Sweden is the latest country to hold out on journal subscriptions, while negotiators share tactics to broker new deals with publishers. Inspired by the results of a stand-off in Germany, negotiators from libraries and university consortia across Europe increasingly declare that if they don’t like what publishers offer, they will refuse to pay for journal access at all.
In this era of billionaires and unequal funding, where is research going? And perhaps more importantly, how will our changing resources affect the training, success, and diversity of the scientists of our future?
Michael Eisen is anything but silent. In his career as a scientist, which has included a slapdash U.S. Senate campaign, blog posts, and nearly 39,000 tweets, he has lobbed grenades at the powers that be.
A meta-analysis combining the most popular university rankings to find out which ones are best, and showing which university offers the best value for the money. Spoiler: Switzerland, for once, is a good deal.
The 2-day eLife Innovation Sprint was aimed at bringing together 'computer people' and 'science people' in order to create novel tools for open science.
Institutions, research funding bodies and publishers must all work together to change the system in the interest of advancing research, says Steven Inchcoombe.
The AI field is increasingly turning to conference publications and free, open-review websites while shunning traditional outlets - sentiments dramatically expressed in a growing boycott of a high-profile AI journal.
Why do authors continue to cite preprints years after they've been formally published? A citation is much more than a directional link to the source of a document. It is the basis for a system of rewarding those who make significant contributions to public science.
Introductory report for the Knowledge Exchange working group on preprints, based on contributions from the Knowledge Exchange Preprints Advisory Group.
It takes an average of 15 clicks for a researcher to find and access a journal article. This time could be much better spent
Three steps that could be taken by funding agencies to support young investigators in more constructive and effective ways: (1) greatly expand the use of the New Innovator/Starting Grants awards, (2) increase the funding of young investigators through requests for applications, and (3) experiment with separate competitions for Early Stage Investigators when awarding traditional investigator-initiated R01 grants.
Something strange began happening with a U.S. Department of Education loan program known as Parent PLUS, under which parents borrow money from the government to finance their children’s education.
UK’s newly minted unified funding agency has released the first outline of its strategy. The long-awaited document gives the nation’s researchers an insight into how the mega-funding agency - which will command a budget of GBP6 billion (USD8 billion) - will work.
Storytelling is easy to implement in your manuscript provided you know how. Think of the six plot elements - character, setting, tension, action, climax, resolution - and the three other story essentials - main theme, chronology, purpose. You’ll soon outline the backbone of your narrative and be ready to write a paper that is concise, compelling, and easy to understand.
Right now, the overwhelming majority of peer reviewers, the scientists who scrutinize the latest studies, aren't paid for their labor. This is completely ridiculous. Peer review may be the most important part of the scientific enterprise, and it is not incentivized monetarily.
Many biologists are still reluctant to submit preprints, in part out of concern that doing so will allow others to “scoop” their work and undermine their chances of publication in a prestigious journal. I would like to rebut that concern, among others, and to share our research group’s first experience submitting a preprint manuscript.
Whatever we call it, investment in research will lead the way to important short- and long-term discoveries.
While no one is arguing for funding failure, the challenge is how we define “success.”
Ethical, organizational and economic strengths and weaknesses of funder open access platforms: opportunities and threats presented by funder open access platforms in the ongoing transition to open access.
When it’s also big science, the careers of those involved can suffer.
As young scientists, we are fooled into working harder and longer to live up to sky-high expectations and encouraged to feel inadequate.
Now that many European library consortia are cancelling deals with publishers, how will libraries respond to a world of open access?
Objections to the Creative Commons attribution licence are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible, warns John Wilbanks.
As a commendable European law on personal data comes into force, the research community must not let excessive caution about data sharing, however understandable, become the default position.
Peer review varies in quality and thoroughness. Making it publicly available could improve it.
A graduate student is analyzing how Stormfront and other racist websites misunderstand, and misuse, new scientific papers.
