieving gender parity - like special awards for women - are decried as tokenism, and seem unlikely to induce sustained and systemic change. Given this mindset, our research team decided to take a slightly different approach - with promising results.

Shell Quits Trade Group over Climate-Change Positions

Shell Quits Trade Group over Climate-Change Positions

Shell, citing its positions on climate change, quits an industry trade group. But critics say the oil giant should leave other trade groups as well. Shell said it used four markers in evaluating its trade group memberships: support for the Paris climate agreement, support for carbon taxes, policies encouraging low-carbon technologies and a continuing role for natural gas, which now makes up more than half of Shell’s business.

6 Ways to Make Your Science Advocacy Effective at the State and Local Levels

6 Ways to Make Your Science Advocacy Effective at the State and Local Levels

Advice from the first Science Day at the Arizona state legislature: learn the structure, culture, and language of politics.

Module 1 of the Open Science MOOC: Open Principles

Module 1 of the Open Science MOOC: Open Principles

This is Module 1 of the Open Science MOOC. This course is totally SELF-PACED, meaning it can be completed whenever you want and in your own time. Rationale: To innovate in a field frequently implies moving against prevailing trends and cultural inertia. Open Science is no different. No matter how convinced you are, you will come across resistance from peers and colleagues, and the best defence is strong personal conviction that what you are doing may not be perfect now, but is the right decision in the long run. This module will introduce the guiding principles of the 'open movement', the different actors involved, and the impact that they are having. Learning outcomes You will be able to describe the ethical, legal, social, economic, and research impact arguments for and against Open Science. After deciding which platforms/tools/services are most useful for themselves and their community, you will develop a personal profile for showcasing your research profile and outputs. After reflecting on the status of Open Science within your research group or lab, you will devise concrete ways to locally improve open practices. Using the guidelines published by their research laboratories, departments, or institutes, you will identify the policies for career progression and assessment, publishing and open access, data sharing, and intellectual property. Resources: Open Principles There are two tasks that are optional as part of this module: Defining how Open Science affects you. Developing your digital researcher profile. These tasks are OPTIONAL. You do NOT need to complete them in order to finish this module. They are, however, strongly recommended still. To complete this module, the only thing you need to do is complete the quiz! Once you have done that, you get this cool certificate to proudly display (the real one is bigger and nicer). Citation: We strongly encourage maximal sharing, re-use, and remixing of all content available for this module. It is also openly-licensed (CC0 or CC-BY at source) and copyright free as such. To cite this work, please use: Jon Tennant; Bruce Caron; Jo Havemann; Samuel Guay; Julien Colomb; Eva Lantsoght; Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra; Katharina Kriegel; Justin Sègbédji Ahinon; Cooper Smout & Gareth O'Neill. (2019, March 16). OpenScienceMOOC/Module-1-Open-Principles 2.0.0 (Version 2.0.0). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2595951 Other live modules: Module 5: Open Research Software and Open Source

FAIRsharing As a Community Approach to Standards, Repositories and Policies

FAIRsharing As a Community Approach to Standards, Repositories and Policies

Community-developed standards, such as those for the identification, citation and reporting of data, underpin reproducible and reusable research, aid scholarly publishing, and drive both the discovery and the evolution of scientific practice.

BethAnn McLaughlin: 'Too Many Women in Science Have to Run the Gauntlet of Abuse and Leave'

BethAnn McLaughlin: 'Too Many Women in Science Have to Run the Gauntlet of Abuse and Leave'

The neuroscientist talks about her website to expose sexual 'harassholes' in science

Normalizing Data (sharing)

Normalizing Data (sharing)

Introducing Five Essential Factors, our latest white paper. Over the past two years, we've heard from more than 11,000 researchers about their views on data sharing, what they do in practice and the challenges they face. Building on that understanding, today we have released a whitepaper which proposes five key factors to make data management and sharing "business as usual" for all researchers.