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.

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 federal budget, expected before the end of March, may substantially raise funding for research.

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.

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.

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.

All seven of the UK’s research councils have signed up to a declaration that calls for the academic community to stop using journal impact factors as a proxy for the quality of scholarship.

The pay imbalance is linked to a disproportionate number of men in the top jobs, especially to the performance bonuses offered to senior members of the investments team, all of whom were men.

A paper documenting strong and robust negative correlations between the length of the title of an economics article and different measures of scientific quality.

In order to better serve authors, an agreement between the two organizations outlines broader use of bioRxiv for preprints of papers submitted to PLOS journals.

Study finds that a given discipline's perceived gender bias plays the biggest role in whether women choose to major in it.

For decades, the number of women studying economics seemed to be increasing, easing the persistent scarcity of professional female economists in the United States. But that progress has stalled.

Why Google is celebrating the pioneer of medical and feminist history.

Three women scientists at the storied Salk Institute reveal decades of gender discrimination.

The FinELib consortium and Elsevier today signed an agreement making Elsevier’s globally published research articles available to Finnish academic institutions, while providing Finnish researches with incentives to publish open access if they so choose.

The Center for Open Science (COS) has launched two new preprint services to provide free, open access, open source archives for the Arab and French research communities.

What makes a conflict of interest (COI) in science? Definitions differ, but broadly agree on one thing: an influence that can cloud a researcher’s objectivity. Nature and the other Nature Research journals are taking into account some of these non-financial sources of possible tension and conflict.

Scientists around the globe nowadays regularly take to the internet to scrutinize research after it’s been published — including to run their own analyses of the data and spot mistakes or fraud.

The South Korean government is expanding an investigation into researchers who named their children as co-authors on papers.

Ali Kaya says he used science to stay sane during his incarceration.

PubMed Commons has been a valuable experiment in supporting discussion of published scientific literature. The service was first introduced as a pilot project in the fall of 2013.

Some scientific journals are defusing the fear of getting “scooped” by making it easier for scientists to publish results that have appeared elsewhere.

Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent and harder-working

Some answers to the main challenges in moving toward Open Science.

Scientists often herald the role of chance in research. A project in Britain aims to test the popular idea with evidence.

Opioids. Fracking. Zika. GMOs. Scientists should be speaking up about all sorts of science-based issues that affect our lives. Especially now, when Trump administration officials tell us that climate change is debatable.

I was routinely humiliated by my head of department. Universities must tackle bullying with proper policy.

New Scientist, the world’s leading science and technology weekly magazine, is pleased to announce the appointment of Emily Wilson as Editor.

New tools for building interactive figures and software make scientific data more accessible, and reproducible.

Scientific research can be a cutthroat business, with undue pressure to publish quickly, first, and frequently. PLOS Biology is now formalizing a policy whereby manuscripts that confirm or extend a recently published study are eligible for consideration.