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A group of publishers has agreed to make article summaries available in a common format.Credit: Getty
A single site for free journal abstracts
A group of publishers has pledged to make abstracts of research papers free to read, all in one place. The publishers will submit their article summaries to Crossref, an agency that registers scholarly papers’ unique digital object identifiers (DOIs). Crossref will make the abstracts available in a common format that is machine-readable and easily searchable. So far, 52 publishers have signed up to the initiative, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the US National Academy of Sciences. The goal is to boost the reach and reuse of scientific results, but some scientists have questioned whether it goes far enough to make research more widely available.
Support for US scientists facing scrutiny
A civil-rights group will provide advice and legal resources to Chinese and Chinese American researchers who are facing inquiries from law enforcement as a result of the United States’ increased crack-down on foreign interference. “Simply because the FBI comes to your door, you do not have to answer questions,” says John Yang, the president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
Good news for travelling salespeople
Computer scientists have taken the iconic travelling salesperson problem down a peg. The quandary asks you to optimize the shortest round trip through a set of cities, with applications for everything from planning bus routes to DNA sequencing. A new method for finding approximate solutions to the problem beats the long-standing front-runner only by an almost unthinkably tiny amount. Nevertheless, it breaks through a theoretical and psychological logjam that researchers hope will “open the floodgates to further improvements”, reports Quanta.
Features & opinion
Research integrity: 9 ways to walk the walk
Over the past two decades, there have been plenty of declarations that outline the components of trustworthy research and the principles of research integrity. There have also been shocking cases of fraud, alarming rates of questionable research practices and foot-dragging on retractions and corrections, write political scientist Niels Mejlgaard and 20 colleagues. Their long-term study on improving research integrity reveals nine ways institutions are trying to make things better, from preventing hypercompetition to offering incentives for data sharing.
A master of molecular dynamics
Theoretical physicist Berni Alder pioneered the computer modelling of matter — but himself preferred intuitive understanding over mathematical derivations, writes his former colleague David Ceperley. “He was never the programmer, but the impresario of younger colleagues, pushing them to work on difficult problems through his curiosity and intense interest,” writes Ceperley. Alder died last month, aged 95.
How to declaw COVID misinformation
Countering the “misinformation infodemic” surrounding COVID-19 is key to stopping the virus’s rampant progress through the United States, write molecular biologist Ali Nouri and political scientist Amir Bagherpour of the Federation of American Scientists. They offer recommendations including a coordinated campaign of social-media influencers and more spontaneous two-way chat between public-health officials and the people they need to reach.
Scientific American | 5 min read
The story of the longest fossilized journey
A prehistoric woman walked as fast as she could, carrying a child, in a bold straight line across muddy ground. A few hours later, she returned the same way, alone. This is the mysterious tale told by the longest track of fossil footprints in the world, which stretches over 1.5 kilometres in the dried-up lake bed of White Sands National Park in New Mexico. The path also shows marks from a giant ground sloth, which reared up when startled by the humans, and a mammoth that crossed the trail. We have no way of knowing the full story behind the remarkable journey, write geographer Matthew Bennett and palaeontologist Sally Reynolds, who analysed the footprints. But the image will resonate with anyone who’s made a hurried journey with a child in their arms.
Reference: Quaternary Science Reviews paper
