Academia today finds itself in a paradox. The ‘publish or perish’ mantra has spiralled into an uncalled race, where the finish line is quantity , and not quality . In this obsession to stack CVs with publication credits, research quality and integrity often suffer. Between 2018 and 2022, research articles witnessed a 22.78 per cent growth to 5.14 million. Yet concerns over research integrity persist.

Leiden Madtrics readers might already be familiar with what some have called a “great project” but a “terrible acronym”: GLOBAL, the Guidance List for the repOrting of Bibliometric AnaLyses. Last summer, we invited bibliometricians to join the GLOBAL Delphi study to co-develop a reporting guideline for bibliometric analyses.

(The Spanish version of this blog post is available here). The project, funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), is led by the Latin American Forum for Scientific Evaluation (FOLEC) of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), in collaboration with the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University and SIRIS Academic. International funding circuits are not neutral;

Why rethinking PhD trajectories matters now In the last few years, we have witnessed a growing interplay between the Open Science (OS) movement and the reform of research assessment through global initiatives such as CoARA. In the Netherlands, national efforts like Recognition &

A preprint is a research article that is made openly available on a preprint server, typically before submission to a peer-reviewed journal. Preprinting enables new scientific knowledge to be shared in a timely and open way. It often takes many months or even years for an article to pass through the peer review process of a journal.

In early 2023, CWTS introduced a new organisational structure of so-called focal areas to address the challenges outlined in its knowledge agenda. As discussed in a previous post, the knowledge agenda is not another research agenda, but rather combines research and intervention around the mission of CWTS to better understand how research is practiced and governed, and how it serves society. The focal area Evaluation &

The Open Science (OS) movement has evolved in the last decades, with different actors taking different paths across the various dimensions of the OS concept. Contradictory implementation plans for open access and disparate visions of citizen science co-exist, and are often in conflict at the global scale.

Although fraud and misconduct have always existed in research and scholarly communication, the rise of paper mills over the past decade has led to an unprecedented volume of fake or manipulated research being published. A 2022 report jointly published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the STM Association suggests that between 2 and 46% of submissions to journals in the time between 2019 and 2021 were produced by paper mills.

The new administration in the US is attacking science. Accepted grants and publications are forced to be retracted or altered if they contain forbidden words. Funding and peer review processes for biomedical research are grinding to a halt, and (open) governmental data are being taken down to reflect the views of the current political administration.

Various reform movements are working hard to improve the research system, focusing on issues ranging from research assessment, diversity and inclusion, and research culture to scientific publishing, open science, reproducibility, research integrity, and several others. The agendas of the different reform movements are interconnected and partly overlapping, but sometimes they are also in tension.

Over the past two years, the Information & Openness focal area has made progress in promoting openness in research information through many internal discussions and wider projects. Our efforts have focused on supporting openness-driven data usage and decision making in science management and evaluation, and recognizing the important role open research information plays in these processes.