ScienceGeist

Scientists influenced by funding priorities promoted by regional, national and transnational funding bodies, as well as by the academic mania for ‘interdisciplinariness’, feel compelled to develop a concrete interdisciplinary research topic and organize their research collaboratively.

On the day that the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, higher education and research organisations from across the UK and Europe have reaffirmed their commitment to working together, and are calling on their respective governments to make this a priority.

Connections prove resilient as researchers circumvent geopolitical obstacles.

Abstract: There are many reasons why open source projects have difficulty attracting contributors. Current academic incentive structures are some of the strongest. Wanting to maintain a competitive advantage, too great a focus on novelty when publishing papers, and too little credit given to writing documentation and tutorials, all encourage researchers to reinvent the wheel in a closed team. Although I will discuss these barriers, my talk will focus on some challenges that are much easier to overcome. Not knowing where to start. "Imposter syndrome" and the various intersecting biases that accompany (and often underpin) it. Being unsure as to whether a project even wants any contributions. These can all be addressed with 10 simple rules. From laying out your welcome mat, through setting explicit expectations, to the graceful death of your project, these steps will will help you build and run an open and inclusive community-driven project online. (Breaking down capitalism may have to wait for another day.) Bio: Kirstie Whitaker is a research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (London, UK) and senior research associate in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. Her work covers a broad range of interests and methods, but the driving principle is to improve the lives of neurodivergent people and people with mental health conditions. Dr Whitaker uses magnetic resonance imaging to study child and adolescent brain development and participatory citizen science to educate non-autistic people about how they can better support autistic friends and colleagues. She is the lead developer of "The Turing Way", an openly developed educational resource to enable more reproducible data science. Kirstie is a passionate advocate for making science "open for all" by promoting equity and inclusion for people from diverse backgrounds, and by changing the academic incentive structure to reward collaborative working. She is the chair of the Turing Institute's Ethics Advisory Group, a Fulbright scholarship alumna and was a 2016/17 Mozilla Fellow for Science. Kirstie was named, with her collaborator Petra Vertes, as a 2016 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine. You can find more information at her lab website: whitakerlab.github.io.

The authors provide recommendations for a highly open and participatory interactive process of collaboration using digital tools and environments, discuss potential issues that come with working with large and diverse authoring communities, and provide possible solutions should these arise.

The project included more than 200 researchers around the world, about 40 of them women, including Dr. Bouman.

This essay proposes how distributed Web technologies are poised to enable an entirely new way of communication and cooperation among scientist and citizens.

ETH Zurich has submitted a request to the ETH Board to terminate the employment relationship with a professor in the former Institute for Astronomy. To avoid as far as possible similar cases from escalating in future, ETH Zurich is adapting its structures and processes.

The UK has benefitted from funder incentives that make Open Access appealing for authors, while US funders have taken a less interventionist approach to Open Access. This in turn has led to increased international collaboration for UK researchers.

A new study shows that little teams are more likely to take their research in radically new directions.

Teams can work well, but co-leaders often don't.

Top tips for principal investigators to help junior scientists navigate the travails of teamwork.

Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative's approach to accelerating science and curing disease.

The benefits and challenges of three approaches to scientific meetings.

Foreign faculty in Japan are less productive than their local counterparts on many measures, but better connected to global collaborations.

A web application showing how successful universities or research-focused institutions collaborate.

A digital scholarship librarian and a historian assembled a team of professors, graduate students, researchers, and fellows to create "Torn Apart / Separados", an interactive web site that visualizes the vast apparatus of immigration enforcement in the US, and broadly maps the shelters where children can be housed.

'Devil in the details' when US and European researchers try to work together under Horizon 2020.  When it comes to US-European relations, nothing is simple these days.

International research collaborations could end in wake of US President Donald Trump’s decision.

Expansion of US carrier associated with an increase in partnerships of more than 30 percent.

Researcher-centric communication, collaboration and attribution platform powered by blockchain - with proof-of-existence and real-time, permanent, citing for all scientific and scholarly works.

The case for decentralized, trusted platforms for the dissemination of scientific information and attribution.

Ensure the benefits are felt by all involved, maintain a degree of distance and objectivity, protect the quality of consent and your publishing rights, and always choose your partners carefully.

Papers authored by academic and corporate partners are more widely discussed online.

Scientists who collaborate locally publish more papers and are more highly cited than those who engage in long-distance relationships.

Combining the minds of humans and machines to avoid confirmation bias.

An analysis of a collection of open-access datasets quantifies their benefit to the scientific community.

How many scientists does it take to change the world?