Novelist Cormac McCarthy's Tips on How to Write a Great Science Paper
The Pulitzer prizewinner shares his advice for pleasing readers, editors and yourself.
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If World Leaders Choose to Fail Us, My Generation Will Never Forgive Them | Greta Thunberg
If World Leaders Choose to Fail Us, My Generation Will Never Forgive Them | Greta Thunberg
We are in the middle of a climate breakdown, and all they can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth, says climate activist Greta Thunberg.
43 Percent of White Students Harvard Admits Are Legacies, Jocks, or the Kids of Donors and Faculty
Myth-busting: All Open Access Journals Can Be Listed in DOAJ
This is a myth. People think that DOAJ exists to index all open access journals. A journal can only be indexed if it passes all of our criteria. The Directory of Everything Open Access The Director…
Evaluating FAIR Maturity Through a Scalable, Automated, Community-governed Framework
Evaluating FAIR Maturity Through a Scalable, Automated, Community-governed Framework
Transparent evaluations of FAIRness are increasingly required by a wide range of stakeholders, from scientists to publishers, funding agencies and policy makers. We propose a scalable, automatable framework to evaluate digital resources that encompasses measurable indicators, open source tools, and participation guidelines, which come together to accommodate domain relevant community-defined FAIR assessments. The components of the framework are: (1) Maturity Indicators - community-authored specifications that delimit a specific automatically-measurable FAIR behavior; (2) Compliance Tests - small Web apps that test digital resources against individual Maturity Indicators; and (3) the Evaluator, a Web application that registers, assembles, and applies community-relevant sets of Compliance Tests against a digital resource, and provides a detailed report about what a machine "sees" when it visits that resource. We discuss the technical and social considerations of FAIR assessments, and how this translates to our community-driven infrastructure. We then illustrate how the output of the Evaluator tool can serve as a roadmap to assist data stewards to incrementally and realistically improve the FAIRness of their resources.
Landmark 'United in Science' Report Informs Climate Action Summit
The world's leading climate science organizations have joined forces to produce a landmark new report for the United Nations Climate Action Summit, underlining the glaring - and growing gaps - between agreed targets to tackle global warming and the actual reality.
Scientists Worldwide Join Strikes for Climate Change
From Bangkok to Brisbane, researchers were among those who protested to urge action on global warming.
What to Consider when Asked to Peer Review a Manuscript
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) discuss what you should consider when you are asked to peer review a manuscript.
Ethicist Warns Universities Against Using AI in Admissions
Algorithms may simply lead to 'self-fulfilling prophecies' and do not give reasons for their decisions, Oxford researcher warns.
Guidelines on Criteria of Good Practice for Strenghtening Gender Equality Policies
MDPI Now Gives Scholars the Possibility to Endorse and Recommend Articles
MDPI Now Gives Scholars the Possibility to Endorse and Recommend Articles
MDPI is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access journals since its establishment in 1996.
Can We Assess the Wider Effects of Public Engagement?
The extent to which researchers can assess the impact of their public engagement is often under-analysed and limited to success stories. Drawing on the example of development aid, it is argued that we need to widen the parameters for assessing public engagement.
Set Citation Data Free
Respondents to a Nature poll want to make their own decisions about how to interpret citation metrics. That requires data to be freely accessible.
Funding of Platinum Open Access Journals in the Social Sciences and Humanities
Funding of Platinum Open Access Journals in the Social Sciences and Humanities
The Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences SAHS proposes the establishment of a Platinum Open Access Fund. The funding would allow to flip and operate 15-20 scientific journals in the humanities and social sciences that are not depending on article processing charges and that are immediately open for everyone.
Sweden's New Read & Publish Agreement
The Bibsam Consortium in Sweden signed a new tranformative Read & Publish agreement with academic publisher Springer Nature. It covers rights to publish in over 1,800 hybrid journals at no extra cost for the author as well as reading rights for over 2,100 journals since 1997.
The Problems of Unit Costs Per Article
Every five minutes or so, someone tries to come up with a cost-per-article figure for academic publishing. Martin Paul Eve explains why he finds himself wanting to resist the temptation.
The Problem With Sugar-Daddy Science
The pursuit of money from wealthy donors distorts the research process-and yields flashy projects that don't help and don't work.
Quality in Peer Review: An Interview with Tracey Brown, Sense About Science
Continuing our celebration of Peer Review Week 2019, today Alice Meadows interviews Tracey Brown, OBE, Director of Sense about Science, which has been involved in Peer Review Week from the start.
Politicians and R&D Funders 'Finally Pushing in Same Direction' on Science Publishing
Politicians and R&D Funders 'Finally Pushing in Same Direction' on Science Publishing
A major push by science funding agencies in Europe to make the research they back freely available at the point of publication is the world's best chance of fundamentally altering scientific publishing, says the new coordinator of Plan S, Johan Rooryck.
The Grad Activist: Why I'm Striking for Climate | GradHacker
One graduate student explains the importance of the global climate strike.
Elsevier Investigates Hundreds of Peer Reviewers for Manipulating Citations
The publisher is scrutinizing researchers who might be inappropriately using the review process to promote their own work.
Citecorp: Working with Open Citations - ROpenSci - Open Tools for Open Science
Citecorp: Working with Open Citations - ROpenSci - Open Tools for Open Science
citecorp is a new (hit CRAN in late August) R package for working with data from the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC). OpenCitations, run by David Shotton and Silvio Peroni, houses the OCC, an open repository of scholarly citation data under the very open CC0 license. The I4OC (Initiative for Open Citations) is a collaboration between many parties, with the aim of promoting "unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data". Citation data is available through Crossref, and available in R via our packages rcrossref, fulltext and crminer.
How Getting Rid of 'Shit Jobs' and the Metric of Productivity Can Combat Climate Change
Giving Credit: Gender and the Hidden Labour Behind Academic Prestige
This blog post highlights the historical precedent of Mary Quayle Innis and the unrecognised impact she had on her husband Harold Adams Innis’ career and suggests that the social sciences and humanities would benefit from a wider interpretation of scholarly attribution than is currently practiced.
A Standardized Citation Metrics Author Database Annotated for Scientific Field
A Standardized Citation Metrics Author Database Annotated for Scientific Field
Citation metrics are widely used and misused. This Community Page article presents a publicly available database that provides standardized information on multiple citation indicators and a composite thereof, annotating each author according to his/her main scientific field(s).
Quality is Multi-Dimensional: How Many Ways Can You Define Quality in Peer Review?
Quality is Multi-Dimensional: How Many Ways Can You Define Quality in Peer Review?
Alice Meadows and Karin Wulf kick off the fifth annual Peer Review Week with their thoughts on defining quality in peer review principles and practices.
Artificial Intelligence Confronts a 'Reproducibility' Crisis
Machine-learning systems are black boxes even to the researchers that build them. That makes it hard for others to assess the results.
Seven Steps to Make Travel to Scientific Conferences More Sustainable
Seven Steps to Make Travel to Scientific Conferences More Sustainable
Researchers should learn to travel better to mitigate their climate impacts. Institutions can help by facilitating and rewarding sustainable travel behaviour, rather than fuelling the pressure to attend conferences, say Olivier Hamant, Timothy Saunders and Virgile Viasnoff.
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