China bestraft Betrug in der Wissenschaft

China is punishing scientific fraud

China: social punishments extended to fraudulent scientists

China’s social credit system, which assigns misconduct scores to its citizens, may be extended to researchers found to have committed scientific misconduct. If introduced, the punishment might even involve losing access to bank loans and jobs outside academia, according to Nature.

84,339

The number of new authors who published on the biology preprint server Biorxivin 2018, four times more than in 2016. Nevertheless, only 67 percent of the preprints submitted before the end of 2016 were subsequently published in journals (as of end 2018).

“If this continues, there’ll be no more interest in conducting research in Zurich”.

Manfred Kopf of ETH Zurich in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, denouncing a massive increase in bureaucracy and requirements at the Cantonal Commission for Animal Experiments

Artificial intelligence helps peer review

The Swiss publishing house Frontiers Media has developed an AI system to help in the peer-review process. It suggests potential experts, identifies conflicts of interest and even provides plagiarism scores.

European Open Science Cloud

Launched at the end of 2018, the EOSC platform allows researchers to share their biology, environment, physics and digital humanities data. Switzerland supports the project, and its scientists have access to it.

“When applicants fail to recognise the degree to which the [grant] contest is already a lottery, they will overinvest effort in preparing proposals, to the detriment of science”.

K. Gross and C. Bergstrom in in Plos Biology have analysed the cost-benefit ratio inherent in the preparation of a research project funding application.

EUR 9 billion

The estimated budget for the construction of the Future Circular Collider proposed by CERN in early 2019, to be housed in a 100-km long tunnel.

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