Archived newsblog
Nature’s news team is no longer updating this newsblog: all articles below are archived and extend up to the end of 2014. Read more
Nature’s news team is no longer updating this newsblog: all articles below are archived and extend up to the end of 2014. Read more
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced the world’s strongest policy in support of open research and open data. If strictly enforced, it would prevent Gates-funded researchers from publishing in well-known journals such as Nature and Science. Read more
More than half of all peer-reviewed research articles published from 2007 to 2012 are now free to download somewhere on the Internet, according to a report produced for the European Commission, published today. That is a step up from the situation last year, when only one year in the three-year report period – 2011 – reached the 50% free mark. But the report also underlines how availability dips in the most recent year, because many papers are only made free after a delay. Read more
The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura. Read more
The world’s first commercial coal-fired power plant that can capture its carbon dioxide emissions officially launched today in Canada – marking a milestone for so-called ‘clean coal’ technology. Read more
The Japanese research centre where one researcher was found guilty of scientific misconduct and another died in an apparent suicide this year will be renamed and reduced in size, the institute announced today. Read more
The US Department of Energy has revealed today how papers from research it funds will become free to read, making it the first federal agency to respond to new standards for open access and data-sharing ordered by the White House 18 months ago. Read more
Germany’s science funding may look healthy to outsiders, but its research ministry seems to have stretched its cash too thinly. Last week, it decided that helping to fund the world’s biggest radio-telescope – to be built in South Africa and Australia by 2024 at a cost of more than €1.5 billion – was one international mega-project too many. On 5 June, it said it would pull out of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), to the dismay of German astronomers, who say they were not consulted and are hoping to reverse the move. Read more
Five years after it launched, Microsoft’s free scholarly search engine has fallen into shabby disrepair, failing to track even a fraction of papers published since 2011. But the team behind the product says they are shifting their focus to a yet-to-be-released, next-generation version of the service. Read more
It’s a common complaint among academics: today’s researchers are publishing too much, too fast. But just how fast is the mass of scientific output actually growing? Read more