Luck of the Draw
Funders should assign research grants via a lottery system to reduce human bias, says Dorothy Bishop.
Send us a link
Weak Demand Forces Springer Nature to Cancel 3.2 Billion Euro Float at Last Minute
Weak Demand Forces Springer Nature to Cancel 3.2 Billion Euro Float at Last Minute
Springer Nature, the publisher of science magazines Nature and Scientific American, cancelled its 3.2 billion euro stock market flotation planned for Wednesday on weak investor demand, dealing a heavy blow to Germany's vibrant IPO season.
More Institutions Consider Ending their 'Big Deals' with Publishers
An increasing number of universities are ending, or threatening to end, bundled journal subscriptions with major publishers.
Harassment Should Count as Scientific Misconduct
Scientific integrity needs to apply to how researchers treat people, not just to how they handle data.
A Beginner's Guide for Addressing Sexual Harassment in Academia
Suggestions for how scientists, specifically male scientists, can undermine the alienating culture of sexual harassment that exists in STEM.
Money talks
With detailed proposals on the next R&D programme due within weeks, MEP Christian Ehler, the European Parliament’s Horizon 2020 lead, explained his priorities to Ben Upton.
The Hierarchy of Countries Winning Nobels in the Sciences Is Shifting
Nobel-prize data suggest the productivity of American science has fallen.
Conflicting Academic Attitudes to Copyright Are Slowing the Move to Open Access
The open access movement has prompted a shift towards retention of rights and the use of creative commons licenses to control how works are used by publishers. However, in many cases, researchers continue to agree to standard assignment terms offered by publishers without fully investigating or understanding them.
Rationalizing the Extremes: Introducing the Citation Distribution Index
This post introduces the citation distribution index, an impact indicator developed by Science-Metrix to address many of the limitations of the average measures used in bibliometrics.
Weak Demand Forces Springer Nature to Cancel 3.2 Billion Euro Float at Last Minute
Weak Demand Forces Springer Nature to Cancel 3.2 Billion Euro Float at Last Minute
Springer Nature, the publisher of science magazines Nature and Scientific American, cancelled its 3.2 billion euro (2.8 billion pound) stock market flotation planned for Wednesday on weak investor demand, dealing a heavy blow to Germany's vibrant IPO season.
Ministers prepare to debate Horizon Europe
EU research ministers will meet at the end of the month to debate how the EU’s next R&D programme, Horizon Europe, can help address the bloc’s societal and economic challenges.
Budget 2018: When Scientists Make Their Case Effectively, Politicians Listen
The Unhappy Postdoc: a Survey Based Study
In this study, among a large number of factors that can enhance life satisfaction for postdocs (e.g., publication productivity, resources available to them) only one stood out as significant: the degree to which atmosphere in the lab is pleasant and collegial.
Open-Access Model Is a Return to the Origins of Journal Publishing
Until recently, many university and society journals operated at a loss. To return to their earlier significant role in scientific dissemination, scientific societies and universities will have to return to their earlier acceptance of knowledge sharing as part of their broader public service, rather than their more recent exploitation of publications as revenue generators.
Australian Budget Delivers for Science Facilities and Medical Research
Research facilities and medicine were among the winners for science in Australia's 2018/19 national budget. The government will push to invest almost Aus$1.9 billion (US$1.4 billion) over the next 12 years in shared research infrastructure. Scientists welcome relative windfall after years of stagnating funds.
Publishing Continues to Outperform Perception
Publishing Continues to Outperform Perception
With the Springer Nature IPO in the offing, it's important to remember that publishing continues to outperform perception.
Introducing a New Standard for the Citation of Research Data
The Identifiers Expert Group of the FORCE11 Data Citation Implementation Pilot (DCIP) has achieved a significant step toward the harmonization of identifier resolution standards for data citation in research articles.
Stock Photos of Scientists Reveal That Science Is Mostly About Staring
Stock Photos of Scientists Reveal That Science Is Mostly About Staring
Sometimes at chickens.
How Health Care Changes When Algorithms Start Making Diagnoses
Complex algorithms will soon help clinicians make incredibly accurate determinations about our health from large amounts of information, premised on largely unexplainable correlations in that data.
Nature Says It Wants to Publish Replication Attempts. so What Happened When a Group of Authors Submitted One to Nature Neuroscience?
Nature Says It Wants to Publish Replication Attempts. so What Happened When a Group of Authors Submitted One to Nature Neuroscience?
Over the past few years, Nature has published editorials extolling the virtues of replication, concluding in one that “We welcome, and will be glad to help disseminate, results that explore the validity of key publications, including our own.” Mante Nieuwland, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and colleagues were encouraged by that message and submitted one such replication attempt to Nature Neuroscience. In a three-part guest post, Nieuwland will describe what happened when they did and discusses whether reality lives up to the rhetoric.
Scholars Have Data on Millions of Facebook Users. Who’s Guarding It?
Scholars Have Data on Millions of Facebook Users. Who’s Guarding It?
Academics have scoured Facebook pages in the name of science. But the troves they’ve amassed are sometimes unsecured and now pose a privacy risk.
I’d Whisper to My Student Self: You Are Not Alone
Twenty years on, Dave Reay speaks out about the depression that almost sunk his Ph.D., and the lifelines that saved him.
An Empirical Study of the per Capita Yield of Science Nobel Prizes: Is the Us Era Coming to an End?
An Empirical Study of the per Capita Yield of Science Nobel Prizes: Is the Us Era Coming to an End?
For the USA, this study finds, the entire history of science Noble prizes is described on a per capita basis to an astonishing accuracy by a single large productivity boost decaying at a continuously accelerating rate since its peak in 1972.
For Open Science, but up a Different Path
According to Wikipedia, Open Science is "the movement to make scientific research, data and dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, amateur or professional." That definition raises a number of questions.
A Landscape Study on Open Access and Monographs: New Summary and Survey
The state of affairs with regard to policies, funding and publishing Open Access monographs in eight European countries.
×