Science is in big trouble. Or so we’re told. In the past several years, many scientists have become afflicted with a serious case of doubt — doubt in the very institution of science. As reporters covering medicine, psychology, climate change, and other areas of research, we wanted to understand this epidemic of doubt. So we...Read More

A major goal of the Scholarly Commons program is to determine whether a set of high level principles that define the abstract entity known as the Scholarly Commons can be expressed in a useful way.   This exercise involves synthesis of activities from the Madrid Workshop, Re-imaginging Research Communications, and follow on activities at FORCE2016 and...Read More

During August the Research Councils UK on behalf of the UK Open Research Data Forum released a draft Concordat on Open Research Data for which they have sought feedback. The Universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford prepared a joint response which was sent to the RCUK on 28 September 2015. The response is reproduced...Read More

Éric Archambault, Grégoire Côté, Brooke Struck and Matthieu Voorons Science-Metrix and 1science, 1335 Mont-Royal E., Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H2J 1Y6 This note presents data from the 1science oaIndx on the average of relative citations (ARC) for 3.3 million papers published from 2007 to 2009 and indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). These data show...Read More

The Federal Trade Commission has charged the publisher of hundreds of purported online academic journals with deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars. The FTC’s complaint alleges that OMICS Group, Inc., along with two affiliated companies and their president and director,...Read More

Over the last decade, there have been significant changes in data sharing policies and in the data sharing environment faced by life science researchers. Using data from a 2013 survey of over 1600 life science researchers, we analyze the effects of sharing policies of funding agencies and journals. We also examine the effects of new...Read More

According to a report at STM-Publishing.com, The open access journal, BMC Psychology, has announced it will launch the first ever randomized controlled trial to find out if a ‘results free’ peer-review process can help reduce publication bias. ‘Results free’ means that reviewers of research manuscripts submitted for publication will not be able to see the...Read More