In the beginning, there was a question. This is how every science story seems to start. But what if it doesn’t? Does research always require a question, or even a hypothesis? Is it possible to conduct science without a question? Can you “answer” a question that you haven’t posed before? My story started when social life had come to a halt. In late March 2020, the Coronavirus had paused public life and forced society into a global lockdown.

The World Health Organization has declared a COVID-19 ‘infodemic’: an overabundance of information which is often mixed with rumours and misinformation. In light of this, CWTS researchers Giovanni Colavizza and Karlijn Roex are conducting a study in which they investigate how science is communicated during the coronavirus pandemic.

While we are busy resetting research publishing with Hypergraph and drafting our first community projects to give our community members an open platform to share their experiences with academic work culture, we also want to introduce the team to the community. To cut a long story short: Please say hi to James Lomas , our product manager!

“What do you do for work?” is a common conversation starter at social gatherings. For doctors or teachers, this is easier to answer, but for members of the A-TEAM this is a question that requires a lengthy explanation. The short answer would be that we unify organizations in a database, but this does not cover all our work.

The COVID 19 pandemic challenges society and its institutions. Science is particularly affected by the crisis, as it is expected to contribute with expertise to the solution of the problem. As serious as the crisis will be for the global community, it is an exciting time for science and a sociologist of science like me. Because while science is busy solving a problem, it inevitably changes.

Today CWTS is releasing the 2020 edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking. As always, the release of the ranking requires a major effort involving contributions from a large number of colleagues at our center. This year, the COVID-19 crisis, combined with a major update of the internal data infrastructure at CWTS, created additional challenges, which has unfortunately led to a delay of almost two months in the release of the ranking.

Months into the corona crisis we are living in a world changed, for better or worse things are other than they once were. It is obvious many countries were underprepared, but does it make sense to ask—could this have been otherwise? Indeed, this is a prodigious question, one unlikely to be answered comprehensively by a blog post.

There are many reasons why we should be concerned with how science is portrayed in the news media, particularly given the ‘infodemic’ related to COVID-19. For example, over-hyped research results can lead to misinterpretation that may contribute, among other things, to public skepticism and distrust towards science.

On June 1st, we partnered with GEUT (Argentina) to develop open source software to support the peer-to-peer commons (p2pcommons) infrastructure that powers our application Hypergraph.

Several things and events happened during the past month and a half which involved us directly as a participant. Here we introduce some of the most significant ones: a) our interview during a Fireside Chat at the Open Publishing Fest; b) the SCOSS presentation of a poster about us during LIBER 2020; c) the two new short-term open positions (application deadline: 23 July 2020) for our Wellcome Trust funded project;