A database of retractions shows hundreds of academic articles with Australian authors have been withdrawn.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.

Large data sets can now be quickly analyzed to assess whether or not certain features, previously deemed unimportant, can actually affect the chances of a research paper being accepted for publication. In this post, James Hartley looks at new research on weekly submission dates.

WorldCat, an aggregate database of library catalogs worldwide, was primarily set up to aid libraries in carrying out their work in areas such as cataloging or resource sharing. Brian Lavoie offers an insight into the types of questions WorldCat data can provide answers to, and how research of this kind also amplifies the value and impact of library collections.

Psychologist Susan Fiske was the founding editor of the journal Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. In trying to reach a lay audience with research findings that matter, she counsels stepping a bit outside your academic comfort zone.