In our digital era, scientists are certainly sharing and reusing open data. Yet it remains unclear how widespread data reuse and citation practices are within academic disciplines, and why scientists cite—or do not cite—data in their research work.

Doctors are moving out of their clinics and taking over the digital world. Many physicians are engaging in digital media, sharing their expertise and opinions on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. But little is known on how doctors are mediating health research on social media. Noha Atef, a postdoctoral fellow at the ScholCommLab, led a series of qualitative studies on doctors who create video blogs (or vlogs) on YouTube.

In the slow, unpredictable world of journal publication, preprints—unreviewed published papers—offer a mechanism for rapidly communicating health research with the scholarly community. Historically, media coverage of preprints was discouraged in journalism, due to potential concerns about reporting flawed, biased, or provisional research.

By Olivia Aguiar and Alice Fleerackers During the pandemic, more research was shared openly, more preprints were posted, and we saw an explosion in the public communication of science, particularly in mainstream media. In the long-term, these changes have the potential to foster more open, diverse, and inclusive approaches to research and bolster our capacity to face present and future societal challenges.

Scholarly metrics are widely applied to assess research quality and impact despite their known limitations. One of the most popular scholarly metrics is the h-index—which is defined as the “ h number of papers with at least h number of citations.” This means that if a researcher has an h-index of 12, they have published 12 papers with at least 12 citations each.

The review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process is central to academic life and workplace advancement. It influences where faculty direct their attention, research, and publications. By unveiling the RPT process, we can inform actions that lead towards a greater opening of research.

“Denying a professor tenure, Harvard sparks a debate over ethnic studies,” reads a New York Times story published in January 2020. “After twice being denied tenure, this Naval Academy professor says she is seeking justice,” a more recent headline proclaims. “Academic tenure: In desperate need of reform or of defenders?” asks another.

From data sharing mandates to clinical trial registration, Open Science (OS) policies for biomedical research are in no short supply. But ensuring those policies become real-world practices can be a challenge—particularly when there’s no simple way to measure success.

In this blog post, Andrea Whiteley summarizes key findings and recommendations from her research with more than 100 participating Community Scholars.

The internet has made scientific research more available to the public and the media.(Shutterstock) Alice Fleerackers, Simon Fraser University and […]