ScienceGeist

Rigid safe distancing rules are an oversimplification based on outdated science and experiences of past viruses, publication argues.

The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) set out to examine whether the gender of applicants and peer reviewers and other factors influence peer review of grant proposals submitted to a national funding agency.

Women leaders around the world have had considerably more success in slowing the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, and two economists based in the United Kingdom can now explain why.

This study sheds light on the various determinants of Articel Processing Charges in Open Access. The results strongly support the hypothesis that academia runs the risk not to take advantage of the cost-reducing opportunities inherent to digitization via a hybrid oa-strategy.

This paper presents a state-of-the-art analysis of the presence of 12 kinds of altmetric events for nearly 12.3 million Web of Science publications published between 2012 and 2018.

Their use and platforms require greater scrutiny Preprints-manuscripts that have not undergone peer review-were first embraced in physics, catalysed by the creation in the early 1990s of arXiv.org, an open online repository for scholarly papers.1 It was not until 2013 that similar initiatives were embraced by the biological and then medical sciences,2 and novel publishing platforms continue to emerge. Some commentators believe the potential for harm is outweighed by the benefits,134 but others have raised specific concerns regarding medical preprints and mitigating the risk of harm to the public.2 These discussions need to be revisited in the context of the covid-19 pandemic, which has been accompanied by an explosion of preprint publications. An analysis focusing on studies estimating the R of SARS-CoV-2 drew attention to the powerful role of preprints in shaping global discourse about covid-19 transmissibility. While showing the benefits that preprints may confer when adopting a consensus based approach-where data is extracted from multiple studies to observe trends and obtain an average with or without the exclusion of outliers-the authors also identify risks-matters of credibility and misinformation, both intentional and unintentional5-which may be increased where there are vested interests involved. Notably, two linked preprint publications examining the association between smoking and covid-19,67 which were widely disseminated before …

Valuing diversity leads to scientific excellence, the progress of science and, most importantly, it is simply the right thing to do. We must value diversity not only in words, but also in actions.

The purpose of this paper is to study the patron's usage behavior in an academic library. This study investigates on pattern of patron's books borrowing in Khunying Long Athakravisunthorn Learning Resources Center, Prince of Songkla University that influence patron's academic achievement during on academic year 2015-2018. The study collected and analyzed data from the libraries, registrar, and human resources. The students' performance data was obtained from PSU Student Information System and the rest from ALIST library information system. WEKA was used as the data mining tool employing data mining techniques of association rules and clustering. All data sets were mined and analyzed to identify characteristics of the patron's book borrowing, to discover the association rules of patron's interest, and to analyze the relationships between academic library use and undergraduate students' achievement. The results reveal patterns of patron's book loan behavior, patterns of book usage, patterns of interest rules with respect to patron's interest in book borrowing, and patterns of relationships between patron's borrowing and their grade. The ability to clearly identify and describe library patron's behavior pattern can help library in managing resources and services more effectively. This study provides a sample model as guideline or campus partnerships and for future collaborations that will take advantage of the academic library information and data mining to improve library management and library services.

In the last decade Open Science principles, such as Open Access, study preregistration, use of preprints, making available data and code, and open peer review, have been successfully advocated for and are being slowly adopted in many different research communities. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic many publishers and researchers have sped up their adoption of some of these Open Science practices, sometimes embracing them fully and sometimes partially or in a sub-optimal manner. In this article, we express concerns about the violation of some of the Open Science principles and its potential impact on the quality of research output. We provide evidence of the misuses of these principles at different stages of the scientific process. We call for a wider adoption of Open Science practices in the hope that this work will encourage a broader endorsement of Open Science principles and serve as a reminder that science should always be a rigorous process, reliable and transparent, especially in the context of a pandemic where research findings are being translated into practice even more rapidly. We provide all data and scripts at . ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

DORA has evolved into an active initiative that gives practical advice to institutions on new ways to assess and evaluate research. This article outlines a framework for driving institutional change.

Leaders of the scientific community have declared that American science is in a crisis due to inadequate federal funding. They misconstrue the problem; its roots lie instead in the institutional interactions between federal funding agencies and higher education. 

