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Scientists in Taiwan, Germany, and Peru will lose access to more than 12,000 scientific journals after institutions boycott the publishing giant for high prices and minimal open-access options.
Fake news has been in the news a lot lately. Fake news proliferated wildly during the 2016 U.S. election, much of it completely fabricated, usually with an extreme partisan bias. Fake news is corrosive. It mis-informs the public, divides people against one another, leads to bad policy decisions, and can even induce people to take action against imaginary threats.
Traditionally, at the beginning of the new year we celebrated what is known as Public Domain Day: on the first of January of any given year the works of authors who have been dead for more than 70 years enter the public domain. As this is a decisive year for copyright reform in the European Union, it seems much more important to highlight the dangers for the public domain that we are facing in the context of the copyright reform process.
As talks with the publisher stall, researchers in the country weigh whether they can cope without a deal
It’s often argued that studying the liberal arts will enrich the life of the mind. For STEM majors, it can also give them a practical advantage in their careers.
We wanted to share with you some of the awesome science innovations and disruptors from the last year. This is our list.
In Germany, negotiations between scientific publishing company Elsevier and a consortium of hundreds of universities, technical schools, research institutes, and public libraries stalled in December 2016. As a result, more than 60 institutions have lost their online access to Elsevier's journals effective 1 January, although some can still access archived articles published before that date. The price of the journals is only part of the problem.
2016 will go down as a year that taught us to question our assumptions. The election of Donald Trump, an outcome
There are a few red flags to look out for when reading about new scientific discoveries that can help you spot dodgy or unreliable work.
Evading science communication simply because it is difficult, time-consuming or not important enough reflects more on how much scientists value their own work and its place in posterity.
Dame Athene Donald laments the lack of progress on gender issues
BioRxiv is a pre-print repository for life science researchers who can now easily share their unpublished work with the research community.
Fixing problems in the academic job market by reducing the number of PhDs would homogenise the sector, argues Tom Cutterham.
Highly productive researchers have significantly higher probability to produce top cited papers.
The world's largest scholarly journal, PLOS ONE, is seeing fewer and fewer researchers publish their work in it as the open-access publishing market evolves.
Articles with more narrative abstracts are cited more often.
A current debate about conflicts of interest related to biomedical research is to question whether the focus on financial conflicts of interest overshadows “nonfinancial” interests that could put scientific judgment at equal or greater risk of bias.
Time devoted to research is increasingly precious to us in academia. We chastise ourselves for not being able to keep up with the huge volumes of current literature. If only there was some way that all the latest literature on a particular topic could be packaged together for us, and delivered right to our inbox without us even having to lift a finger! Now, what would we call such an improbable utopia – ah yes, peer review.
Searching Google Scholar in 16 languages revealed that 35.6% of 75,513 scientific documents on biodiversity conservation published in 2014 were not in English.
This map shows that across Africa, India, Central America and parts of the Middle East, people are more likely to believe that one of the “bad effects” of science is that it “breaks down ideas of right and wrong”.
Debates over climate change and genome editing present the need for researchers to venture beyond their comfort zones to engage with citizens — and they should receive credit for doing so.
232 new predatory open-access publishers over 2016.
Publication bias, in which positive results are preferentially reported by authors and published by journals, can restrict the visibility of evidence against false claims and allow such claims to be canonized inappropriately as facts.
Young scientists angry at budget cuts say they have been denied permanent jobs.
Groups of authors citing each other is becoming an issue in scientific publishing. With a new approach, researchers discuss how to identify the problem.
