On Friday, March 17, The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) published a reform proposal that promises to improve working conditions in research. This was followed by a massive wave of criticism and protest from scientists across status groups and disciplines.

Introduction The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global and accelerated digitalisation of all education systems. This quickly revealed many inequalities in access to digital resources and lack of digital skills. What concrete impact has this had on learners and teachers worldwide? How can we address these inequalities in education?

Human history is ridden with dreams of utopias. Ideas and visions outlining societies or communities that are free from faults and flaws, running perfectly according to plan. There is no shortage of examples. Many are political, some religious and others stacked somewhere in between.

An Appeal for a Culture of Failure in Academia Mafalda Sandrini For some years now there has been a trend amongst entrepreneurs and artists to come together to exchange stories of failure by disclosing their mistakes on a big stage and acknowledging what they lacked in insight and wisdom. This is framed as a practice of openness for the good of the many, as well as for themselves.

This interview is done in personal capacity and based on insights such as recently published in the “International Handbook on Responsible Innovation: A Global Resource”. In 2013, you introduced a vision for Responsible Research and Innovation.

Can ethics in science be global and why is this topic relevant currently? One of the main recurrent debates in the Global Ethics research team (GEST) has been whether ethics can be at all “global”. My opinion is that not only it could but it should. Notwithstanding the significant differences that we easily witness in cultural, social norms and behaviour, we are faced with a strongly interconnected and interdependent world.

There has been increasing concern recently in ensuring that public funding for science and innovation creates truly public benefits.

This contribution is a crosspost from PLOS blogs which was published in Part I and Part II. The article is a cooperation within N², a network of the Helmholtz Juniors, Leibniz PhD Network and Max Planck PhDnet. With more than 14.000 doctoral researchers, it is the biggest network of doctoral researchers in Germany.

[et_pb_section bb_built=”1″ admin_label=”section”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”] What are from a media ethics perspective the biggest challenges for science in the digital age? One of the biggest challenges in science communication is to create trust.

“Predatory publishing” describes the practice of pseudo scientific publishers that promise scientists the rapid publication of their studies. They purport to carry out a peer review but actually do not do such a thing and basically publish anything if the publication fee has been paid.