Outcome: Indicative statistics.

Eight highly-visible organizations today announced the launch of the Open Research Funders Group, a partnership designed to increase access to research outputs. With nearly $5 billion in combined annual grants conferred, these organizations are committed to using their positions to foster more open sharing of research articles and data.  This openness, the members believe, will accelerate the pace of discovery, reduce information-sharing gaps, encourage innovation, and promote reproducibility.

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.

Amazon made its first commercial drone delivery on Dec. 7 in Cambridgeshire, England.

Over 60 major German research institutions are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier's academic and scientific journals, effective January 1, 2017.

Figshare announced a new partnership with Springer Nature to support BioMed Central and SpringerOpen authors who wish to openly share their supplementary data. Figshare are now hosting additional files from more than 300 BioMed Central and SpringerOpen journals.

New analysis finds that smaller labs get more bang for the buck.

That’s just one of the highlights from a new analysis of buzzworthy publications

The Swiss parliament approved a law to limit immigration by giving its residents priority access to employment vacancies, in an effort to shore up ties with the EU.

Science policy is slowly waking up to the realisation that the value of science may lie in people and places rather than papers and patents.

McGill's Neurological Institute open science agenda includes open access publication of all research data and findings, and an end to the practice of patenting the university's findings.

Researchers at top-flight institutions are not immune to charms of questionable journals

Earlier this year, the Montreal Neurological Institute announced an ambitious commitment to the principles of open science. The Neuro will be eschewing patents for its discoveries and doing all it can to make its research findings widely available. While there have been other large-scale open science initiatives the Neuro is the first major research institute of its kind to make such a wide-ranging commitment to open science.

Mobile researchers get higher citation rates and are also more productive than the average.

Ten people who mattered this year.