Congress gives big funding increase to NIH
The spending bill for the federal government ends more than 12 years of stagnant budgets for NIH.
Study show that elite scientists really do hold back science
Scientists can be stubborn. They can use their gravitas to steamroll new ideas. Which means those new ideas often only prevail when older scientists die.
Altmetric's top 100 research articles in 2015
What academic research caught the public imagination in 2015? Altmetric has pulled together our annual list of the research that has attracted the most online attention in the past year.
What's in a journal name?
Scientists debate the merits of deleting journal names from their publication lists.
Transparent peer review at Nature Communications
Starting Jan 2016 Nature Communications will publish peer reviews alongside with the paper.
University prestige has little influence on leaders' pay
An analysis of the correlation between vice-chancellors’ pay and university ranking.
Make science more reliable, win cash prizes
Honoring young researchers who champion rigorous, transparent research is a small step towards changing the culture of science.
A basic scientist's reflections on research funding
Research can only exist with good and secure funding, but when obtaining funding becomes a dominant part of investigators’ activity, the system has a problem.
Academics, forget about public engagement, stay in your ivory towers
Researchers are urged to make their work accessible, but simplifying complex ideas doesn’t support great scholarship.
Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014
Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014
Analyzing three decades' worth of PubMed-indexed abstracts, scientists find a notable increase in the frequency of positive words, like "innovative" and "novel", over time.
Wrapping it up in a person
Report examining employment and earnings outcomes for Ph.D. recipients.
Post-publication peer review: signed or anonymous?
Participating in open and signed post-publication peer review may not be so bad for your career after all.
The current system of scholarly publishing is a massive infringement of academic freedom
The current system of scholarly publishing is a massive infringement of academic freedom
What actually is "academic freedom"?
Publishers to require ORCID identifiers for authors
A group of seven publishers has announced that they will begin requiring authors to use an ORCID identifier (iD) during the publication process.
Dutch lead European push to flip journals to open access
Academic consortia urge faster changes in scholarly publishing.
Gender breakdown at course level
The proportion of male and female students varies widely across different subjects in UK universities.
The unsung heroes of scientific software
Creators of computer programs that underpin experiments don’t always get their due — so the website Depsy is trying to track the impact of research code.
Funding for key data resources in jeopardy
Several widely used biology databases supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute are facing unsettling change.
3250 CHF für einen Uni-Abschluss
Zu faul, keine Zeit, nicht fähig: Wie rasch Studierende im Web Ghostwriter für den Uni-Abschluss finden. Wie teuer das ist. Und warum die Institute dagegen machtlos sind.
Open journals that piggyback on arXiv gather momentum
Peer-review platforms built around online pre-print repositories spread to astrophysics.
Should scientific papers be anonymous?
When it comes to protecting the scientific literature from bias, the safeguards that academics now use are sorely inadequate.
Big ideas for better science
We asked four researchers who made the news in 2015 what they would change about how science gets done.
Why Preventing Cancer Is Not the Priority in Drug Development
There’s more money to be made investing in drugs that will extend cancer patients’ lives by a few months than in drugs that would prevent cancer in the first place.
Why science's universal language is a problem for research
The vast majority of scientific papers today are published in English. What gets lost when other languages get left out?
Die Wissenschaft - eine weltfremde Künstlerwerkstatt
Die Menschheit steht vor großen Herausforderungen. Doch das Wissenschaftssystem bleibt starr. Das muss sich ändern.
Choosing experiments to accelerate collective discovery
Scientists perform a tiny subset of all possible experiments. What characterizes the experiments they choose? And what are the consequences of those choices for the pace of scientific discovery?
Reproducible research practices and transparency across the biomedical literature
Reproducible research practices and transparency across the biomedical literature
Replication studies are rare and only a few had their data included in a subsequent systematic review or meta-analysis.