ScienceGeist

Academics and editors need to stop pretending that software always catches recycled text and start reading more carefully, says Debora Weber-Wulff.

Academic-conference season is upon us, says Jennifer Tsang. Should I advance my career? Or pay my rent?

US law requires researchers to post study findings on a public registry within a year of completion - or face heavy fines.

Looking beyond a much used and abused measure would make science harder, but better.

Hundreds of thousands of people protested in London to push for a say on the terms of the United Kingdom's departure from the European Union.

Women starting up research groups face more obstacles than their male peers, a UK survey finds.

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.

Eric Lander, Françoise Baylis, Feng Zhang, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Paul Berg and specialists from seven countries call for an international governance framework on genome editing.

The government will assess whether a UK granting scheme could help make up for lost EU research funding.

Nature welcomes a registry that supports experiments to improve refereeing.

ReimagineReview records trials that are probing the pros and cons of different approaches to review.

University of California and Dutch publisher fail to strike deal that would allow researchers to publish under open-access terms.

The proportion of open-access publications with authors from the pharmaceutical industry doubled between 2009 and 2016.

As departure day approaches, chief of top UK lab says he fears science will drop off the government's agenda.

Six male researchers describe their efforts to support their female colleagues.

The hunt for male and female distinctions inside the skull is a lesson in bad research practice.

Publishers say that the bold open-access initiative rules out proven ways of opening up the literature.

To be successful as researchers, we must be able to think through the impacts of our work on society and speak up when necessary.

eLife's departing editor talks about the seismic changes he sees coming - and why some journals will lose out.

Australian chief scientist Alan Finkel calls for formal action to bake in better research practices.

Rare effort to track wages reveals inconsistencies and a gender pay gap.

Many academics have strong incentives to influence policymaking, but may not know where to start. Recent research has examined the ‘how to’ advice in the academic peer-reviewed and grey literatures.

A planned $35-million upgrade could enable LIGO to spot one black-hole merger per day by the mid-2020s.

A new study suggests that making reviewers' reports freely readable doesn't compromise the peer-review process.

Researchers say the policy could intensify existing issues with research quality and misconduct.

On the five-year anniversary of an uprising that propelled Ukraine away from Russia and towards Europe, scientists say things are improving too slowly.

Following these guiding principles for sharing data can help researchers get ahead.

Research needs an authoritative forum to hash out collective problems, argue C. K. Gunsalus, Marcia K. McNutt and colleagues.

Unlike most faulty research practices, fraud actively evades detection. It is also overlooked because the scientific community has been unwilling to have frank and open discussions about it.

A US project is exploring the use of software to assign confidence levels to published research.