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A Summary of OpenCon Berlin 2016
OpenCon Berlin was one of numorous satellite events that took place after the main OpenCon 2016 conference that happened earlier this November in Washington, DC. It was organzied by OpenAIRE, ScienceOpen and Digital Science in cooperation with the Computer and Media Service of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Before the Abstract
Stories about science, research, and being a scientist.
Medicine at a Turning Point
The digital transformation of healthcare is creating major opportunities to better understand disease and effective therapies. But it also poses ethical and legal challenges. A conference organized by the Health Ethics and Policy Lab at UZH addressed some of the current issues.
To My Fellow Lawmakers: Let’s Read Real Science News, Not Breitbart
Fellow Congress members should rely on peer-reviewed science, not fake news.
Are Early Career Researchers the Harbingers of Change?
Part one of a longitudinal study over three years about the behaviour of researchers under 35 who have yet to achieve established or tenured positions.
Take the Time and Effort to Correct Misinformation
Scientists should challenge online falsehoods and inaccuracies — and harness the collective power of the Internet to fight back, argues Phil Williamson.
The Rise of Open Access Mega-Journals
A graph shows the dramatic rise of open access mega-journals such as Plos One, which offer to publish papers based on their scientific soundness rather than the significance or novelty of the results, and which accept research across a broad range of disciplines.
Higher Education Funding Council
A document that sets out the proposals of the four UK higher education funding bodies for the second Research Excellence Framework (REF) for the assessment of research in UK higher education institutions. The proposals seek to build on the first REF conducted in 2014, and to incorporate the principles identified in Lord Stern’s Independent Review of the REF.
Why Researchers Should Get the Same Client Confidentiality As Doctors
Promises made by researchers to participants to elicit the truth may not be worth the paper their written on if the courts can bulldoze though them.
Turn Children on to Science Through Reading
Books have the power to trigger a lifelong urge to know more about the world and its environs.
Accelerating Translational Research through Open Science
Seeking to accelerate research advances and reimagine its role in the community, the Montreal Neurological Institute (Neuro) announced in the spring of 2016 that it is launching a five-year experiment during which it will adopt Open Science—open data, open materials, and no patenting—across the institution.
Swiss Army Knives of Scholarly Communication
A few slides comparing ResearchGate, Academia, Mendeley and others.
The Breakthrough Prizes Attempt to Upstage the Nobels
Move over, Alfred... Yuri Milner, a technology billionaire, wants to turn scientists into celebrities.
The licensing of bioRxiv preprints
PeerJ offers the better technology and user experience than bioRxiv, but bioRxiv has greater adoption in the biodata sciences.
Over 600 Springer Nature Journals Commit to New Data Sharing Policies
More than 600 journals across Nature Research, Springer, BioMed Central and Palgrave Macmillan have committed to encouraging good practice in the sharing and archiving and citation of research data by adopting new Springer Nature research data policies.
New Study on Next Generation of Researchers Begins
Today, the Board on Higher Education and Workforce at the NAS announced the formation of a 16-person committee to work on the Next Generation of Researchers study. This study was commissioned by the U.S. Congress in the fiscal 2016 omnibus appropriations package that passed in December 2015.
Researchers Baffled by Nationalist Surge
Economic woes wrought by globalization are only part of the cause.
Breakthrough Awards $25m to Researchers at 'Oscars of Science'
Huda Zoghbi, Stephen Elledge, Jean Bourgain, Joe Polchinski and other researchers in life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics share awards from prize founders Yuri Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin.
Time to Overhaul the Secretive Peer Review Process
Two features of peer review subvert the goals of science: reviews are kept secret and reviewers are usually anonymous, argues Jeffrey S. Flier.
Milestones in Tackling Research Reliability, a Timeline
It’s not a new story, although “the reproducibility crisis” may seem to be. For life sciences, I think it started in the late 1950s. A timeline.
Digital Science Releases GRID Under CC0 License
GRID’s comprehensive database of over 66,000 global research organizations now available under a CC0 license, allowing users to make full use of the database releases with no need for attribution.