Comment in 2022

US universities have made public commitments to recruit and retain faculty of colour. Analysis of three federal datasets shows that at current rates diversity in US faculty will never reach racial parity. Yet, colleges and universities could achieve parity by 2050 by diversifying their faculty at 3.5 times the current pace.

Trophy hunting remains a high-octane debate for scholars and actors at various levels, including governments, lobbies, supranational bodies, local communities and broader publics. These actors are often driven by a range of competing interests. Bridging the divides will require collaboration and a focus on shared goals.

Applying behavioural science can support system-level change for climate protection. Behavioural scientists should provide reliable large-scale data that help in understanding public perceptions and behaviours. Governments should secure infrastructure for data collection and the implementation of evidence.

When sharing research data for verification and reuse, behavioural researchers should protect participants’ privacy, particularly when studying sensitive topics. Because personally identifying data remain present in many open psychology datasets, we urge researchers to mend privacy via checks of re-identification risk before sharing data. We offer guidance for sharing responsibly.

The low representation of academics with disabilities is a longstanding problem on which progress has been slow. Drawing on my research on disability-related barriers and my experiences of disability, I make six practical suggestions for how academic staff and people with disabilities can help make academia more disability inclusive.

Mental health, neuroscience and neuroethics researchers must engage local African communities to enable discourses on cultural understandings of mental illness. To ensure that these engagements are both ethical and innovative, they must be facilitated with cultural competence and humility, because serious consideration of different contextual and local factors is critical.

Data has tremendous potential to build resilience in government. To realize this potential, we need a new, human-centred, distinctly public sector approach to data science and AI, in which these technologies do not just automate or turbocharge what humans can already do well, but rather do things that people cannot.

When academics support refugee scholars, everyone benefits. Scholars who are refugees face complex challenges, including bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and academic barriers. Ahmad Al Ajlan discusses key steps that academic communities can take to support and integrate their refugee colleagues.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) already exist in several countries, with many more on the way. But although CBDCs can promote financial inclusivity by offering convenience and low transaction costs, their adoption must not lead to the loss of privacy and erosion of civil liberties.

Failure to consider the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion in biomedical and human behaviour research harms patients, trainees and scientists. On the basis of experience and evidence, we make actionable, specific recommendations on how equity, diversity and inclusion can be considered at each step of a research project.

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine showcases substantial challenges, especially to international humanitarian and criminal law and human rights. It also calls for an urgent revisiting of the role of the United Nations Security Council in the maintenance of international peace and security, and of the security architecture in Europe and worldwide.

Russian disinformation exploits social problems in foreign states to undermine people’s trust and breed conspiracy theories. Tackling it is difficult but feasible.

In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a broad swathe of countries have imposed a bevy of sanctions aimed at Vladimir Putin and his supporters. However, the future success of sanctions in curbing Russian aggression is unclear and, despite being targeted, they may harm average Russian individuals and affect prices worldwide.

On 24 February 2022, Russia’s attack on Ukraine shook the world. Among many issues forcibly raised by the war, the question of information manipulation has been particularly important for the public and scholars alike. How did Vladimir Putin’s regime manage to convince the Russian public to support the invasion?

Financial, informational and other constraints lower the adoption of welfare-improving technologies amongst people living in poverty. Field trials have identified effective strategies to facilitate behaviour change. Researchers and policymakers need to apply this knowledge, and form institutional partnerships to implement solutions at scale.

Although large-scale data are increasingly used to study human behaviour, researchers now recognize their limits for producing sound social science. Qualitative research can prevent some of these problems. Such methods can help to understand data quality, inform design and analysis decisions and guide interpretation of results.

Olfaction has profoundly shaped human experience and behaviour from the deep past through to the present day. Advanced biomolecular and ‘omics’ sciences enable more direct insights into past scents, offering new options to explore critical aspects of ancient society and lifeways as well as the historical meanings of smell.

Computational psychiatry holds promise for basic research and clinical practice in safeguarding mental health. In this Comment, we discuss why China needs computational psychiatry, why its development in China will benefit the field globally, and the challenges of promoting computational psychiatry in China and how to tackle them.

Women are underrepresented in prestigious science roles in many countries. This is also true in China, where they are less likely to succeed in election to the Chinese Academies of Sciences and Engineering — for reasons unrelated to scientific merit. Reform of election procedures is needed to foster gender balance.

Open scholarship has transformed research, and introduced a host of new terms in the lexicon of researchers. The ‘Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Teaching’ (FORRT) community presents a crowdsourced glossary of open scholarship terms to facilitate education and effective communication between experts and newcomers.