ScienceGeist

Climate change is severely straining the world's oceans, creating profound risks for coastal cities and food supplies, a U.N. report finds.

The Science Europe Briefing Paper identifies the key issues at stake in implementing a policy of Open Access to academic books, and outlines recommendations for different stakeholder groups to facilitate and accelerate such a policy.

All contracts for academic posts should be open-ended, and liable to termination: this is the opinion of the President of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences Antonio Loprieno.

An ad hoc planning committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will organize a public symposium in conjunction with the September 2019 meeting of the Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science. The symposium will explore current barriers to adopting open science practices and how they might be addressed.

The world's leading climate science organizations have joined forces to produce a landmark new report for the United Nations Climate Action Summit, underlining the glaring - and growing gaps - between agreed targets to tackle global warming and the actual reality.

From Bangkok to Brisbane, researchers were among those who protested to urge action on global warming.

Algorithms may simply lead to 'self-fulfilling prophecies' and do not give reasons for their decisions, Oxford researcher warns.

MDPI is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access journals since its establishment in 1996.

A major push by science funding agencies in Europe to make the research they back freely available at the point of publication is the world's best chance of fundamentally altering scientific publishing, says the new coordinator of Plan S, Johan Rooryck.

citecorp is a new (hit CRAN in late August) R package for working with data from the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC). OpenCitations, run by David Shotton and Silvio Peroni, houses the OCC, an open repository of scholarly citation data under the very open CC0 license. The I4OC (Initiative for Open Citations) is a collaboration between many parties, with the aim of promoting "unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data". Citation data is available through Crossref, and available in R via our packages rcrossref, fulltext and crminer.

The Bibsam Consortium in Sweden signed a new tranformative Read & Publish agreement with academic publisher Springer Nature. It covers rights to publish in over 1,800 hybrid journals at no extra cost for the author as well as reading rights for over 2,100 journals since 1997.

Autoformatting in Microsoft Excel has caused many a headache—but now, a new study shows that one in five genetics papers in top scientific journals contains errors from the program.

Concerns include declining volume, slower publication, and softening citation measures.

ETH rector says academia should focus on 'excellent performances', not quantity of research.

Presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology acknowledged in separate announcements this week that their connections to financier Jeffrey Epstein went deeper than previously revealed, further entangling the elite institutions with a donor who was a convicted sex offender.

The UK government’s announcement of its plans to offer extended post-study work visas for international graduates of UK universities has received an unusual response - unalloyed praise from the higher education sector.

Brian Schmidt says academia is losing brightest researchers because they cannot endure 'intolerable' precarity throughout their thirties

The acting chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) is investigating whether the agency's response to President Trump's claims about Hurricane Dorian constituted a violation of policies and ethics.

The UK is focusing on international partnerships and ground-breaking sector deals in order to remain a global leader in science

The Government of the Netherlands has launched a funding drive to support culture and heritage sectors, as well as in science and innovation.

New documents show that the M.I.T. Media Lab was aware of Epstein's status as a convicted sex offender, and that Epstein directed contributions to the lab far exceeding the amounts M.I.T. has publicly admitted.

Nearly a week before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration publicly backed President Trump over its own scientists, a top NOAA official warned its staff against contradicting the president. This happened hours after Trump asserted, with no evidence, that Alabama "would most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated" by hurricane Dorian, and days before he showed a hurricane map modified with a hand-drawn, half-circle around Alabama.

Around six-in-ten Democrats support increased spending for scientific research, compared with 40% of Republicans, a gap that has grown over time.

Science PhD programmes cater almost exclusively to students bound for academia, but they don't have to.

The Trump administration is limiting scientific input to the 2020 dietary guidelines, raising concerns among nutrition advocates and independent experts about industry influence over healthy eating recommendations for all Americans.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR) announce they are the first of the United Nations agencies to join COAlition S. This commitment will ensure that all WHO and TDS supported health research will be free to read online on the day it is published.

Interim head of MIT Anthropology explains the plan's vision and challenges, plus progress made at an historic MIT workshop.

Co-chairs of the implementation task force of the international research-funder consortium cOAlition S clarify their position with regard to financially supporting the important transition to full open access after 2024.

Assessment of risk of bias is regarded as an essential component of a systematic review on the effects of an intervention. The most commonly used tool for randomised trials is the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool. We updated the tool to respond to developments in understanding how bias arises in randomised trials, and to address user feedback on and limitations of the original tool.