Science Europe recommends assessing societal impact and contributions to knowledge and policy when awarding grants and promotions.

The paper argues for the development of open science in Africa as a means of energising national science systems and their roles in supporting public and private sectors and the general public.

With a condition that's "too strange for words," patient can do mental math but cannot recognize numerals.

The aim of this study is to investigate how patterns of collaboration and scholarly independence are related to early stage researchers' development in two multidisciplinary learning environments at a Swedish university. .

Cross-sectoral mobility funding requires recipients to change their environment and often some aspects of their research. There is a need to understand the impact on the researchers' experiences as knowledge producers within such programs, as part of the broader potential and significance of cross-sectoral mobility funding.

This cross-sectional study examines the preprint publication policies of 100 clinical journals with the highest impact factor.

In late February and early March 2020, Switzerland experienced rapid growth of severe COVID-19 infections. This pre-print follows and analyses non-pharmaceutical interventions during this period.

The world's third largest producer of scientific research, Germany, is the origin of the research university and the independent, extra-university research institute. Its dual-pillar research policy differentiates these organizational forms functionally: universities specialize in advanced research-based teaching; institutes specialize intensely on research. This article discusses the future utility of the dual-pillar policy.

In his new book, psychologist Stuart Ritchie paints a portrait of the modern system of research, and all the ways it gets undermined.

Biennials, regional hubs and virtual attendance can slash emissions, new calculations show.

UNESCO is launching international consultations aimed at developing a Recommendation on Open Science for adoption by member states in 2021. Its Recommendation will include a common definition, a shared set of values, and proposals for action. At the invitation of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, this paper aims to contribute to the consultation process by answering questions such as: • Why and how should science be "open"? For and with whom? • Is it simply a matter of making scientific articles and data fully available to researchers around the world at the time of publication, so they do not miss important results that could contribute to or accelerate their work? • Could this openness also enable citizens around the world to contribute to science with their capacities and expertise, such as through citizen science or participatory action research projects? • Does science that is truly open include a plurality of ways of knowing, including those of Indigenous cultures, Global South cultures, and other excluded, marginalized groups in the Global North? The paper has four sections: "Open Science and the pandemic" introduces and explores different forms of openness during a crisis where science suddenly seems essential to the well-being of all. The next three sections explain the main dimensions of three forms of scientific openness: openness to publications and data, openness to society, and openness to excluded knowledges2 and epistemologies3. We conclude with policy considerations. A French version of this paper is available here: https://zenodo.org/record/3947013#.Xw-Ksx17nOQ

Lockdowns in the United States caused by the COVID-19 pandemic appear related to a decrease in the number of women publishing research papers, especially as first authors.

This study presents indicators of open access at the institutional level for universities worldwide. By combining data from Web of Science, Unpaywall and the Leiden Ranking disambiguation of institutions, it tracks OA coverage of universities' output for 963 institutions.

Scientific authorship comes with benefits, but also responsibilities. If authors are unwilling to explain their work, editors must step up to defend their journal.

Novelty indicators are increasingly important for science policy. This paper challenges the indicators of novelty as an atypical combination of knowle…

Research organisations need to be able to identify which proposals are the best for funding, and which researchers should be appointed or promoted. Science Europe has collated a set of policy recommendations to ensure that assessments of research quality are effective, efficient, and fair.

The Lancet Digital Health has published a paper from BKC Executive Director Urs Gasser and colleagues from ETH Zurich's Health Ethics & Policy Lab. Combining health policy, ethics, & tech governance knowledge with practical experience, the paper contributes to best-practice building during the global pandemic. 

Open Access in Theory and Practice investigates the theory-practice relationship in the domain of open access publication and dissemination of research outputs. 

The current pandemic has exposed a host of issues with the current scholarly communication system, also with regard to the discoverability of scientific knowledge. Many research groups have pivoted to Covid-19 research without prior experience or adequate preparation. They were immediately confronted with two discovery challenges: (1) having to identify relevant knowledge from unfamiliar (sub-)disciplines with their own terminology and publication culture, and (2) having to keep up with the rapid growth of data and publications and being able to filter out the relevant findings.