Empowering citizen scientists
Scientists should consider engaging more with the DIYbio community.
Elsevier cracks down on pirated scientific articles
Elsevier has filed a complaint hoping to shut down websites which are particularly popular in developing nations where access to academic works is relatively expensive.
Why Are We Working So Hard to Open up Science? A Personal Story.
Discussing the negative impacts of inaccessible outcomes, unavailable data, and doctored results in advancing science in general, and that impact in very concrete personal terms.
Scientific Output Scales with Resources. A Comparison of US and European Universities
Scientific Output Scales with Resources. A Comparison of US and European Universities
A recent study finds a strong correlation between university revenues and their volume of publications and (field-normalized) citations. These results demonstrate empirically that international rankings are by and large richness measures and, therefore, can be interpreted only by introducing a measure of resources.
Pressure to publish may discourage innovative research
The researchers' conclusions are drawn from a database they assembled of more than 6 million scholarly publications in biomedicine and chemistry.
Paper disputes causes of research misconduct
Productive researchers with high-impact papers and those working in countries were the pressure to publish is intense are less likely to produce retracted papers and are more likely to correct them.
How Big a Problem Are Articles that Should Be OA but End Up Behind Paywalls
How Big a Problem Are Articles that Should Be OA but End Up Behind Paywalls
In recent years, observers have noticed that articles for which an APC has been paid are not always made freely available. How pervasive is this problem?
Why Science Must Embrace Co-Creation with Generative AI to Break Current Research Barriers
Motivating Participation in Open Science by Examining Researcher Incentives
Motivating Participation in Open Science by Examining Researcher Incentives
A survey of researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital provides insights into the challenges and opportunities involved in adopting an open science policy across an entire patient-oriented academic institution.
Financial Ties of Medical Journal Editors Should Be Disclosed
Approximately half of the editors of 52 prestigious U.S. medical journals received payments from the pharmaceutical and medical device industry in 2014.
Nine Researchers Sue University of Rochester Over Sexual-Harassment Allegations
Lawsuit alleges that the institution mishandled complaints about cognitive scientist Florian Jaeger.
When things go wrong
Publishers should apply consistent policies to correcting the published literature and adopt versioning. The scientific community ought to encourage corrections.
Diamond Open Access, Societies and Mission
In this article Robert Harington assesses the Diamond open access model for society journal publishing.
Mental Health in Academia
How can the scientific community support researchers with mental health issues?
Africa produces 1.1% of global scientific knowledge
There are just 79 scientists per million Africans, compared to 4,500 per million people in the United States.
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.
Journals Retract More Than a Dozen Studies from China That May Have Used Executed Prisoners' Organs
Journals Retract More Than a Dozen Studies from China That May Have Used Executed Prisoners' Organs
In the past month, PLOS ONE and Transplantation have retracted fifteen studies by authors in China because of suspicions that the authors may have used organs from executed prisoners.
Why is academic writing so needlessly complex?
Some research funders have mandated in recent years that studies they finance be published in open-access journals, but they've given little attention to ensuring those studies include accessible writing.
Pilot Programme Encourages Researchers to Share the Code
New project, partly designed by a University of Cambridge researcher, aims to improve transparency in science by sharing ‘how the sausage is made’.
Should You Be Able to Patent an Organism?
The synthetic biology community is divided.
Reverse Engineering JCR's Self-Citation and Citation Stacking Thresholds
Now we know how suppression decisions are made, should metrics companies suppress titles at all or simply make the underlying data more transparent?
Replication and the Manufacture of Scientific Inferences: A Formal Approach
Replication and the Manufacture of Scientific Inferences: A Formal Approach
The field of replication studies remains a controversial, misunderstood.To help bring order to the chaos, the author suggests a theory of manufactured inferences.
Reviewer fatigue? Why scholars decline to review their peers' work
Breuning et al. include some tips for avoiding reviewer fatigue:
"Flipping" to (more) Open when You're Already Open
With most of the OA conversation now dominated by the notion of a transition to OA, what does this mean for those native OA publishers, like PLOS, who are already OA, and have been for years?
'Transformative' Open Access Publishing Deals Are Only Entrenching Commercial Power
'Transformative' Open Access Publishing Deals Are Only Entrenching Commercial Power
Funders and researchers are squandering a huge opportunity to create a more just and effective system, says Jon Tennant
Researchers Win Some, Lose Some in Final U.S. Tax Bill
Tuition tax out, but orphan drug credit reduced.
Too Many Academics Study the Same People
Researchers should recognize communities that feel over-researched and under-rewarded.
We’re Incentivizing Bad Science
Current research trends resemble the early 21st century’s financial bubble. Let’s imagine what might happen if the rules of professional science evolved such that scientists were incentivized to publish as many papers as they could and if those who published many papers of poor scientific rigor were rewarded over those who published fewer papers of higher rigor?
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