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Global team of scientists find ecosystem below earth that is twice the size of world's oceans
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.
What research caught the public imagination in 2018? Check out our annual list of papers with the most attention.
Sea ice was thinner in late 2017 and much of 2018 than at any time in the last 30 years, while wild reindeer and caribou populations continue to decline.
Many undergraduates in the natural sciences will never take part in research, despite a willingness to learn. But their presence can teach others how to lead.
In 2018, there has been a drop in the number of fully OA journals published by Elsevier, from 416 to 328 journals. The majority of Elsevier’s fully OA journals are still non-charging.
Philip Ball looks at whether prizes and awards help or hinder scientific progress.
CRISPR is indeed an exciting and promising technology that's already affecting the lives of many people. That said, we should be cautious.
The humanities subjects do not benefit from the research excellence framework. They need a better system.
The University of California faces a Dec. 31 deadline to reach a renewal deal on subscriptions to 1,500 scientific journals. Here's why it might not regret letting its subscriptions lapse.
The Netherlands plan a shift away from evaluating faculty members only on research metrics. This move would also make it possible to be hired on the basis of teaching.
Officials pledge support for European-led 'Plan S' to tear down journal paywalls - but it's unclear whether China will adopt its policies.
Sexism has long skewed research, but a new wave of scientists is shifting course.
Academic research publications rely on doctors to voluntarily disclose their payments from drug and health companies in a lax reporting system some say is broken.
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.
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
Psychology’s replication crisis has changed the field. Today, authors are voluntarily posting their data, replication attempts are published in top journals, and researchers are increasing their sample sizes and committing to data collection and analysis plans in advance.
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.
Launch of the ORCID funder open letter: Nine funding bodies are committed to expanding the use of ORCID in their grant applications.
Despite the position being billed as a stepping stone on the way to tenure-track academic employment, many postdocs, discouraged by their poor prospects, are questioning their career choices and instead looking to non-academic jobs as an alternative. However, as Chris Hayter and Marla A. Parker reveal, making this transition is not as easy as it might first appear.
Scholars say their field is coming under increasing pressures from forces outside the academy who want to delegitimize it.
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."
The Netherlands will radically shake up how academics are assessed and promoted, including a shift away from relying on citations and journal impact factors.
If democracy depends on informed citizens, democracy is in trouble. This is a moment of crisis for many institutions, including higher education, especially in disciplines such as English, philosophy, and history, which promise to prepare students as citizens. To prepare students for a world where information is filtered by computers, we will need a stronger alliance between the humanities and math. This alliance has two reciprocal parts: cultural criticism of the mathematical models shaping our world, and mathematical inquiry about culture.
