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.
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.
Mafalda Sandrini Some days ago, a friend of mine told me that while she was grocery shopping, a 60 to 70 years old man shouted at her because she was wearing a mask. She was shocked: how could the man not understand she wanted to protect him? “I could be a weapon to him”, she told me. My friend, as far as she knows, did not have the COVID-19 disease, but she claimed she could not know for sure.
[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=”Intro” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”] Tracking Open Access in times of COVID-19 Here, we measure in near time the number of publications on COVID-19 and Sars-CoV-2 and the share of Open Access publications.
Evgeny Bobrov, Open Data and Research Data Management Officer, at QUEST Center, Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), (© BIH/Thomas Rafalzyk) The COVID-19 pandemic requires swift reactions, which in turn makes the sharing of all available knowledge on the virus as quickly and as freely as possible an imperative.
Over the past 10 years, my colleagues and I have been doing research on research, on how academic knowledge is created (i.e. scholarly communication) and disseminated (i.e. research communication). We have been looking at how researchers collaborate and share data (here, here and here), how they perform quality checks (here), where they publish and how they engage with the public (here and here). Perhaps the most important insight I have gained
Juggling software, materials, and people In my third week of grad school, I found myself metaphorically elbows-deep in my human-robot interaction lab’s codebase. I was porting a robot teleportation interface from tablet to desktop. The goal: To run a psychology study exploring how young kids learned language skills with social robots. Jacqueline M. Kory-Westlund But comments were few and far between.
Introduction The way science is conducted is changing. The internet and other digital means alter the scale and pace of data-driven research and collaborative possibilities. Most modern scholarly research now relies to some extent on digital research infrastructures.
In an influential series of opinion pieces published in early 2014 (see introductory comment by Macleod et al., 2014), the medical journal The Lancet tackled the issue of “increasing value, reducing waste” in biomedical research. This series laid out in detail the issues that had led Chalmers & Glasziou to conclude in 2009 that 85% of investment in biomedical research was wasted.
The Web was created as a coordination and cooperation tool for scientists. Subsequently, it had a revolutionary impact on almost all aspects of our life. The rise of a “network society” did in the end, however, only had a minor effect on the forms of organising among the scientific community. Its paradigm of scientific communication and cooperation between a scholar and a publisher dates back to the early 17th century.