For Yet Better Science

On 11 February, we celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. To celebrate diversity and representation in STEM-related fields, we asked six female scientists from CERN to share their stories. They shared what a typical day looks like, what they enjoy most in their profession and what is interesting in their careers.  

The impact of data science on science and knowledge production is an important and timely topic. Data Science and AI are changing the way we do science. AI is increasingly used in scientific practices, from data discovery to data analysis, for extracting new knowledge out of research artifacts, generating novel and experimentally testable scientific hypotheses, writing, publication, outreach, and research assessment but its biggest promise is to generate new scientific knowledge and understanding.  

In the world of academic publishing, to refer to a journal or publisher (or any other scholarly entity) as “predatory” carries with it a very serious and negative connotation, and can damage its reputation if that claim is made in public. If such a claim is supported by clear evidence, then it becomes a valid critical opinion because it is substantiated... Leonid Schneider Tweeted on several occasions that Springer Nature’s Science and Engineering Ethics (SEE) was “predatory”, in one Tweet even stating that “They are deeply unethical crooks at Science & Eng Ethics!” These are not light claims to be made in public ... On September 16, 2017, the author contacted Schneider to request a full and thorough list of properties that led him to make these accusations in public. In that email, the SEE co-editors-in-chief, Raymond Spier and Stephanie Bird, Springer Nature, COPE and other related individuals were copied, with a formal request to offer feedback. Almost two years after that email

The past two decades have seen increasing interests in open data. Many scientists believe that the original research data should be properly organized and opened to the public and researchers throughout the world, and, once the open-data strategies are put into practice, the entire scientific research enterprise could be transformed. Driven by the trend of data sharing many platforms and repositories have been established. Universities, funding agencies and academic journals are also taking an active role in facilitating data sharing. In this forum discussion organized by National Science Review and chaired by Jianhui Li, panelists from diverse backgrounds who have all participated in the development of open data gathered together and talked about the recent progress and future directions of open data.  

Reproducibility has long been a tenet of science but has been challenging to achieve—we learned this the hard way when our old approaches proved inadequate to efficiently reproduce our own work. Here we describe how several free software tools have fundamentally upgraded our approach to collaborative research, making our entire workflow more transparent and streamlined. By describing specific tools and how we incrementally began using them for the Ocean Health Index project, we hope to encourage others in the scientific community to do the same—so we can all produce better science in less time.  

The first MIT Better Science Ideathon brought together teams of people involved in scientific research - including students, researchers, policy makers, publishers, and funders - to explore how the process of science can be improved. There was a focus on how open science can accelerate scientific progress through fostering collaboration and reproducibility and by reducing the barriers to learning.  

Tweets about Leonid Schneider.