Launch of the ORCID funder open letter: Nine funding bodies are committed to expanding the use of ORCID in their grant applications.

Press release for launch of ORCID funders open letter. ORCID is pleased to announce the launch of an open letter in support of the use of ORCID identifiers (iDs) in the grant application and reporting process. Nine funding bodies around the world have signed the letter and invite others to join them.

Peer review is lauded in principle as the guarantor of quality in academic publishing and grant distribution. But its practice is often loathed by those on the receiving end. Here, seven academics offer their tips on good refereeing, and reflect on how it may change in the years to come

The annual United Nations climate talks have to kick the Paris agreement up a gear.

An ERC Grant is the most prestigious award for excellent European research projects. A team with three researchers from the ETH Domain had also applied for such a grant. Today, Gabriel Aeppli from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, Henrik Rønnow from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne EPFL and Nicola Spaldin from ETH Zurich, together with their colleague Alexander Balatsky from Nordita, Stockholm University, received the contract signed by the EU confirming the extraordinary 14 million euro funding.

The Netherlands will radically shake up how academics are assessed and promoted, including a shift away from relying on citations and journal impact factors.

The 14th Berlin Open Access Conference, hosted by the Max Planck Society and organized by the Max Planck Digital Library on behalf of the Open Access 2020 Initiative (oa2020.org), has just come to an end after two intense days with 170 participants from 37 countries around the world discussing where the research organizations and their library consortia stand in their negotiations with scholarly publishers in transitioning scholarly publishing to open access. The participants represented research performing and research funding organizations, libraries and government, associations of researchers and other umbrella organizations, many of them holding high-level positions at their organizations. In his welcoming address, Max Planck Society President Martin Stratmann captured the spirit of the meeting when he stated: "Open Access is the responsibility of all of us."

Commission concedes it will need more time to resolve long-term budget negotiations – but it remains committed to its plan boosting R&D subsidies

The change is intended to enable researchers to access structural funds for projects reviewers say are excellent, but which don’t make the cut for Horizon Europe grants.

Officials pledge support for European-led 'Plan S' to tear down journal paywalls - but it's unclear whether China will adopt its policies.

In 2019, innovation funding will be increasingly randomised.

This year taught us more about distant planets and our own world, about the ways we're influencing our environment and the ways we're changing ourselves.

By helping scientists gamify the crowdsourcing of data analysis, SwipesForScience will engage the community to speed up research.

Many of Sci-Hub's domains have been blocked in Russia following a complaint from academic publisher Springer Nature that three studies covering heart and brain health were offered without obtaining an appropriate license.

After a troubled year for universities, the next generation of leaders is emerging. They're tech savvy, low ego and skilled in soft power

How are Hungarian, Polish and Swedish gender scholars responding to criticism and campaigns to discredit their work? Not only do they emphasize the intrinsic value of gender studies - they also use humour to counter the anti-gender campaigns.

A year ago, we launched the ORCID Reducing Burden and Improving Transparency (ORBIT) project. Find out how far we've come since then in this post by ORCID staff Josh Brown and Tom Demeranville, who are leading the project.

Graduate students from Africa could benefit from such efforts, but it is not clear who will pay for them.

A new classification system adds real-world complexity to social dilemmas like the paradigmatic 'tragedy of the commons.'

A leading scientist wants Chinese researchers to halt a project to create genetically modified children.

He Jiankui says he created twin girls whose genes were edited to make them resistant to HIV. Was that ethical? Or even legal?

cOALition S asks for feedback on the Plan S implementation plan.

Slides from a talk given to the general assembly of Science Europe in Brussels on 22 Nov 2018. Gives an overview of the problems of over-metricised research evaluation and how this might be tackled, in part through initiatives driven by DORA, and how they are linked with drives such as Plan S to promote open science. Shared under a CC-BY-SA opinion (though Figshare doesn't seem to allow me to select that option from their drop-down menu).

The startling announcement by a Chinese scientist represents a controversial leap in the use of genome-editing.

A new collection page brings together articles that eLife has published in the burgeoning field of meta-research.

Climate already affecting communities, and effects will get worse without action. The new report is designed to be “policy relevant,” but does not make specific policy recommendations, federal officials associated with the U.S. Global Change Research Program noted.

Do you work in a scientific research institution? Are you frustrated with aspects of current research culture, such as the pressure to "publish or perish", the reproducibility crisis, climbing the academic ladder and persistent gender biases? Do you want to shape the culture that you work in? Join us on the 7th of February, 2019 at the University of Lausanne for an afternoon of "We Scientists 2035 Workshops". Let's make small changes today for a better research culture tomorrow!