Direct funding of regional university networks is being talked about by the EC and national governments. Another option would be rewarding universities according to how much they contribute to local innovation - using an assessment similar to the UK’s REF. EU support for universities is currently channelled only to specific projects, with no institutional discretion.
A discussion about the role and concerns of graduate students and postdocs in peer review.
Times Higher Education’s first major global survey of university staff views on work-life balance finds academics feeling stressed and underpaid, and struggling to fit time for personal relationships and family around their ever-growing workloads.
Ensure the benefits are felt by all involved, maintain a degree of distance and objectivity, protect the quality of consent and your publishing rights, and always choose your partners carefully.
To enable peer feedback, collaboration and transparency in scientific research practices, Hypothesis and the Center for Open Science (COS) are announcing a new partnership to bring open annotation to Open Science Framework (OSF) Preprints and the 17 community preprint servers hosted on OSF.
Alexandra Elbakyan runs Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. (Long read ...)
The National Science Foundation says institutions it supports must disclose when researchers are found to have violated policies or are put on leave pending investigation.
Why do we forget so much of what we read? Anthropologist Barbara J. King suggests that the answer might point toward benefits of a slower pace of teaching in the college classroom.
Society clearly benefits from innovation and creativity, and therefore has a vested interest in ensuring that such behaviors are rewarded while not stifling future innovation.
The Journal of Vibroengineering in December retracted three papers after becoming suspicious that one of the authors had convinced other researchers to cite his work.
The Code of Practice for Research Data Usage Metrics standardizes the generation and distribution of usage metrics for research data, enabling for the first time the consistent and credible reporting of research data usage.
This research article describes a procedure to generate a snapshot of the structure of a specific scientific community and their outputs based on the information available in Google Scholar Citations (GSC)....
On 1 February 2018, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) announced the discontinuation of PubMed Commons, citing usage that had been “minimal, with comments submitted on only 6,000 of the 28 million articles indexed in PubMed.” Although sparse,
For the first time, nearly all scholarly literature is available gratis to anyone with an Internet connection, suggesting the toll access business model may become unsustainable.
Spending on research projects on blockchain technologies by the European Union is to jump after it announced plans to increase funding from €83 million to as much as €340 million by 2020.
Birmingham Health Partners will lead one of six new sites across the UK created to address challenging healthcare issues through use of data science, funded by £30 million from Health Data Research UK.
The percentage of funding for basic science R&D in the central government's total financial input in science and technology has reached the level of developed countries, according to an official overseeing resource allocation and management at the ministry.
Science, it turns out, is an excellent place to find such people. After all, the scientific method requires you to recognize when you’re wrong - to do so happily, in fact. The story of Daniel Bolnick, an evolutionary biologist who had the courage to recognize his mistake.
Institutions have made little progress against the misuse of research metrics when hiring and promoting academics.
At least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. Also, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA.
HHMI meeting examines ways to improve manuscript vetting: little consensus on whether reviewers should have to publicly sign their critiques, which traditionally are accessible only to editors and authors.
The case for decentralized, trusted platforms for the dissemination of scientific information and attribution.
New LERU report makes recommendations on the many ways in which gender bias can be avoided.
The unsustainable nature of the digital data landscape, the quality and credibility of the data themselves, and how data sources currently represent only privileged individuals, are challenges that can be overcome, but to do so requires significant investment in key data governance priorities.
Societal impact should be rated more highly in scientific publishing and research evaluation. To this end, we suggest that ways to achieve it should be introduced as an important component of curricula at higher-education institutions.
