The Netherlands will radically shake up how academics are assessed and promoted, including a shift away from relying on citations and journal impact factors.

The 14th Berlin Open Access Conference, hosted by the Max Planck Society and organized by the Max Planck Digital Library on behalf of the Open Access 2020 Initiative (oa2020.org), has just come to an end after two intense days with 170 participants from 37 countries around the world discussing where the research organizations and their library consortia stand in their negotiations with scholarly publishers in transitioning scholarly publishing to open access. The participants represented research performing and research funding organizations, libraries and government, associations of researchers and other umbrella organizations, many of them holding high-level positions at their organizations. In his welcoming address, Max Planck Society President Martin Stratmann captured the spirit of the meeting when he stated: "Open Access is the responsibility of all of us."

Commission concedes it will need more time to resolve long-term budget negotiations – but it remains committed to its plan boosting R&D subsidies

The change is intended to enable researchers to access structural funds for projects reviewers say are excellent, but which don’t make the cut for Horizon Europe grants.

Officials pledge support for European-led 'Plan S' to tear down journal paywalls - but it's unclear whether China will adopt its policies.

In 2019, innovation funding will be increasingly randomised.

This year taught us more about distant planets and our own world, about the ways we're influencing our environment and the ways we're changing ourselves.

By helping scientists gamify the crowdsourcing of data analysis, SwipesForScience will engage the community to speed up research.

Many of Sci-Hub's domains have been blocked in Russia following a complaint from academic publisher Springer Nature that three studies covering heart and brain health were offered without obtaining an appropriate license.

After a troubled year for universities, the next generation of leaders is emerging. They're tech savvy, low ego and skilled in soft power

How are Hungarian, Polish and Swedish gender scholars responding to criticism and campaigns to discredit their work? Not only do they emphasize the intrinsic value of gender studies - they also use humour to counter the anti-gender campaigns.

A year ago, we launched the ORCID Reducing Burden and Improving Transparency (ORBIT) project. Find out how far we've come since then in this post by ORCID staff Josh Brown and Tom Demeranville, who are leading the project.

Graduate students from Africa could benefit from such efforts, but it is not clear who will pay for them.

A new classification system adds real-world complexity to social dilemmas like the paradigmatic 'tragedy of the commons.'

A leading scientist wants Chinese researchers to halt a project to create genetically modified children.

He Jiankui says he created twin girls whose genes were edited to make them resistant to HIV. Was that ethical? Or even legal?

cOALition S asks for feedback on the Plan S implementation plan.

Slides from a talk given to the general assembly of Science Europe in Brussels on 22 Nov 2018. Gives an overview of the problems of over-metricised research evaluation and how this might be tackled, in part through initiatives driven by DORA, and how they are linked with drives such as Plan S to promote open science. Shared under a CC-BY-SA opinion (though Figshare doesn't seem to allow me to select that option from their drop-down menu).

The startling announcement by a Chinese scientist represents a controversial leap in the use of genome-editing.

A new collection page brings together articles that eLife has published in the burgeoning field of meta-research.

Climate already affecting communities, and effects will get worse without action. The new report is designed to be “policy relevant,” but does not make specific policy recommendations, federal officials associated with the U.S. Global Change Research Program noted.

Do you work in a scientific research institution? Are you frustrated with aspects of current research culture, such as the pressure to "publish or perish", the reproducibility crisis, climbing the academic ladder and persistent gender biases? Do you want to shape the culture that you work in? Join us on the 7th of February, 2019 at the University of Lausanne for an afternoon of "We Scientists 2035 Workshops". Let's make small changes today for a better research culture tomorrow!

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is officially launched. The inauguration marks the conclusion of a long process, demonstrates the importance of EOSC for the advancement of research in Europe and introduces the new EOSC Portal.

Automated tools could speed up and improve the review process, but humans are still in the driving seat. Most researchers have good reason to grumble about peer review: it is time-consuming and error-prone, and the workload is unevenly spread, with just 20% of scientists taking on most reviews. Now peer review by artificial intelligence (AI) is promising to improve the process, boost the quality of published papers — and save reviewers time.

Ideas in support of an upward trend in universities and academics setting up their own presses in an environment increasingly dominated by large commercial publishing houses.

Much science communication research focuses on how science is represented and how science communication products are consumed. This article instead explores the production of a set of science communication projects, arguing that actor-network theory (ANT) can be one possible tool for such research.