Academic hiring and promotion committees and funding bodies often use publication lists as a shortcut to assessing the quality of applications. In order to avoid bias towards prestigious titles, plain language statements should become a standard feature of academic assessment.
An oily, 100-nanometer-wide bubble of genes has killed more than two million people and reshaped the world. Scientists don't quite know what to make of it.
A new agreement with the European Union means that Swiss researchers are eligible for some Horizon 2020 grants.
Michael Eisen hopes a victory in 2018 will bring a new scientific voice to the US legislature.
The perceived and actual barriers experienced by researchers attempting to do reproducible research.
If we believe data should be valued like other research outputs, we must take action to achieve this. Supporting the open data movement means providing proper support for data citations.
A new COVID-19 vaccine, developed by researchers from the Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine, is being offered patent-free to vaccine manufacturers across the world.
A young researcher who shot to fame in scientific circles when she published an apparently radical and simple way to create stem cells has been found guilty of misconduct by a committee charged with investigating her work
More than 60 major German research institutions are to be expected to have no access to the full texts of journals by the publisher Elsevier from 1 January 2017 on, among them Göttingen University with 440 Elsevier journals.
Giving researchers the data skills they need to share, review, and validate each other’s work, writes Erin Becker.
Continuing our celebration of Peer Review Week 2019, today Alice Meadows interviews Tracey Brown, OBE, Director of Sense about Science, which has been involved in Peer Review Week from the start.
Letting the rich pay for science that interests them is a bad idea—even if they aren’t convicted sex offenders.
India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has boosted the country's economy by fostering a booming generic drugs industry and devising new approaches to hybrid crops. Now, the network of 38 national laboratories needs to nurture its own finances.
When we pay for federally funded research, we should be allowed to read it. That’s the simple premise of FASTR, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act.
Avoiding the r-word would make it easier for researchers to correct the literature after an honest mistake.
England's free speech bill should outlaw gag orders that stifle revelations of bad practice, says an anonymous author.
Scientific cooperation between the UK and Russia was boosted in August this year when Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev agreed to extend the UK-Russia Intergovernmental Agreement on Science and Technology cooperation for another 10 years.
As researchers prepare for the science march, it's worth noting that the flip-side of Trump's anti-science is a sort of alt-science appeasement on the left.
The stigma has a punitive effect on citations for prior collaborators of fraudulent researchers.
Airborne transmission by droplets and aerosols is important for the spread of viruses. Face masks are a well-established preventive measure, but their effectiveness for mitigating SARS-CoV-2 transmission is still under debate. We show that variations in mask efficacy can be explained by different regimes of virus abundance and related to population-average infection probability and reproduction number. For SARS-CoV-2, the viral load of infectious individuals can vary by orders of magnitude. We find that most environments and contacts are under conditions of low virus abundance (virus-limited) where surgical masks are effective at preventing virus spread. More advanced masks and other protective equipment are required in potentially virus-rich indoor environments including medical centers and hospitals. Masks are particularly effective in combination with other preventive measures like ventilation and distancing.
US lawmakers have warned that fake research papers risk compromising trust in the entire scientific system, as Artificial Intelligence makes it ever easier for so-called paper mills to fool journals into accepting made up articles.
Physicists and engineers must do more than peddle ideas if their technologies are to translate effectively beyond the lab, says Hans Zappe.
