ScienceGeist

The "commons of the mind" must be preserved, says James Boyle of Duke Law School, on the 50th anniversary of "The tragedy of the commons"

Preservation is an imperative for our community, yet the Digital Preservation Network is disbanding. What lessons can we learn from its struggle?

DNA tests can have a placebo effect.

In 2018, there has been a drop in the number of fully OA journals published by Elsevier, from 416 to 328 journals. The majority of Elsevier’s fully OA journals are still non-charging.

M4K Pharma was incorporated to launch an open science drug discovery program that relies on regulatory exclusivity as its primary intellectual property and commercial asset, in lieu of patents. In many cases and in key markets, using regulatory exclusivity can provide equivalent commercial protection to patents, while also being compatible with open science. The model is proving attractive to government, foundation and individual funders, who collectively have different expectations for returns on investment compared with biotech, pharmaceutical companies, or venture capital investors.In the absence of these investor-driven requirements for returns, it should be possible to commercialize therapeutics at affordable prices. M4K is piloting this open science business model in a rare paediatric brain tumour, but there is no reason it should not be more widely applicable.

The economist William Nordhaus will receive his profession's highest honor for research on global warming that's been hugely influential - and entirely misguided.

Run by queer and transgender scientists, a new program aims to help high school students of similar identities see a future for themselves in science.

Philip Ball looks at whether prizes and awards help or hinder scientific progress.

This year taught us more about distant planets and our own world, about the ways we're influencing our environment and the ways we're changing ourselves.

OCLC Research and euroCRIS, the international organization for research information, partnered to develop a survey and synthesize the results to examine how research institutions worldwide are applying research information management (RIM) practices.

If democracy depends on informed citizens, democracy is in trouble. This is a moment of crisis for many institutions, including higher education, especially in disciplines such as English, philosophy, and history, which promise to prepare students as citizens. To prepare students for a world where information is filtered by computers, we will need a stronger alliance between the humanities and math. This alliance has two reciprocal parts: cultural criticism of the mathematical models shaping our world, and mathematical inquiry about culture.

How innovation in search engines needs renewing with open working and open indexes.

In 2019, innovation funding will be increasingly randomised.

 If science is growing exponentially, then the major technological advancements and upheavals of the past 200 years are only the tip of the iceberg.

Want to get the best research from your team? Take these six steps to invest in stronger relationships.

We want the research we fund - like publications, data, software and materials - to be open and accessible, so it can have the greatest possible impact.

The entrepreneur and author on how universities can create a healthy working culture

Researchers who are mobile get more citations and build broader teams of collaborators than those who aren't, concludes a recent study.

A year ago, we launched the ORCID Reducing Burden and Improving Transparency (ORBIT) project. Find out how far we've come since then in this post by ORCID staff Josh Brown and Tom Demeranville, who are leading the project.

Many believe it is difficult to reconcile demands for gender equality and measures such as moderate quotas with academia's conception of quality. This is according to a new master's thesis on assessments and gender in hiring processes for senior-level positions.

A global sprint to develop 10 FAIR things resources for data in different disciplines.

The undersigned researchers believe that the world's scholarly literature is a public resource that only achieves its full value when it is freely available to all. 

The idea of the conference is to bring to the fore the impact contributions of social sciences and humanities (SSH) research to transformative national and European research and innovation agendas, as well as to openly reflect on and structurally discuss the topic. Due to the huge interest in the conference and limited seating, a live-streaming of the main sessions of the conference on both conference days is offered.