Too many university posts are given to men without proper competition.

"I'm not a scientist." How many times have you heard that lately from politicians who are trying to duck questions about important scientific topics like climate change and vaccines?

What does 'excellence' really mean?

We need to ensure the reward and support structures in academia promote the best practices rather than corner cutting.

STEM culture must rein in the pressure to separate professional and personal identities.

Turn the fraught flirtation between the social and biophysical sciences into fruitful partnerships with five principles.

Bernard Rentier explains how the University of Liege persuaded nearly all its researchers to put their papers in its institutional repository.

Please, European universities, stop playing in the second league when it comes to fundraising. Go out and ask your alumni for resources to help you build the next Stanford.

Paul Jump examines the many reasons for irreproducibility in science and efforts to tackle it.

In the US, taxpayers are said to be spending $139bn a year on research, and in the UK, £4.7bn. Too much of that money is disappearing into big pockets.

UK Minister for Universities and Science Jo Johnson wants to see a "simpler" research funding system as well as faster routes for private provider "challenger institutions" to enter higher education.

Peer review is often claimed to be the guarantor of the trustworthiness of scientific papers, but it is a troubled process. Preprints offer a way out.

University league tables do not pay enough attention to institutions’ innovative spirit, argues the European Commission’s Gerard de Graaf.

Tie funding to verified good institutional practice, and robust science will shoot up the agenda.

Failure to replicate is not a bug; it is a feature. It is what leads us along the path of scientific discovery.

My team is drawn from all over Europe and beyond – the researchers bring in talent, income and dedication.

Moedas' speech at the opening of the academic year and the 375th Anniversary of Helsinki University.

You can’t measure human skills the way you do engineering systems, Robert Dingwall and Mary Byrne McDonnell observe.

Interdisciplinarity is often framed as an unquestioned good within and beyond the academy, one to be encouraged by funders and research institutions alike. And yet there is little research on how interdisciplinary projects actually work—and do not work—in practice.

Paper showing that increasing research investments, resulting in an increasing knowledge base, have not yielded comparative gains in certain health outcomes over the last five decades. [Closed Access]

Institutions and funders should be alert to unfeasibly prolific authors when measuring and creating incentives for researcher productivity.

The involvement of online discussion sites in the identification of errors, anomalies and worse in the published literature continues to demonstrate the usefulness of post-publication review. It also highlights the ambiguous power of anonymity.

Today’s patent regime operates in the name of progress. Instead, it sets innovation back. Time to fix it.

Peer review may not spot fraud – so universities need to be vigilant in tackling any wrongdoing among their staff.

"Making non-attachment a central part of science education would beat the hell out of ethics classes and regulations about the use of Photoshop in preparing figures."

Positive results are exciting, but the interest in positive results is skewing what we know about science.

Contrary to what some think, the battle against sexism in STEM has not been won, let alone reversed in favor of women.

Microbiologists show it's possible to achieve gender equity in scholarly presentations

Many academics have internalised the pressure to police disciplinary boundaries, and keep their heads down and in their faculties.

Hiring a few research stars uses up resources that might otherwise support a number of promising younger researchers.