Holly Else

Feb 5, 2025 | nature.com | Holly Else

‘Helicopter research’ doesn’t happen just when researchers from rich countries swoop in and exploit the resources of low-income ones — rich universities are increasingly taking advantage of poorer institutions in the same country, and often in the same neighbourhood. Marylin Fraser, the head of the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, a non-profit organization in New York City that focuses on community health and education, has experienced this at first hand.

Jan 24, 2025 | nature.com | Holly Else

Prominent ecologist Thomas Crowther, whose research on trees has influenced figures including US President Donald Trump, will depart the prestigious Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) after the institution said that it would not renew his contract. ETH Zurich says it has received “reports of alleged misconduct on a variety of levels” and has lost trust in the assistant professor. Crowther and ETH Zurich declined to comment on the allegations.

Jan 23, 2025 | nature.com | Holly Else

Leaders at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, will introduce financial incentives for academic publishers to adopt open science policies as part of the organization’s collective agreement with 11 particle-physics journals. Open-access reformers launch next bold publishing planThe current scheme sees those journals publish work from the field openly and at no cost to authors, in exchange for bulk payments.

Dec 12, 2024 | nature.com | Holly Else

In 2017, when Sherri Christian returned to her institution after a year-long sabbatical, she looked around the biochemistry department and realized that she was the last female hire, seven years earlier. At the time, there were 19 members, just 6 of them women, including her. Access the most recent journalism from Nature's award-winning team Explore the latest features & opinion covering groundbreaking research or

Oct 14, 2024 | nature.com | Holly Else

The retraction of a high-profile paper1 that tested ways to improve the soundness of scientific studies has highlighted the challenges of such ‘reproducibility’ research. The retracted paper’s authors include some of the titans in the field. In the study, published in Nature Human Behaviour last November, the authors described a rigorous research protocol involving features such as large sample sizes, with the goal of ensuring the soundness of psychological experiments.