Don't hide the decline
US scientists should not be placated by the ‘flat budget’ myth. Funds are decreasing, and the situation will get worse.
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Incoming NSF director faces challenges in Congress
Former Purdue University president France Córdova inherits an agency at a crossroads.
Industry-funded academic inventions boost innovation
Brian D. Wright and colleagues present data challenging the assumption that corporate-funded academic research is less accessible and useful to others.
Stem-cell method faces fresh questions
Papers describing acid-bath technique under more scrutiny after institute’s investigation finds errors in methodology
Brain-mapping projects to join forces
US and European research programmes will begin coordinating research
Budget cuts bite at NIH and NSF
The NIH awarded 750 fewer new research grants in 2013 compared with 2012, an 8.3% drop. The 2013 sequestration also hit the US NSF, which awarded 690 fewer grants.
The art of science advice to government
Peter Gluckman, New Zealand's chief science adviser, offers his ten principles for building trust, influence, engagement and independence.
Back to basics on research funding
Core science gets budget boost in a bid to change research culture and increase innovation.
Track and trace
Track and trace
More than half a million researchers have now signed up for an online science passport: a unique 16-digit identity number, with an accompanying online profile, from the Open Researcher and Contributor ID ( ORCID) project. There, researchers can maintain an up-to-date record of their professional pursuits.
"Ich habe meine Vorbehalte gegen diese ewige Forderung nach Transparenz"
"Ich habe meine Vorbehalte gegen diese ewige Forderung nach Transparenz"
Antonio Loprieno, Rektor der Uni Basel, im Interview
Medicine gets up close and personal
Long-term study will monitor healthy people in detail — and encourage them to respond to the results
NIH plans to enhance reproducibility
Francis S. Collins and Lawrence A. Tabak discuss initiatives that the US National Institutes of Health is exploring to restore the self-correcting nature of preclinical research.
Data sharing will pay dividends
As public pressure builds for drug companies to make more results available from clinical trials, the industry should not forget that it relies on collective goodwill to test new therapies.
The greater good
The greater good
Governments, funding agencies and universities must all do their bit to ensure that research is appropriately assessed and rewarded.
Particle-physics papers set free
Tensions as open-access initiative goes live — without the field’s leading journal.
China tops Europe in R&D intensity
China has for the first time overtaken Europe on the share of its economy devoted to R&D.
Call the cops
The long arm of the law has reached into an investigation of alleged scientific misconduct in Italy.
NIH to experiment with high-risk grants
NIH considers supporting more individual researchers rather than projects.
The DIY dilemma
The DIY dilemma
The do-it-yourself-biology movement has an image problem. More commonly called DIYbio, it tends to conjure up pictures of T-shirt-clad misfits marshalling limited scientific skill in their basements as they try to make cool-but-fringe things such as glow-in-the-dark plants.
Enemy of the good
Who are the outstanding mentors of young researchers? Since 2005, Nature has awarded an annual prize for scientific mentoring, rotating through a variety of countries.
3 ways to blow the whistle
Reporting suspicions of scientific fraud is rarely easy, but some paths are more effective than others.
LHC plans for open data future
When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is humming along, the data come in a deluge.
The missing piece to changing the university culture
A new type of initiative is empowering graduate students and postdocs to reshape their academic training, providing another avenue to express their passion for research.
The risks of the replication drive
The push to replicate findings could shelve promising research and unfairly damage the reputations of careful, meticulous scientists, says Mina Bissell.
PLOS profits prompt revamp
Elizabeth Marincola, PLOS's chief executive, says that the future of science publishing is not in branded, highly selective titles. Instead, she sees a world in which article metrics and community judgements help the cream of research to rise to the top.
SpotOn Conference London 2013
SpotOn Conference London 2013
A collection of talks given last week at the London SpotOn conference 2013 on science communication and peer review.
Large NIH projects cut
Big science is under big pressure at the NIH. Gone are the glory days of the early 2000s, when a doubling of the agency's budget over five years allowed it to establish dozens of programmes with their own large, dedicated budgets.
Preprints come to life
What are biologists so afraid of? Physicists, mathematicians and social scientists routinely post their research to preprint servers such as arXiv.org before publication, yet few life scientists follow suit. A website that goes live this week is hoping to change that.
SpotOn London 2013
Join us at this year's SpotOn London conference on Friday 8th and Saturday 9th November. Now celebrating its sixth year, SpotOn London is an annual two-day conference hosted by Nature Publishing Group for anyone interested in how science is communicated and carried out online.
Points of view
Points of view
Relate your data to the world around them using the age-old custom of telling a story.
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