Scientists, Please Run for Office. The Planet Needs You.
The country desperately needs more egghead lawmakers. Right now, Capitol Hill has almost none.
Cheap Flights Increase Research Collaboration, Study Finds
Expansion of US carrier associated with an increase in partnerships of more than 30 percent.
Pre-print Open Access Site arXiv Surpasses Billion Download Mark
The pre-print database for scientists to test the peer-review waters was set up in 1991 as a relatively simple electronic bulletin board on a single computer. Twenty-six years later, the site arXiv.org has surpassed a full billion downloads of papers and receives more than 10 million submissions each month.
An analysis of Wellcome Trust OA spend
To help make the costs around open access more transparent, the Wellcome Trust has published details on how much it spent on article processing charges in the year 2013-14.
How nations fare in PhDs by sex
How women and men fare in doctoral studies around the world.
UK’s Powerful Funding Body Takes Shape
UK’s newly minted unified funding agency has released the first outline of its strategy. The long-awaited document gives the nation’s researchers an insight into how the mega-funding agency - which will command a budget of GBP6 billion (USD8 billion) - will work.
Swiss Seek Full Disclosure in FP9
The European Commission should give Framework 9 applicants access to the full evaluation reports for their proposals, a Swiss position paper on the programme has said.
Elsevier Reports 40% Gender Pay Gap
Elsevier has reported a median pay gap of 40%, more than twice the UK average of 18.4% and the highest yet reported by a publishing company.
Commission and EIF seek Pan-European Venture Capital Fund-of-Funds Managers
Commission and EIF seek Pan-European Venture Capital Fund-of-Funds Managers
The European Commission and the European Investment Fund are inviting applications for setting up and managing one or more private-sector led, market-driven Pan-European Venture Capital Funds-of-Funds.
Scientist Screwed Up? Send' Em to Researcher Rehab
Plagiarism. Cheating. Lying. Should these scientists get a second chance?
Not So Many Uncited Papers, Actually
How many scientific papers drop into the void, never to be cited by anyone, ever again? There are all sorts of estimates floating around, many of them rather worryingly high, but this look at the situation by Nature suggests that things aren't so bad.
UN report calls for a greater place for science in international decision-making
Science is a public good and deserves to be valued more highly and used effectively by decision-makers at all levels.
Human Brain Project votes for leadership change
Europe's ambitious but contentious €1-billion HBP has announced changes to its organization in a response to criticism of its management and scientific trajectory by many high-ranking neuroscientists.
The measure of success
Rather than focusing on what members of underrepresented groups need to do to “adapt” to academic culture, we should be interrogating the system itself, which expects all of us to work excessively at the expense of our physical and mental health.
African Scientists Get Their Own Open-Access Publishing Platform
Venture will launch next year and seeks to strengthen continent’s science by helping academics share work more quickly.
What constitutes appropriate peer review for interdisciplinary research?
What constitutes appropriate peer review for interdisciplinary research?
How can interdisciplinary research proposals be more effectively assessed through peer review?
When Will Peer Reviewers Finally Get Paid?
Right now, the overwhelming majority of peer reviewers, the scientists who scrutinize the latest studies, aren't paid for their labor. This is completely ridiculous. Peer review may be the most important part of the scientific enterprise, and it is not incentivized monetarily.
A change in the resubmission policy
The NIH is to allow researchers to base new grant applications on ideas that have previously been rejected for funding.
Beyond today's crowdsourced science to tomorrow's citizen science cyborgs
Computers are getting better and better at the jobs that previously made sense for researchers to outsource to citizen scientists. But don't worry: there's still a role for people in these projects.
Predatory Publishers Gain Foothold in Indian Academia’s Upper Echelon
Researchers at top-flight institutions are not immune to charms of questionable journals
Fraud Scheme Uncovered in China
The Chinese government finds almost 500 researchers guilty of misconduct in relation to a recent spate of retractions from a cancer journal.
Annotating the scholarly web
Scientific publishers are forging links with an organization that wants scientists to scribble comments over online research papers.
Gender Balance in Time-Keeping at Life Science Conferences
Male speakers exceeded their allocated time more frequently than female speakers, especially at large conferences (73% vs 49%). Since conferences are an important arena for science dissemination this might have a negative impact on female scientist's careers.
Visualizing research impact
Visualizing research impact
A visualization of 6,975 case studies capturing the work of 50,000 researchers working in 154 institutions and grouped into 36 disciplinary units of assessment.
What the Acquisition of Meta Means for Scholarly Publishers
Meta, a data science company, has been acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, whose aim is to accelerate the pace of scientific advances.
"It’s a Toxic Place." : How the Online World of White Nationalists Distorts Population Genetics
"It’s a Toxic Place." : How the Online World of White Nationalists Distorts Population Genetics
A graduate student is analyzing how Stormfront and other racist websites misunderstand, and misuse, new scientific papers.