Wellcome Trust's Director of Science Jim Smith addresses how Wellcome should identify the most able and dedicated researchers, and how it should support, and recognise, team science.

Scientific integrity needs to apply to how researchers treat people, not just to how they handle data.

Funders should assign research grants via a lottery system to reduce human bias, says Dorothy Bishop.

With the Springer Nature IPO in the offing, it's important to remember that publishing continues to outperform perception.

The US now faces a dilemma over the future of this national achievement and the supporting arrangements making it sustainable. The ‘social contract’ for science and research now looks more tentative than at any time since the Space Race.

In the context of a recent proposal to exclude research from consideration at the Environmental Protection Agency, John Ioannidis points out that "perceived perfection is not a characteristic of science, but of dogma" and envisions how governments can promote a standard of openness in science.

When scientists in California and around the world finally solved the mystery of gravitational waves last year, only one question remained: Who should get credit for the discovery?

In the digital era, each publisher has established its own content platform, to the detriment of the researcher experience. Discovery is fragmented, leading to substantial library investment in order to provide single-index whole-collection search.

There's a great deal of concern about a lack of diversity in senior academic roles. But Rachel Handforth's research suggests that problems start much earlier along the academic career path.

Collecting, annotating and curating data of universities, funding organizations and publishers manually is both wasteful and impossible to do comprehensively. If these data were available in a globally standardized, digital, open format, this effort could be redirected towards analysis and improving research information and administration.

Across time, public understanding about how science works is affected by journalism. A journalist, with very little extra effort, can increase the accuracy of public understanding and minimize public vulnerability to distortions of science.

We call for bringing sanity back into scientific judgment exercises. Despite all number crunching, many judgments - be it about scientific output, scientists, or research institutions - will neither be unambiguous, uncontroversial, or testable by external standards nor can they be otherwise validated or objectified.

Sneha Kulkarni from Editage takes a look at the ever-increasing global scientific output, and asks questions about quantity versus quality.

A new organization is helping researchers explain their work and why it matters.

Women leave jobs because they feel isolated and stalled, not for family reasons.

One way to push back against the pressure to “publish or perish” is to randomly audit a small proportion of researchers and take time to assess their research in detail. Auditors could examine complex measures of quality which no metric could ever capture such as originality, reproducibility, and research translation.

There are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That’s 13,000 too many.

The financial pressure that publishers impose on libraries is a worldwide concern. Gold open-access publishing with an expensive article-processing charge paid by the authors is often presented as an ideal solution to this problem. However, such a system threatens less-funded departments and even article quality.

Contrary to commonsense belief, attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics discourage initiative, innovation and risk-taking. The entrepreneurial element of human nature is stifled by metric fixation.

Text and Data Mining. Or the creation of new knowledge from existing information (but not in the EU).

Inequality is reproduced (and whiteness is institutionalized) by citation patterns as earlier periods of overt exclusion are legitimated by an almost ritualistic citation of certain thinkers.

If you are a scientist, there are many compelling reasons to openly share your source code, from reproducibility to increasing impact.

Perspectives on the benefits of open peer review, and responding to concerns.

In an uncertain world, more governments are asking universities to help develop weapons. That’s a threat to the culture and conscience of researchers.

It is clear that APCs cover both the direct processing costs and the indirect costs of running the entire publishing business. Therefore, the term APC is itself misleading.

Policy makers often cite research to justify their rules, but many of those studies wouldn’t replicate.

Congress will have to pay for some steps to ensure greater reproducibility in the sciences. In the end, those steps will save enormous amounts now spent building blind allies and mirages. What’s needed are standardized descriptions of scientific materials and procedures, standardized statistics programs, and standardized archival formats. 

Efforts to hire diverse faculty are often hamstrung by a basic conservatism in academic departments, which often hides under the mask of quality control.

Obviously peer review should not be abandoned entirely, but it is time to recognise the need for a separate category of highly innovative research with appropriate funding.

Let’s not tell ourselves that "science is broken". Let’s agree that we all share in the responsibility to improve it, by keeping open the mental bandwidth to ask and explore hard questions.