This article reports on how some scientists impersonate outside reviewers for journals and give high marks to their own manuscripts. Scientists appear to have figured out a new way to avoid any bad prepublication reviews that dissuade journals from publishing their articles: Write positive reviews themselves, under other people's names. In…

The National Science Foundation (NSF), in carrying out the Obama administration's new push for greater public access to research published in scientific journals, will consider exclusivity periods shorter than the 12-month standard in the White House directive, as well as trade-offs involving data-sharing and considerations of publishers'…

Students are bringing the latest devices to campuses expecting to use them as learning tools, and colleges are trying to deliver. Some of the world's best-known universities tried some experiments with a new model of online learning, in which students watch short video lectures, take automatically graded quizzes, and use online communities to work…

OMICS Publishing Group is an open-access publisher operating under an author-pays model. Unlike traditional journal subscriptions in which readers or institutions pay to read content, OMICS relies on its contributors for financial support. Although the author-pays model is not a new phenomenon in the realm of open access, its recent popularity has…

It is not news that software exists to check undergraduate papers for plagiarism. What is less well known is that some federal grant agencies are using technology to detect plagiarism in grant proposals. That variety of research misconduct is a growing problem, according to federal experts. The National Science Foundation, in its most recent…

Scientific journals have been retracting unreliable articles at rapidly escalating rates in the past few years, raising concern about whether research faces a burgeoning ethical crisis. Various causes have been suspected, with the common theme being that journals are seeing more cases of plagiarism and fudging of data as researchers and editors…

Scholarly groups have long served as hubs of academic life and the embodiments of their disciplines, but they face uncertain and divergent futures. Some disciplinary associations are struggling to remain relevant and financially viable as demographic and technological changes threaten their traditional sources of revenue. The core of their…

Of all the reasons to use "The New Yorker" in a college writing class, the most compelling may be that its articles go beyond--well beyond--the five-paragraph model. Why, oh why, did that paradigm become such a fixture in composition courses? Students in the author's writing classes invariably suppose they can compose a quick introduction, add…

Although the percentage of female authors is still less than women's overall representation within the full-time faculty ranks, researchers found that the proportion has increased as more women have entered the professoriate. They also found that women cluster into certain subfields and are somewhat underrepresented in the prestigious position of…

This spring, academic journals may turn the anti-plagiarism software that professors have been using against their students on the professors themselves. CrossRef, a publishing industry association, and the software company iParadigms announced a deal last week to create CrossCheck, an anti-plagiarism program for academic journals. The software…

Senior scholars, the A-list of academic publishing, seem to submit fewer unsolicited manuscripts to traditional humanities journals than they used to. The journal has become, with very few exceptions, the place where junior and midlevel scholars are placing their work. Technology and changing habits have called into question the nature of the…

This article features the Cliffs Cottage, a "showcase home" at Furman University which demonstrates the use of green technology in residential building and teaches about sustainability. Custom-built for the shelter-magazine dreams of "Southern Living," a sponsor of the home, the house seems better suited for a tony subdivision.…

Faculty members gnash their teeth and wring their hands when students plagiarize. They cry for offenders to be punished. But now an online text-search program directed at their own work suggests that professors in biomedicine may be just as guilty of paper-writing sins. More than 70,000 article abstracts appeared disturbingly similar to other…

In what some are calling a peaceful revolution, researchers have mounted a takeover of high-energy-physics publishing. One signature at a time, national research agencies and university libraries have pledged to support a radical new system that would replace expensive subscriptions to leading journals with membership in a nonprofit group. The new…

This paper reports that a large-scale, multinational attempt in Europe to rank humanities journals has set off a revolt. In a protest letter, some journal editors have called it "a dangerous and misguided exercise." The project has also started a drumbeat of alarm in this country, as U.S.-based scholars begin to grasp the implications…