Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Who Will Challenge the Predators Now That Beall’s List is Gone?
University librarian Jeffrey Beall used to write a blog that identified by name what he saw as predatory publishers of academic journals. Since he suddenly shut down the site earlier this month, will –or even should — someone else pick up the baton?
Social Science Needs its Own Doctor-Patient Confidentiality
Several recent high-profile incidents suggest that the confidentiality promises routinely made by social scientists have little in the way of legal support.
Is the Concept of Race Science’s Biggest Mistake?
There is a clear consensus among anthropologists that races aren’t real, that they don’t reflect biological reality, and that most anthropologists don’t believe there is a place for race categories in science.
The Research on Communicating Science in a Post-Truth Era
A new report from the National Academies on current science communication finds it’s going to need strategic and serious investment in the ‘science’ of science communication and demand much greater engagement and collaboration between those who study science communication and those who actually do it.
When Government is Not Enough for Research Funding
Two research executives from the University of Minnesota see there isn’t enough government funding to pay for all the innovative research that needs to be taking place. Might business take up the slack?
Fixing Peer Review, a Biologist’s View
Peer review clearly isn’t perfect, but rather than simply bypassing it and releasing even more information into an overloaded system, we should focus on making it better, says this life sciences editor. The first step is to reset and clearly state our standards for quality in both publishing and peer reviewing.
Why Did Contract Theory Deserve a Nobel Prize?
As technology improves and organizations become more complex, the theory and practice of contract design will only increase in importance. As such, we owe, we owe a great debt to this year’s Nobel laureates in economics for giving us powerful tools to structure effective contracts.
Inane Criticism of ‘Absurd’ Research Leaves No One the Wiser
Perhaps the solution to conflicting spending priorities, write Rod Lamberts and Will J. Grant, is simply to acknowledge that people will always have conflicting priorities, and think about how best to live alongside each other: mythical, homogeneous pub-goer and irrelevant, out-of-touch academic alike.
