The (Possible) Postdoc Union Boom
Could postdoc unions be the next big thing in collective bargaining among academics? Recent filing at University of Washington could be beginning of a new round of organizing.
Academics and Copyright Ownership: Ignorant, Confused or Misled?
Elizabeth Gadd takes a look at the contradictions between scholarly culture and copyright culture, and the cognitive dissonance created.
Forces of Nature
Recognize women who changed science with this free collection of print-at-home posters.
Springer Nature Blocks Access to Articles in China
Academic publisher Springer Nature says it has blocked access to articles within China to comply with demands from the Chinese government.
A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective on Emergent and Future Innovations in Peer Review
A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective on Emergent and Future Innovations in Peer Review
Emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review.
Plans to Promote German Research Excellence Come Under Fire
Critics say selection process for high-stakes funding programme is flawed.
Public Money, Public Code: Show Your Support For Free Software in Europe
Public Money, Public Code is a campaign of the Free Software Foundation Europe that seeks to transform that ideal into European law.
The Fractured Logic of Blinded Peer Review in Journals
The case for “blinding” to make journal peer review fair seems less and less plausible to me for the long run. It even seems antithetical to ultimately reducing the problems it’s a bandaid solution for.
Academics Step Down from Posts on Elsevier Journals
High price of journals 'placing strain on acceptance' of division of labour between researchers and publishers, says professor.
Join the Disruptors of Health Science
Thomas Insel's biggest lesson from his shift from NIMH director to Silicon Valley entrepreneur: academic and technology company researchers should partner up.
The Running Costs of eLife 2.0
Paul Shannon, Head of Technology, looks at the costs of running eLife’s own continuous publication platform four months after the launch of eLife 2.0.
Science Organizations Troubled by Rand Paul Bill Targeting Peer Review
Rand Paul wants to add two people to every federal peer-review panel evaluating research proposals, charged with looking for value to taxpayers. Science advocates say idea would politicize federal funding of research.
Are Scientists Doing Too Much Research?
It sounds almost absurd, but that could be one factor behind the so-called “reproducibility crisis”.
Metrics: Human-Made, but Humane?
Metrics are notoriously inappropriate for evaluating humanistic scholarship. HumetricsHSS is an initiative to embed metrics with humanistic values.
NSF selects Anne Kinney to head Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate
W. M. Keck Observatory chief scientist to lead investments in astronomy, chemistry, physics, materials science and mathematics research.
Why 'Statistical Significance' Is Often Insignificant
Researchers who want professorships are sometimes driven to publish suspect findings.
DNAinfo and Gothamist Are Shut Down After Vote to Unionize
Reporters and editors at the local news sites joined a union last week. On Thursday, their billionaire owner closed the sites.
Republican Tax Proposal Gets Failing Grade From Higher-Ed Groups
The planned overhaul would place new tax burdens on colleges and students, and some critics argue that it could undermine charitable giving to the institutions.
If Funders and Libraries Subscribed to Open Access
Considerations of open access models that can work across disciplines. The case of ELife, PLoS, and BioOne.
The Titans of AI Are Getting Their Work Double-Checked by Students
A challenge investigating reproducibility of empirical results submitted to the 2018 International Conference on Learning Representations.
Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability
Data from several lines of evidence suggest that the methodological quality of scientific experiments does not increase with increasing rank of the journal.
A Prestigious Research Publisher Gives in to China's Censorship
The Financial Times disclosed that Springer Nature has blocked access in China to at least 1,000 articles from the websites of two of its journals in response to Beijing’s censorship demands.
Making Medicine, Not Money: How One U of T Researcher's Startup Is Rethinking Big Pharma's Business Model
Making Medicine, Not Money: How One U of T Researcher's Startup Is Rethinking Big Pharma's Business Model
The latest medical innovation to spring from Aled Edwards’s University of Toronto lab isn’t a new protein structure or potential drug target – it’s a business model.
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