Search

The Internet is rapidly changing the way the results of academic research are communicated within communities and with the wider public. In a push to accelerate change and make the results of research immediately and freely available online for all to read and use, the European Commission, with support from a group of high-profile funders, has proposed a plan to influence the way academic research is published. Here, we discuss the likely impact of this plan on the publishing landscape, the potential benefits, and some possible unintended consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PubMed is a free search engine for biomedical literature accessed by millions of users from around the world each day. With the rapid growth of biomedical literature—about two articles are added every minute on average—finding and retrieving the most relevant papers for a given query is increasingly challenging. We present Best Match, a new relevance search algorithm for PubMed that leverages the intelligence of our users and cutting-edge machine-learning technology as an alternative to the traditional date sort order. The Best Match algorithm is trained with past user searches with dozens of relevance-ranking signals (factors), the most important being the past usage of an article, publication date, relevance score, and type of article. This new algorithm demonstrates state-of-the-art retrieval performance in benchmarking experiments as well as an improved user experience in real-world testing (over 20% increase in user click-through rate). Since its deployment in June 2017, we have observed a significant increase (60%) in PubMed searches with relevance sort order: it now assists millions of PubMed searches each week. In this work, we hope to increase the awareness and transparency of this new relevance sort option for PubMed users, enabling them to retrieve information more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The MooSciTIC project is a capacity-building initiative targeting West African research scientists and higher education teachers. The project aimed to improve the self-reliance of researchers and upgrade research practices by providing on-site summer schools on trans-disciplinary topics such as scientific writing, communication, and integrity. Here, we explain how this program was designed and implemented and share the positive responses from our trainees, hoping to inspire similar initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outbreaks of emerging plant diseases and insect pests are increasing at an alarming rate threatening the food security needs of a booming world population. The role of plant pathologists in addressing these threats to plant health is critical. Here, we share our personal experience with the appearance in Bangladesh of a destructive new fungal disease called wheat blast and stress the importance of open-science platforms and crowdsourced community responses in tackling emerging plant diseases. Benefits of the open-science approach include recruitment of multidisciplinary experts, application of cutting-edge methods, and timely replication of data analyses to increase the robustness of the findings. Based on our experiences, we provide some general recommendations and practical guidance for responding to emerging plant diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horseshoe crabs have been integral to the safe production of vaccines and injectable medications for the past 40 years. The bleeding of live horseshoe crabs, a process that leaves thousands dead annually, is an ecologically unsustainable practice for all four species of horseshoe crab and the shorebirds that rely on their eggs as a primary food source during spring migration. Populations of both horseshoe crabs and shorebirds are in decline. This study confirms the efficacy of recombinant Factor C (rFC), a synthetic alternative that eliminates the need for animal products in endotoxin detection. Furthermore, our findings confirm that the biomedical industry can achieve a 90% reduction in the use of reagents derived from horseshoe crabs by using the synthetic alternative for the testing of water and other common materials used in the manufacturing process. This represents an extraordinary opportunity for the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries to significantly contribute to the conservation of horseshoe crabs and the birds that depend on them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Perspective, a group of national funders, joined by the European Commission and the European Research Council, announce plans to make Open Access publishing mandatory for recipients of their agencies’ research funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable outside funding will be required to overcome the financial shortfalls faced by most of Africa’s protected areas. Given limited levels of external support, it will be essential to allocate these funds wisely. While most recent studies on conservation triage have recommended prioritizing reserves with the highest remaining conservation value (the “last best places”), such investments are complicated by the fact that these same reserves often attract the greatest revenues from ecotourism and thus the most attention from corrupt local governments. Alternatively, philanthropic organizations might achieve greater returns from investing in the management of neglected areas with lower current conservation value but with less financial leakage from corruption. We outline here how high levels of corruption could favor a strategy that shifts investments away from the last best places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how knowledge is represented in the human brain is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. To date, most of the work on this topic has focused on knowledge representation in cortical areas and debated whether knowledge is represented in a distributed or localized fashion. Fang and colleagues provide evidence that