The Royal Society has not been able to find any reason why so few women were successful in securing awards from one of its fellowship schemes in 2014

Facilities prepare for shutdown as government refuses to secure funding. Up to 1,700 jobs at 27 facilities at risk from 30 June, with $150m in vital funding tied to the Coalition’s higher-education changes.

Europe's ambitious but contentious €1-billion HBP has announced changes to its organization in a response to criticism of its management and scientific trajectory by many high-ranking neuroscientists.

While the Netherlands, France and the UK showed significant growth, other countries such as Finland, Switzerland and Spain declined. However, Switzerland still heads the ranking with 848 applications per million inhabitants.

A workshop held by the National Research Council in the US addressed statistical challenges in assessing and fostering the reproducibility of scientific results by examining the extent of reproducibility, the causes of reproducibility failures, and potential remedies. Here's the program.

A controversial statistical test has finally met its end, at least in one journal.

The NCI call it the end of an era. Harold Varmus, director of the US NCI and former director of the NIH, announced on 4 March that he will be stepping down from his post at the end of the month.

To help make the costs around open access more transparent, the Wellcome Trust has published details on how much it spent on article processing charges in the year 2013-14.

In an appearance before the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, Dr. Francis Collins, head of NIH, offered a familiar warning to lawmakers considering future appropriations for scientific research.

Not only are scientific articles that have strong coverage in social media likely to be cited more in the future, social media is also the tool that allows us to communicate directly with the general public.

What we're learning, and why it matters.

It has taken a while, but the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences (SAAS) have come out with a valuable booklet on authorships of scientific manuscripts. This recommendations, published now also as a special article in the Swiss Medical Weekly, aspire to serve as a practical guide for principal investigators confronted with the task of assigning authorships to the individuals contributing to scientific manuscripts.

Scholarly articles are distributed almost exclusively in digital form. While there is an increasing number of journal articles freely available via green or gold open access, the majority of them still can only be read if the reader works at an institution with a subscription to the journal..

Last spring, the four of us published an essay in PNAS in which we described the severe problems now faced by scientists working in the US biomedical research system, recommending several steps that might be taken to improve the situation...

Why only 2 of 43 young scientists receiving the prestigious University Research Fellowships in the UK were women.

The cooperation will expose to Altmetric the metadata of all the Paperity articles for proper identification. In return, Altmetric will track social mentions of these articles and measure online attention they receive, with calculation of Altmetric score.

We propose steps to help increase the transparency of the scientific method and the reproducibility of research results.

In April 2014, four leaders of the scientific establishment issued

"I never quit until I get what I'm after. Negative results are just what I'm after. They are just as valuable to me as positive results." - Thomas A. Edison.

The final act in a long-running saga should bring tighter controls on unproven therapies, both at home and abroad.

Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer.

The Institute of Medicine takes a step in the right direction but we should move even faster.

Real scientific controversies are self-correcting shows the BICEP2 and Planck example.

An interview with John Ioannidis, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford.

Professors issue warning over obsession with performance management and research excellence.

Corruption is a barrier to innovation. Greater scrutiny of public spending is needed if science and technology are to fulfil their potential.

A startup accelerator called "Scholas.Labs" was announced during an education event hosted by Pope Francis.

A survey finds that 87% of scientists agree with the statement “Scientists should take an active role in public policy debates about issues related to science and technology.

Analysis of millions of papers finds that junior biomedical researchers tend to work on more innovative topics than their senior colleagues do.

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