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Bland Peer Review Needs a Pinch of Salt
Wise and honourable assessors of grant applications must be allowed to use their discretion, says Sui Huang

Universities Are Broke. So Let’s Cut the Pointless Admin and Get Back to Teaching
The meaningless tasks and faux-business strategies prioritised by British universities have skewed their real role, writes André Spicer

Research in the Age of Open Science
UK leads drive towards more open way of sharing science, says Jo Johnson

7 Functionalities the Scholarly Literature Should Have
As a regular user of the scholarly literature since before the internet, I have closely followed its digitization. I find it rather frustrating that some of the most basic functionalities are still excluded.
Open Science and its Discontents
The current funding climate certainly doesn’t favour changes, but that doesn’t mean that change isn’t possible.
What I Learned from Predatory Publishers
This article is a first-hand account of Jeffrey Beall’s work identifying and listing predatory publishers from 2012 to 2017.
Why We Can't Trust Academic Journals to Tell the Scientific Truth
Academic journals don’t select the research they publish on scientific rigour alone. So why aren’t academics taking to the streets about this?

It's Time for Academics to Take Back Control of Research Journals
The evolution to a high-profit industry was never planned. Academics need to make the case for lower-cost journals.

A Stanford Scientist on the Biology of Human Evil
"Our species has problems with violence." —Biologist Robert Sapolsky

Re-Envisioning a Future in Scholarly Communication
The scholarly process is ridden with single points of failures at all stages.
Why Scientific Consensus Is Worth Taking Seriously
Yes, collective missteps happen. But if anything, history shows how hard it is to get scientists to agree in the first place.

Publish Houses of Brick, Not Mansions of Straw
Papers need to include fewer claims and more proof to make the scientific literature more reliable.

The Environment Needs Cryptogovernance
The blockchain technology that underpins cryptographic currencies can support sustainability by building trust and avoiding corruption, explains Guillaume Chapron.

Does Sharing of an Unpublished Thesis Create Enough Harm to Imprison Someone?
Does Sharing of an Unpublished Thesis Create Enough Harm to Imprison Someone?
Charlie Rapple highlights the case of Diego Gómez, a Columbian researcher facing prison for sharing someone else's thesis via Scribd.

The Meaning of Life in a World Without Work
As technology renders jobs obsolete, what will keep us busy? Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari examines ‘the useless class’ and a new quest for purpose

Physiognomy’s New Clothes
Rapid developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning have enabled scientific racism to enter a new era, in which machine-learned models embed biases present in the human behavior used for model development.
