The National Science Foundation (NSF), in carrying out the Obama administration's new push for greater public access to research published in scientific journals, will consider exclusivity periods shorter than the 12-month standard in the White House directive, as well as trade-offs involving data-sharing and considerations of publishers'…

Scientific journals have been retracting unreliable articles at rapidly escalating rates in the past few years, raising concern about whether research faces a burgeoning ethical crisis. Various causes have been suspected, with the common theme being that journals are seeing more cases of plagiarism and fudging of data as researchers and editors…

For many Americans, the confluence of a recession and a growing realization that the nation needs to end its reliance on fossil fuels seems like a double dose of bad news. But for the nation's research universities, it may be an opportunity. A Brookings Institution, a policy-study group with ties to the Democratic leaders now controlling the White…

After spending $133-million to build a new award-winning technological gem of a power plant, officials at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst are expecting their fuel bills to rise by $7-million a year. And yet they are very proud of the accomplishment. The reasons for the higher energy costs involve a complicated mix of technology,…

When President Obama dreams out loud, as he did in a speech last week, of a future when solar panels are as "cheap as paint" and buildings produce their own energy, researchers like the physicist Yang Yang are dreaming right along with him. Mr. Yang's laboratory is among hundreds at colleges around the country that stand to benefit from a new…

After a month of celebrating the largest boost in federal spending on scientific research that most of them have ever seen, university presidents are increasingly tuned to the possibility of a downside. The new money--primarily from a $21.5-billion jump in research-and-development spending in the economic-stimulus law--is certainly welcome,…