News & Comment

The long term and persistent challenges faced by women and other minorities in science requires dedicated strategies. Here the authors share the example of “Parité sciences”, game changer initiative deployed in Québec to address gender disparity.

Women+ continue to face obstacles at each step along the way of pursuing a scientific career, and physics has one of the lowest gender diverse participation of all STEM subjects. This is a tremendous waste of potential that can only be reversed with a significant cultural change by all participants.

Urbasi Sinha is a Professor of Light and Matter Physics at the Raman Research Institute, India. Her research is in the field of quantum technologies, where she uses experimental methods to investigate quantum information processing, precision tests of quantum mechanics, photonic quantum computing as well as quantum communications including quantum key distribution (QKD) in free space, fibre and integrated photonics.

Tanusri Saha-Dasgupta is a Professor and Director at S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, India. Her research focuses on computational condensed matter physics and the study of the optical, electronic, and magnetic properties of materials from first principles. Tanusri has been widely engaged in working groups, meetings, and other activities to promote gender parity in Indian academic institutions.

Sharona Gordon is a biophysicist, who applies the tools of physics to understand the fundamental principles of life. Her work combines biochemistry, electrophysiology, and fluorescence spectroscopy to understand how chemical signals get converted to electrical signals at cell membranes. She is a full professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Flavia de Almeida Dias is an experimental particle physicist who has been a member of the ATLAS Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider since 2013 and has had leading contributions in analyses involving pairs of vector bosons, searches for extra Higgs bosons and dark-matter mediators. She is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and at Nikhef—the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics. She was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and the University of Edinburgh.

While its museums are adorned by the masterpieces born from the brushes of Klimt and Schiele, the steps of prominent scientists like Hess, Boltzmann, and Schrödinger still echo in the halls of its university. Vienna can be rivalled by few cities in the world for artistic and scientific heritage, and that commits to continue its tradition as a melting pot of art and science.

Lyndsay Fletcher is a Professor of Astrophysics, specialising in solar physics, in the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow and the Rosseland Centre for Solar Physics, University of Oslo.

Helen Gleeson is an experimental physicist working in soft matter. She has held leadership positions in both the University of Manchester and the University of Leeds where she is currently the Cavendish Professor of Physics. The focus of her research is in the physics of liquid crystals, both from a fundamental and applied perspective.

February 22, 2023 marks an important milestone. We celebrate the fifth anniversary of Communications Physics.

Communications Physics is five years old. So we are celebrating, with a special anniversary collection. And as we do every day with exciting physics papers, we take a moment to reflect on our journey so far and our future direction.

While gender disparities in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines are widely noted, the citation gap is still understudied and awareness remains low. Here, we address citation inequity in physics and describe individual and collective mitigation initiatives, including the citation diversity statement.

All human activity generates a carbon footprint and scientific research is no exception; however, given the diversity in research activity, developing a standard approach to monitor environmental impact is complex. In this comment, the authors propose a framework for scientists to self-report emissions of research-related emissions in their papers as a means to gradually build an overview of the potential carbon footprint of scientific activity.

In January 2019, we announced to our authors and referees that Communications Physics would adopt Transparent Peer Review (TPR). What does this mean and how has it been received?

In order for terahertz devices to reach technological maturity, robust characterization methods and reliable metrics for comparison between studies must be defined. In this comment, the authors describe the challenges faced in obtaining robust power measurements in the terahertz regime, and summarize recent efforts to establish standards for this field.

Science diplomacy has become an important dimension of international relations. Here’s a take on the past, present and future of fusion science diplomacy and the role such big collaborative endeavours play in shaping the future of this field in the international political sphere.

Global events in the past year has made prescient a long-standing debate on the definition and suitability of impact and novelty as criteria for publication in selective journals. Reflecting on this issue, Prof Andrea Armani and Prof Jerry Lee argue that rigour and reproducibility is, in fact, more crucial.

Emergency action in response to the COVID-19 pandemic led to the removal of financial and regulatory barriers to developing medical technologies. But, as Andrea Armani and Eric Diebold explain, a broader cultural shift in academia can expedite their translation from laboratory benches to real-world use.

Göttingen is home to the Third Infinity conference, a biennial event organized by Ph.D. candidates that aims, beyond discussing complex systems physics, at providing a platform to discuss themes central to doctoral life and education. As part of the organizing committee of Third Infinity 2020, in this comment we would like to raise attention on the main issues faced by today’s European interdisciplinary Ph.D. students as we learnt them from direct experience during the organization process, as well as from discussion with our peers during the event.

Trust is the theme of this year’s peer review week. Confidence in the most broadly used form of assessment, and often considered a quality seal, of scholarly communication, remains high. However, the continuously evolving means of disseminating science and the exponential growth of research output require journals to do more to reassure their authors and readers on the rigour of peer review, while maintaining an open dialogue aimed at improving the system.