The default format for most academic conferences is a plenary followed by panel presentations. If we can’t revolutionize conference design, we can at least consider Duncan Green’s seven tips for improvement (electric shocks optional).

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms are sometimes dismissed as distractions for students. But they’re also avenues for scientific communication. Scientists are active on social media, discussing everything from methods to the latest developments in research. They even use social media to raise funds…

The future of the academic monograph has been questioned for over two decades. At the heart of this ‘monograph crisis’ has been a publishing industry centred on the print publication of monographs and a failure and lack of incentives to develop business models that would support a transition to open digital monographs. In this post Mike Taylor argues that if monographs are to be appropriately valued, there is a pressing need to further integrate monographs into the digital infrastructure of scholarly communication. Failing this, the difficulty in tracking the usage and discovery of monographs online, will likely make the case for justifying further investment in monographs harder.

A database of retractions shows hundreds of academic articles with Australian authors have been withdrawn. Research misconduct threatens to corrode trust in academic qualifications and publications.

As part of a project sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the Rita Allen Foundation, four science communications experts tackled surrounding the effective and ethical communication of science to relevant policymakers. in this webinar, we talk to the four experts about their findings and the processes they recommend.

In the wake of Elsevier shuttering access to its current journal articles at the University of California, the university librarian at UC-Davis reviews the context of the dispute and argues open access offers the best path for academia’s future.

Plan S, a funder led initiative to drive open access to research will influence how learned societies, the organizations tasked with representing academics in particular disciplines, operate, as many currently depend on revenues from journal subscriptions to cross-subsidise their activities. Here, Alicia Wise and Lorraine Estelle update the first phase of the SPA-OPS project assessing the options available for learned societies to make the transition to open access.

It goes without saying that research has greater impact when more people have access to it. In a distracted, multilingual world we often struggle to get important research findings into the hands of those who can use what we’ve learned. As Dr. Tullio Rossi of Animate Your Science points out, visuals help us reach across disciplines.

A new machine learning tool can detect and classify different strengths of Islamophobic hate speech on Twitter. Bertie Vidgen and Taha Yasseri explain their processes in creating a new tool that detects Islamophobic hate speech on Twitter.

Researchers asked science communicators what they need to know about their audiences. Age, education, gender and economic, educational, cultural and ideological background were typical answers. But to really know your audience, those are just a starting place.

At the Winter Academic Conference of the American Marketing Association, four Austin, Texas-based marketing professionals discussed how they stay up-to-date on the latest marketing strategies and research, the place of research-based recommendations over others, and tips for researchers who want to make an impact in practice.

A new preprint was recently shared on PeerJ Preprints on the Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations. Alice Fleerackers, Juan Pablo Alperin, and Erin McKiernan discuss the investigation and the findings on how the flawed metric is currently used in tenure and promotion decisions in universities across North America.