ScienceGeist

The development of preprint servers as self-organising peer review platforms could be the future of scholarly publication.

As an early career researcher (ECR), making the transition from the “traditional” way of doing science into methods that are more open, reproducible, and replicable can be a daunting prospect. We know something needs to change about our workflow, but where do we start?

Science is never the work of one person; it is the collaborative effort of students, technicians, professors, librarians and the support networks around them. This week, millions of girls and women around the world who have been told science is not for them found a new role model in Bouman - a new data point that told them yes you can.

The world's youth have begun to persistently demonstrate for the protection of the climate and other foundations of human well-being. As scientists and scholars who have recently initiated similar letters of support in our countries, we call for our colleagues across all disciplines and from the entire world to support these young climate protesters. Their concerns are justified and supported by the best available science.

Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal.

Abigail Cabunoc Mayes from Mozilla Open Leaders offers some answers.

Superbugs are spreading. We need doctors trained to treat them.

Many previous attempts at achieving gender parity - like special awards for women - are decried as tokenism, and seem unlikely to induce sustained and systemic change. Given this mindset, our research team decided to take a slightly different approach - with promising results.

Advice from the first Science Day at the Arizona state legislature: learn the structure, culture, and language of politics.

James Wilsdon feels that a new university ranking based on contributions to society is too little, too late.

If sexual harassment, misconduct, and retaliation are the firing squads that assassinate individual careers, then implicit bias is the lead in the water that poisons the entire town.

We asked experts for practical suggestions on why Google's AI ethics council bombed and what the company should do next.

This essay traces the history of refereeing at specialist scientific journals and at funding bodies and shows that it was only in the late twentieth century that peer review came to be seen as a process central to scientific practice

The views of Alessandro Strumia, as expressed in your story "My big bang theory is: women don't like physics" (News Review, last week), are based on a biased interpretation of the data and are at...

PhD grads complain that there are too few academic jobs. Should universities recruit fewer or do they need to support their postgrads into alternative careers?

Statisticians are calling on their profession to abandon one of its most treasured markers of significance. But what could replace it?

Hayley Teasdale argues that PhD studies are an ideal time for developing your research communication and impact skills and growing your entrepreneurial and organizational capabilities.

This essay proposes how distributed Web technologies are poised to enable an entirely new way of communication and cooperation among scientist and citizens.

We need paid leave so young researchers can start families without abandoning STEM careers.

Last Friday, hundreds of thousands of students in the United States and around the world were out in the streets rather than in their classrooms, demanding that our political leaders address the climate crisis with the urgency and focused action that the science so clearly demands.

Robert P. Crease harks back to the shapers of our scientific infrastructure and what they can tell us about how to handle the threat we now face.

How can academic libraries "vote with their dollars"?

There is a wealth of advice and 'how to' guides available to academics on the subject of how research can have an impact on policy and practice. In this post Kathryn Oliver and Paul Cairney assess the value of this literature, arguing that unless researchers seek to situate research impact within processes of policymaking and academic knowledge production, this advice can ultimately reinforce current inequalities in research impact.

Young people will be greatly impacted by the effects of climate change, so it is critical that their voices are heard.

Young people are going on a climate strike and researchers are supporting their cause. Reto Knutti discusses the issues.

Policymakers need to be encouraged to take a scientic approach when drawing up legislation to boost food security, according to a panel of experts.

Contrary to first impressions, Congress has done a decent job standing up for scientific research.

The progress of science depends on how we preserve and share what we know.