brain connections and the white matter supporting such connections might play a significant role. The work opens new avenues of investigation, breaking through disciplinary boundaries across network neuroscience, computational neuroscience, cognitive science, and classical lesion studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholars comprising journal editorial boards play a critical role in defining the trajectory of knowledge in their field. Nevertheless, studies of editorial board composition remain rare, especially those focusing on journals publishing research in the increasingly globalized fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Using metrics for quantifying the diversity of ecological communities, we quantified international representation on the 1985–2014 editorial boards of 24 environmental biology journals. Over the course of 3 decades, there were 3,827 unique scientists based in 70 countries who served as editors. The size of the editorial community increased over time—the number of editors serving in 2014 was 4-fold greater than in 1985—as did the number of countries in which editors were based. Nevertheless, editors based outside the “Global North” (the group of economically developed countries with high per capita gross domestic product [GDP] that collectively concentrate most global wealth) were extremely rare. Furthermore, 67.18% of all editors were based in either the United States or the United Kingdom. Consequently, geographic diversity—already low in 1985—remained unchanged through 2014. We argue that this limited geographic diversity can detrimentally affect the creativity of scholarship published in journals, the progress and direction of research, the composition of the STEM workforce, and the development of science in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia (i.e., the “Global South”). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current unprecedented expansion of infrastructure promises to enhance human wellbeing but risks causing substantial harm to natural ecosystems and the benefits they provide for people. A framework for systematically and proactively identifying the likely benefits and costs of such developments is badly needed. Here, we develop and test at the subregional scale a recently proposed global scheme for comparing the potential gains from new roads for food production with their likely impact on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Working in the Greater Mekong—an exceptionally biodiverse subregion undergoing rapid development—we combined maps of isolation from urban centres, yield gaps, and the current area under 17 crops to estimate where and how far road development could in principle help to increase food production without the need for cropland expansion. We overlaid this information with maps summarising the importance of remaining habitats to terrestrial vertebrates and (as examples of major ecosystem services) to global and local climate regulation. This intersection revealed several largely converted yet relatively low-yielding areas (such as central, eastern, and northeastern Thailand and the Ayeyarwady Delta), where narrowing yield gaps by improving transport links has the potential to substantially increase food production at relatively limited environmental cost. Concentrating new roads and road improvements here while taking strong measures to prevent their spread into areas which are still extensively forested (such as northern Laos, western Yunnan, and southwestern Cambodia) could thus enhance rural livelihoods and regional food production while helping safeguard vital ecosystem services and globally significant biological diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing refugee crisis in Europe has seen many countries rush to construct border security fencing to divert or control the flow of people. This follows a trend of border fence construction across Eurasia during the post-9/11 era. This development has gone largely unnoticed by conservation biologists during an era in which, ironically, transboundary cooperation has emerged as a conservation paradigm. These fences represent a major threat to wildlife because they can cause mortality, obstruct access to seasonally important resources, and reduce effective population size. We summarise the extent of the issue and propose concrete mitigation measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The oversupply of postdoctoral scholars relative to available faculty positions has led to calls for better assessment of career outcomes. Here, we report the results of a study of postdoctoral outcomes at the University of California, San Francisco, and suggest that institutions have an obligation to determine where their postdoc alumni are employed and to share this information with current and future trainees. Further, we contend that local efforts will be more meaningful than a national survey, because of the great variability in training environment and the classification of postdoctoral scholars among institutions. We provide a framework and methodology that can be adopted by others, with the goal of developing a finely grained portrait of postdoctoral career outcomes across the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coral reefs on remote islands and atolls are less exposed to direct human stressors but are becoming increasingly vulnerable because of their development for geopolitical and military purposes. Here we document dredging and filling activities by countries in the South China Sea, where building new islands and channels on atolls is leading to considerable losses of, and perhaps irreversible damages to, unique coral reef ecosystems. Preventing similar damage across other reefs in the region necessitates the urgent development of cooperative management of disputed territories in the South China Sea. We suggest using the Antarctic Treaty as a positive precedent for such international cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]