To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect
Judea Pearl, a pioneering figure in artificial intelligence, argues that AI has been stuck in a decades-long rut. His prescription for progress? Teach machines.
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Q&A about the Cancellation of the Agreement with Elsevier Commencing 1 July
Why was the agreement with Elsevier not renewed?
The Monarch’s Stupendous Migration, Dissected
A cartoon showing how the feisty orange-black butterfly uses a toolbox of biological tricks to find its way down to Mexico for winter and flap north again in spring.
Notes From an Academic Paper Mill
As someone with a deep appreciation of education and expertise, it’s troubling to know that college is just one more locus of skulduggery, veiled and overt.
How Persistent Identifiers Can Save Scientists Time
Persistent identifiers (PIDs) provide unique keys for people, places, and things, which supports the research process by facilitating search, discovery, recognition, and collaboration. This article reviews the main PIDs used in research (DOIs, ORCIDs, ...), as well as demonstrating how they are being used, and how, in combination, they can increase trust in research and the research infrastructure.
OpenUP Hub - OpenUP Blog Competition for Early Career Researchers and Students
Early career researcher or student? Tell us your ideas for the future of review, dissemination or assessment in research and win a scholarship to attend the OpenUP Final Conference in Brussels, September 5th and 6th 2018, and present your ideas!
Trends for Open Access to Publications
European Commission data and case studies covering access to scientific publications. Bibliometric data as well as well as data on the policies of journals and funders are available.
Wide Racial Gaps Persist in College Degree Attainment
Compared to White adults in the United States, Black adults are two-thirds as likely to hold a college degree and Latino adults are only half as likely – with both groups attaining degrees at a lower rate in 2016 than White adults did back in 1990, according to a new report by The Education Trust.
Open Access Tools and Resources
A list with some open tools and resources, which hopefully, someone will find useful.
University of Victoria Digital Humanities Lab Expert on the Privatization of Knowledge
University of Victoria Digital Humanities Lab Expert on the Privatization of Knowledge
"Their profit margins are bigger than oil and gas. Most people don’t know this,” explains Alyssa Arbuckle, Associate Director of a digital humanities lab at the University of Victoria.
Trump's NASA Chief Changed His Mind on Climate Change. He Is a Scientific Hero.
When asked why he changed his mind, Bridenstine told The Washington Post, "I heard a lot of experts, and I read a lot. I came to the conclusion myself that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, that we've put a lot of it into the atmosphere, and therefore we have contributed to the global warming that we've seen."
Hybrid OA Journal Monitor
An open source dashboard presenting the uptake of hybrid open access for 3,347 different journals from 42 publishers between 2013 and 2018.
Stakeholders Open Consultation
Feedback on Rules of Participation from all the relevant stakeholders is essential for the European Open Science Cloud.
An Astronaut Will Be Spain’s New Science Minister
Pedro Duque, who has been on two space missions, is the best-known face in a Cabinet lineup with more women than men.
The Institutionalized Racism of Scholarly Publishing
Publishing exclusively in English can cause the deterioration of a culture’s local knowledge, brain drain, and hinder the emergence of important research. There are scholarly journals from the Global South who won’t flip to open access because they know they will be immediately labelled as predatory. Fixing these problems will require reconsidering how we talk about predatory publishers, no longer recommending blacklists, and using databases beyond Scopus and Web of Science.
QS World University Rankings 2019
MIT tops the list for a record seventh consecutive year. ETH Zurich ranks seventh - its best ranking ever. EPFL also in top 25.
Signing My Peer Review - Unintended Consequences and Gender
Roughly two years ago, I began to sign every peer review I did for journals. It resulted directly from a review on an article that I received that had glaring issues and made me wonder "Would they have been this sloppy if they had to attribute their name to this work?"
Introducing Metadata for Peer Review
The new exposure of peer review information through its public API provides opportunities for discoverability, analysis, and integration of tools.
Growth Rate Ten Times Higher Than Journal Articles
Preprints are one of the fastest growing types of content in Crossref. The growth may well be approximately 30% for the past 2 years (compared to article growth of 2-3% for the same period).
Sweden Commits to Open Science with New Open Access Publishing Deal
Swedish researchers can now publish their articles in Frontiers’ Open Access journals through a simplified process that covers publishing fees, thanks to a national agreement announced today between Frontiers and the National Library of Sweden.
No Race or Gender Bias in a Randomized Experiment of NIH R01 Grant Reviews
No Race or Gender Bias in a Randomized Experiment of NIH R01 Grant Reviews
A randomized experiment of NIH R01 grant reviews finds no evidence that White male PIs receive evaluations that are any better than those of PIs from the other social categories.
China to Crack down on Fraud in Scandal-Hit Scientific Research
China to Crack down on Fraud in Scandal-Hit Scientific Research
New national guidelines spell out punishment for plagiarism, fabrication of data and research conclusions, ghostwriting and peer review manipulation.
Loss of Trust? Loss of Trustworthiness? Truth and Expertise Today
Loss of Trust? Loss of Trustworthiness? Truth and Expertise Today
A discussion of how trust in expertise is placed or refused, highlighting the affective dimension of epistemic trust, and discussing the danger of a 'context collapse' in digital communication.
Preliminary Findings from the Review, Promotion, and Tenure Study
Only about 5% of the institutions made explicit mention of open access in their guidelines, and, in several of those few cases, the mention was done to call attention to the potentially problematic nature of these journals.
Questioning Truth, Reality and the Role of Science
In an era when untestable ideas such as the multiverse hold sway, Michela Massimi defends science from those who think it hopelessly unmoored from physical reality.
All Publishers Are Predatory - Some Are Bigger Than Others
The assumption that the publication of an article in a high-impact factor, indexed journal somehow adds value to international science is a collective illusion - one that is unfortunately shared by funding agencies, institutions and researchers. This illusion - which serves as an excuse to delegate the evaluation of science to for-profit companies and anonymous reviewers for the sake of false objectivity - costs taxpayers dearly.
Call Prix Schläfli 2019
The “Alexander Friedrich Schläfli Prize” of the Swiss Academy of Sciences (SCNAT) is one of the oldest prizes in Switzerland. Since the first awarding in 1866, 108 young talents in different natural science disciplines have been distinguished.
Effects of Copyrights on Science
A unique WWII-era programme in the US, allowed US publishers to reprint exact copies of German-owned science books, to explore how copyrights affect follow-on science. This artificial removal of copyright barriers led to a 25% decline in prices and a 67% increase in citations.
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