The National Information Standards Organization (NISO), a Baltimore, Maryland-based non-profit that promotes standardization in publishing, has embraced a plan to make it easier for journals to share rejected manuscripts and manuscript reviews without forcing authors to go through another arduous submission process. Read more
The analysis—which covered 486,644 biomedical articles with two to nine authors published between 1946 and 2009—found that female, black and Hispanic authors were less likely than were white men to hold prestigious last-author spots. And while all scientists tended to land more last-author spots as their careers went on, that trend was slower for women and minorities. “There’s a lack of progression for those groups,” says Bruce Weinberg, a co-author of the study and an economist at Ohio State University in Columbus. Read more
This piece was originally published on the BioMed Central blog network, part of Springer Nature. Read more
Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle gathered names of first and last authors from papers published from 2005-2017 in 15 major science and neuroscience journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, Nature Neuroscience and Neuropsychology Review. Nearly 10% of the names were excluded because they were relatively gender neutral, but the rest told a clear story: In these journals, authorship is a male-dominated enterprise. Read more
The 2017 Better Science through Better Data event in London, UK, hosted by Springer Nature and Wellcome, was a full day exposé of emerging open data practices, tools, strategies, and policies. Among the potential benefits of open data are replicability, reproducibility, and reusability. While open data is a relatively new hype, some evidence suggests that open data does indeed increase reproducibility. Read more
Female and Hispanic faculty representation in the United States increased significantly between 1992 and 2015, but more slowly for black and indigenous faculty members, according to a review study of personnel records from four large US land-grant institutions published in PLoS One . The small numbers of URM lack the data necessary to draw valid conclusions about retention. However, the study found, URM hiring is increasing, but not at the rate expected for the number of STEM doctoral degrees earned by the populations. Read more
Better Science through Better Data writing competition winner Katie Ember … Read more
Better Science through Better Data writing competition winner Anastasia Greenberg … Read more
Naturejobs journalism competition winner Jiska van der Reest … Read more
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