ETH Zurich is opening a new research and teaching centre with a focus on exploring the origin and prevalence of life on Earth and beyond. Under the leadership of Noble Laureate, Didier Queloz, more than 40 research groups from five departments will address the big questions posed by humankind.
One of the latest creations to emerge from the Research Institute's lab, Apograf is an interactive platform that houses an extensive collection of scientific publications and is building a mechanism for incentivising peer review.
Self-governance of science was supposed to mean freedom of inquiry, but it also ended up serving the business model of scientific publishers while undermining the goals of science policy.
A multidisciplinary approach is required to understand, address, and recover from pandemics, and social scientific disciplines are central to this.
Leading academics defend EU research missions and say productivity growth should not be the direct goal of European investment in research and innovation.
EPSRC Engineering fellowships were under-subscribed and so we should all be preparing our applications. But just because a theme is under-subcribed doesn't mean that you've got a better chance of getting funded.
Further to my other post earlier this week, I have added the additional points to my response letter to the Plan S implementation guidelines. These centre around monographs (9), REF involvement in Plan S (10), infrastructural support (11), the "time of publication" (12), clarification of the term "quality" (13), compliance of existing software with repository requirements (14), publisher deposition (15), and the ability to pursue defamation suits for wrongful attribution and reputational damage with the waiver of moral rights under CC BY 4.0 (16). If number 16 could be resolved, the open licensing landscape would be much clearer. The full letter is now available.
Subscription journals will let some Plan S funded researchers share accepted manuscripts under open licences.
The German U15 group of research-intensive universities has signed a long-term agreement to support closer ties between researchers and universities at its Canadian counterpart, U15 Canada.
Exhibiting a dogmatic faith in metrics, higher education executives are being guided less by rational considerations about educational values and more by the "snake oils" of efficiency, profitability, and accountability. But these dark arts exact a price. Due to increasing competition for funds and jobs, and with the jobs themselves becoming increasingly precarious, universities have become "anxiety machines" for academics.
Eleven research funders in Europe announce ‘Plan S’ to make all scientific works free to read as soon as they are published.
The risk of nasty side effects in the Moderna and Oxford trials should be made clear now, before it ends up as fodder for the skeptics.
The Open Access movement was meant to provide universal access to knowledge, however the hybrid model seems to defeat this point by hindering the discoverability of hybrid Open Access articles, and creating more difficulties to disseminate knowledge.
New research finds no clear evidence that targeted funding leads to larger or more abrupt shifts in research topics than non-targeted funding. Instead, changes in research focus tend to be gradual, and similar in scale across both funding modes.
The extraordinary standoff between the CDC and a drug company over patent rights raises a big question for the Trump administration: How aggressively should the government attempt to enforce its patents against an industry partner?
Astronomer Geoff Marcy and geneticist Francisco Ayala risk losing their spots in prestigious scientific institution.
You can restore credibility to Congress and lead on issues from opioid addiction to clean water
COVID-19 presents a opportunity to transform democratic engagement in the governance of global public goods. To make us more resistant and resilient to future global health crises we need transformative thinking to democratically engage global citizens.
Two recent research efforts looked into the southern alligator lizard, which has one of nature's more extreme mating strategies.
From climate to COVID, naivety about how science is hijacked promotes more of the same.
As it turns out, many Ph.D. students resent the expectation that they bring food and drinks to their thesis defenses. UCLA's psychology department just said they shouldn't do it.
A report on the status of women faculty at EPFL outlines common challenges faced by women professors, and more importantly, recommendations on how to move forward.
A digital scholarship librarian and a historian assembled a team of professors, graduate students, researchers, and fellows to create "Torn Apart / Separados", an interactive web site that visualizes the vast apparatus of immigration enforcement in the US, and broadly maps the shelters where children can be housed.
Officials are under pressure to restart the economy, but many states are moving too quickly, researchers say. The costs may be measured in lost lives.
