Eight highly-visible organizations today announced the launch of the Open Research Funders Group, a partnership designed to increase access to research outputs. With nearly $5 billion in combined annual grants conferred, these organizations are committed to using their positions to foster more open sharing of research articles and data.  This openness, the members believe, will accelerate the pace of discovery, reduce information-sharing gaps, encourage innovation, and promote reproducibility.

Amazon made its first commercial drone delivery on Dec. 7 in Cambridgeshire, England.

Figshare announced a new partnership with Springer Nature to support BioMed Central and SpringerOpen authors who wish to openly share their supplementary data. Figshare are now hosting additional files from more than 300 BioMed Central and SpringerOpen journals.

One Trump adviser suggested that NASA no longer should conduct climate research and instead should focus on space exploration.

Outcome: Indicative statistics.

The trend of turning universities into businesses is limiting research freedoms in traditionally liberal institutes in northern Europe.

Yesterday, President Obama signed the 21st Century Cures Act into law.

Women in academia may be losing out salary-wise because they are more focused on tasks that may go unrewarded, a new study suggests

More than 60 major German research institutions are to be expected to have no access to the full texts of journals by the publisher Elsevier from 1 January 2017 on, among them Göttingen University with 440 Elsevier journals.

A worldwide coding competition reveals the universities producing the very best coders.

A little over 1 year ago, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) launched mSphere as an open-access, online, pan-microbial sciences journal. We established two major goals: publish cutting-edge science and implement policies and processes to make the publication experience less onerous for authors.

Home Office looks at slashing numbers from 300,000 to 170,000 under tougher student visa rules

The open-access microbiology journal mSphere will give authors a "super-fast track" option toward publication. The idea has some ardent fans, but is also drawing doubts.