EU countries want to ensure the scientific publishing industry is fair and sustainable as it moves towards open access models, according to the first draft of council conclusions seen by Science|Business.
The Federal Council has adopted an implementation proposal regarding the creation of ad-hoc scientific advisory groups during crises. Switzerland’s ERI institutions are to jointly propose experts for the groups.
Academics suspect that papers with grabby conclusions are waved through more easily by reviewers.
What should inform a career in science?
A transitional arrangement means researchers in New Zealand can apply for Horizon Europe grants as of now, even though Brussels and Wellington have yet to fix a budget following the agreement last December under which New Zealand became the first country to secure full association to the research programme.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has announced the creation of a Scientific Advisory Board “to advise UN leaders on ... how to harness the benefits of these advances and mitigate potential risks.”
It's human nature to spot patterns in data. But we should be careful about finding causal links where none may exist, says statistician David Spiegelhalter
The goal of open access is to allow more people to read and use research outputs. An observed association between highly cited research outputs and open access has been claimed as evidence of increased usage of the research, but this remains controversial.
Within the scope of the Career Tracker Cohorts study, postdocs were surveyed in order to learn more about potential changes in their work routines, effects on their research, and their own assessment of the impact the pandemic would have on their careers.
To motivate contributions to public goods, should policy makers employ financial incentives like taxes, fines, subsidies, and rewards? Academic literature suggests the impact of financial incentives is not always positive.
Many researchers say that AI systems aren’t yet at the point of consciousness, but that the pace of AI evolution has got them pondering: how would we know if they were? A checklist derived from six neuroscience-based theories could aid in the assessment.
The Horizon 2020 programme had a huge impact on the European economy, its scientific output, and on society, but was short on budget, needed simplification and should have included better support for women researchers and entrepreneurs.
Study of researchers indicates that a preprint or accepted manuscript can substitute for the version of record in some use cases but not all.
Three U.S. scientists share the 2017 award.
In an open letter some of the largest academic publishers and scientific societies are announcing that they will not just encourage, but ultimately require, researchers to sign up with ORCID.
Commission Recommendation of 25 April 2018 on access to and preservation of scientific information.
Academics are challenging the control of a select group of publishing houses over scientific journals.
One way to push back against the pressure to “publish or perish” is to randomly audit a small proportion of researchers and take time to assess their research in detail. Auditors could examine complex measures of quality which no metric could ever capture such as originality, reproducibility, and research translation.
With more agreements including some form of Open Access, consortia and academic institutions need to monitor the number of Open Access publications, the costs and the value of these agreements.
More than 100 educational institutions, including some of the world's most prestigious, appear linked to blocker funds and other offshore investments.
Letters about women include more doubt-raising phrases than those about men, and that even one such phrase can make a difference in a job search.
To date, the majority of authors on scientific publications have been men. While much of this gender bias can be explained by historic sexism and discrimination, there is concern that women may still be disadvantaged by the peer review process if reviewers' unconscious biases lead them to reject publications with female authors more often. One potential solution to this perceived gender bias in the reviewing process is for journals to adopt double-blind reviews whereby neither the authors nor the reviewers are aware of each other's identities and genders. To test the efficacy of double-blind reviews, we assigned gender to every authorship of every paper published in 5 different journals with different peer review processes (double-blind vs. single blind) and subject matter (birds vs. behavioral ecology) from 2010-2018 (n = 4865 papers). While female authorships comprised only 35% of the total, the double-blind journal Behavioral Ecology did not have more female authorships than its single-blind counterparts. Interestingly, the incidence of female authorship is higher at behavioral ecology journals (Behavioral Ecology and Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology) than in the ornithology journals (Auk, Condor, Ibis), for papers on all topics as well as those on birds. These analyses suggest that double-blind review does not currently increase the incidence of female authorship in the journals studied here. We conclude, at least for these journals, that double-blind review does not benefit female authors and may, in the long run, be detrimental.
With rightwing demagogues gaining power and public debate getting nastier, many are calling for a return to a more sensible politics. But this approach has its own fatal flaws.
Germany's ruling political parties have agreed to plough €5 billion (US$5.4 billion) more into science from 2018 to 2028.
