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Brexit: Turning point

Brexit: Turning point

The result of next week’s crucial UK referendum on whether or not to remain in the European Union will have worldwide repercussions.

If science is going to save the world, we need to make it open

If science is going to save the world, we need to make it open

The last few weeks have been a momentum time in the sciences: not because of a breakthrough in gene therapy or quantum computing, but because world leaders have twice called for scientific papers to be made freely available to all.

World’s Biggest Science Experiment Seeks More Time and Money

World’s Biggest Science Experiment Seeks More Time and Money

The world’s biggest science experiment may get more time and money for completion when nuclear officials convene on Wednesday in France.

Predatory journals: Ban predators from the scientific record

Predatory journals: Ban predators from the scientific record

Universities and colleges should stop using the quantity of published articles as a measure of academic performance. Researchers and respectable journals should not cite articles from predatory journals, and academic library databases should exclude metadata for such publications.

Job-Seeking Ph.D. Holders Look to Life Outside School

Job-Seeking Ph.D. Holders Look to Life Outside School

As the supply of doctorate holders grows and their academic job prospects dwindle, schools take steps to help graduates find work beyond the academy.

Vienna Principles: a vision for scholarly communication

Vienna Principles: a vision for scholarly communication

A set of twelve principles that represent the cornerstones of the future scholarly communication system. They are designed to provide a coherent frame of reference for the debate on how to improve the current system. With this document, we are hoping to inspire a widespread discussion towards a shared vision for scholarly communication in the 21st century.

Boon or burden: what has the EU ever done for science?

Boon or burden: what has the EU ever done for science?

More than 500 million people and 28 nations make up the European Union. It will lose one of its richest, most populous members, if the United Kingdom votes to leave on 23 June. Ahead of a possible ‘Brexit’, Nature examines five core ways that the EU shapes the course of research.

Reproducibility: Archive computer code with raw data

Reproducibility: Archive computer code with raw data

Software tools such as knitr and R Markdown allow the description and code of a statistical analysis to be combined into a single document, providing a pipeline from the raw data to the final results and figures. Outputs are updated by re-running the scripts using version-control tools such as Git and GitHub.

Europe's Most Innovative Universities

Europe's Most Innovative Universities

At first glance, the most innovative universities in Europe don't appear to have much in common. Some are Catholic schools, some are secular, others are state-run and some are private. One is 920 years old. Another has been an independent institution for less than a decade. They’re scattered across the continent, some in large cities, others in rural areas.

Should All Academic Research Be Free And What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About Publishing

Should All Academic Research Be Free And What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About Publishing

It is remarkable that the sharing of academic research was the genesis of the modern web, yet today remains one of the last bastions of non-free content on the web.

Canada launches review of its research enterprise

Canada launches review of its research enterprise

An expert panel will examine the impact of a decade of policies under the previous prime minister, Stephen Harper, aimed at converting university labs into tools for industrial development and commercialization.

Finland takes leading role in the openness of academic journal pricing

Finland takes leading role in the openness of academic journal pricing

Finland is the first country where the subscription prices paid by practically all universities and research institutions to individual publishers are made available.

Measuring gender when you don’t have a gender measure: constructing a gender index using survey data

Measuring gender when you don’t have a gender measure: constructing a gender index using survey data

This study outlines the development of a gender index, focused on gender roles and institutionalised gender, using secondary survey data from the Canadian Labour Force survey. Using this index we then examined the distribution of gender index scores among men and women, and changes in gender roles among male and female labour force participants between 1997 and 2014.

Genuine research keeps students in science

Genuine research keeps students in science

A new study of a novel undergraduate program at the University of Texas (UT), Austin, has found that giving college freshmen the opportunity to do research as part of their coursework significantly increases their chances of completing college and graduating with a science degree.

Contributorship and division of labor in knowledge production

Contributorship and division of labor in knowledge production

Examining the forms that division of labor takes across disciplines, the relationships between various types of contributions, as well as the relationships between the contribution types and various indicators of authors’ seniority.

Patent Law's Reproducibility Paradox

Patent Law's Reproducibility Paradox

Many recent clinical and preclinical studies appear to be irreproducible; their results cannot be verified by outside researchers. This is problematic for not only scientific reasons but legal ones: patents grounded in irreproducible research appear to fail their constitutional bargain of property rights in exchange for working disclosures of inventions.