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Research and education budgets in shambles in Denmark and Finland
Recent changes in the political landscape in Northern Europe have brought some new policies that are less supportive of science and education than previously.
Choosing experiments to accelerate collective discovery
Scientists perform a tiny subset of all possible experiments. What characterizes the experiments they choose? And what are the consequences of those choices for the pace of scientific discovery?
Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2016
Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2016 by Jeffrey Beall, January 5, 2016. Each year at this time I formally release my updated list of predatory publishers. Because the list is now very la…
Post-publication peer review: signed or anonymous?
Participating in open and signed post-publication peer review may not be so bad for your career after all.
The current system of scholarly publishing is a massive infringement of academic freedom
The current system of scholarly publishing is a massive infringement of academic freedom
What actually is "academic freedom"?
Congress gives big funding increase to NIH
The spending bill for the federal government ends more than 12 years of stagnant budgets for NIH.
Study show that elite scientists really do hold back science
Scientists can be stubborn. They can use their gravitas to steamroll new ideas. Which means those new ideas often only prevail when older scientists die.
Altmetric's top 100 research articles in 2015
What academic research caught the public imagination in 2015? Altmetric has pulled together our annual list of the research that has attracted the most online attention in the past year.
What's in a journal name?
Scientists debate the merits of deleting journal names from their publication lists.
Transparent peer review at Nature Communications
Starting Jan 2016 Nature Communications will publish peer reviews alongside with the paper.
University prestige has little influence on leaders' pay
An analysis of the correlation between vice-chancellors’ pay and university ranking.
Make science more reliable, win cash prizes
Honoring young researchers who champion rigorous, transparent research is a small step towards changing the culture of science.
A basic scientist's reflections on research funding
Research can only exist with good and secure funding, but when obtaining funding becomes a dominant part of investigators’ activity, the system has a problem.
Academics, forget about public engagement, stay in your ivory towers
Researchers are urged to make their work accessible, but simplifying complex ideas doesn’t support great scholarship.
Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014
Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014
Analyzing three decades' worth of PubMed-indexed abstracts, scientists find a notable increase in the frequency of positive words, like "innovative" and "novel", over time.
Wrapping it up in a person
Report examining employment and earnings outcomes for Ph.D. recipients.
Fleming's discovery of penicillin couldn't get published today. That's a huge problem.
Fleming's discovery of penicillin couldn't get published today. That's a huge problem.
Some researchers think science should be small again.
Research data in core journals in biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics
Research data in core journals in biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics
Biology top journals share original data at the highest rate, and physics top journals share at the lowest rate.
Burning out faculty at doctoral research universities
Grantsmanship and service activities appeared as the most critical factors associated with faculty burnout.
Examining the impact of the NIH Public Access Policy on the citation rates of journal articles
Examining the impact of the NIH Public Access Policy on the citation rates of journal articles
Study examining whether NIH funded articles that were archived in PMC after the release of the 2008 NIH Public Access Policy show greater scholarly impact than comparable articles not archived in PMC.
Hiding journal names from your publication list is a great idea
Michael Eisen recently announced his new website, which features a new publication list that doesn’t mention journal names anywhere.
EU Commission sets out plan to allow free data mining
Commission proposes a research-friendly copyright for open science and innovation in Europe.
Dutch Universities and Elsevier reach agreement
The Association of Universities in the Netherlands and Elsevier have reached an agreement in principle that marks a milestone in the Netherlands' transition to Open Access.
From January you'll need an ORCID
Royal Society to make ORCIDs mandatory for its journals.
Secret dossier on research fraud suggests government concern over science
‘Too many institutions’ are ready to ‘sweep fraud under the carpet’.
32 private university presidents earned more than $1 million in 2013
Executive compensation at private and public colleges.
The case for abolishing traditional peer review
We have little or no evidence that peer review 'works,' but we have lots of evidence of its downside.