(18 Apr 2025) After freezing all grants to Columbia University last week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now stopping grant and contract payments to Harvard University and four other universities that President Donald Trump’s administration believes have not done enough to combat antisemitism on their campuses. The move will both block new funding and halt payments…
By Ruth A Pagell* (21 Apr 2025) Living in the United States and writing about higher education has been challenging so far this year. I keep getting distracted from my topic for the month—which is reputation—by all of the other news read and heard every day. It makes university rankings seem trivial. Times Higher Education…
(15 Apr 2025) The organization responsible for allocating basic research funding in China has issued misconduct findings against 26 researchers for violations ranging from breach of confidentiality to image manipulation, plagiarism, and buying and selling authorship. The National Natural Science Foundation of China, or NSFC, released the results of 15 misconduct investigations on April 11. Several of…
(14 Apr 2025) From Aaron Tay’s Musings about librarianship: “I recently compared three academic AI search tools: Primo Research Assistant, Web of Science Research Assistant, and Scopus AI for a review article. Why these three? Mainly because they are add-ons to extremely well-established academic search engines or databases: Primo: Owned by Exlibris (a Clarivate company), Primo is one of…
(14 Apr 2025) Requests to remove books from library shelves are on the rise in the UK, as the influence of pressure groups behind book bans in the US crosses the Atlantic, according to those working in the sector. Although “the situation here is nowhere [near] as bad, censorship does happen and there are some…
(9 Apr 2025) The Japan Academic Association for Copyright Clearance (JAC), in collaboration with RightsDirect Japan, a subsidiary of CCC (Copyright Clearance Center), today announced the availability of artificial intelligence (AI) re-use rights within the Digital Copyright License (DCL), an enterprise-wide content licensing solution offering rights from millions of works to businesses. The JAC DCL enables companies with headquarters in Japan to…
(28 Mar 2025) A spate of research findings offer fresh evidence in the debate about whether peer reviewers should be paid for their time and expertise — a fraught topic that has provoked discussion among researchers. This month, two journals released data from their own experiments that suggest that offering payments of around US$250 to researchers…
(4 Apr 2025) Following the University of California Ebook Usability Common Knowledge Group’s (EUCKG) analysis of 3 publisher platforms (Cambridge, Elsevier, and Wiley) and the publication of an initial report, the EUCKG received feedback to evaluate ebook aggregators to see how they perform against similar usability criteria. The criteria focuses on users’ features related to user interfaces,…
(3 Apr 2025) From New York Times, “In many areas of the F.D.A., no employees remain to process payroll, to file retirement or layoff paperwork and to help overseas inspectors who are at risk of maxing out agency credit cards. Even the agency’s library, where researchers and experts relied on medical journal subscriptions that have…
(4 Apr 2025) China is perhaps the world’s new science superpower in terms of gross spending on research and development, a new Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report reveals. Meanwhile, research is under enormous pressure in two other research giants, America and Europe, says Sir Peter Gluckman, president of the International Science…