The battle over public access to federally financed research is heating up again. The basic question is this: When taxpayers help pay for scholarly research, should those taxpayers get to see the results in the form of free access to the resulting journal articles? Actions in Washington this month highlight how far from settled the question is,…

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…

Although the percentage of female authors is still less than women's overall representation within the full-time faculty ranks, researchers found that the proportion has increased as more women have entered the professoriate. They also found that women cluster into certain subfields and are somewhat underrepresented in the prestigious position of…

Faculty members gnash their teeth and wring their hands when students plagiarize. They cry for offenders to be punished. But now an online text-search program directed at their own work suggests that professors in biomedicine may be just as guilty of paper-writing sins. More than 70,000 article abstracts appeared disturbingly similar to other…

Much of academic publishing depends on peer review, a literary form that never sees the light of day and only rarely reveals its author's name to the intended reader. While a negative judgment can be upsetting, the serious review, no matter what the ultimate verdict on publication, normally contains probing comments and suggestions that will keep…

Re:Poste, a Web application that encourages academics to pick apart online articles from the mass media, is only in its infancy. The program has already generated buzz on a social-networking Web site called the Pool. Re:Poste is one of 600 creative works--games, art, and more--by new-media students and faculty members, most of them on the Orono…

Many professors and graduate students finishing their Ph.D.'s at the University of California at Berkeley scoffed at the idea of a post at a liberal-arts college. To them it was considered an acceptable choice only if none of the jobs at research universities came through. Liberal-arts colleges were viewed merely as teaching institutions and did…

Academic Analytics is a for-profit company, owned in part by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, that compiles annual Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index. Its Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index is a ranking of graduate programs at research universities based on what purports to be the first objective measurement of per capita…

This article discusses a new standard for measuring graduate programs in the United States. The Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, produced by Academic Analytics, a for-profit company, rates faculty members' scholarly output at nearly 7,300 doctoral programs around the country. It examines the number of book and journal articles published by…

Microsoft has introduced a new search tool to help people find scholarly articles online. The service, which includes journal articles from prominent academic societies and publishers, puts Microsoft in direct competition with Google Scholar. The new free search tool, which should work on most Web browsers, is called Windows Live Academic Search…

Fullerton, California--College students use technology constantly. They text-message friends, compile playlists for their iPods, and are whizzes at updating their MySpace profiles. But when it comes to one kind of work they are required to do in college--namely, academic research--they can be inept. Too often, college officials say, students rely…

"Chronicle of Higher Education" presents an abundant source of news and information for college and university faculty members and administrators. This April 16, 2004 issue of "Chronicle of Higher Education" includes the following articles: (1) "Shimmering with Stories" (Biemiller, Lawrence); (2) "Cultures…

"Chronicle of Higher Education" presents an abundant source of news and information for college and university faculty members and administrators. This February 18, 2005 issue of "Chronicle for Higher Education" includes the following articles: (1) "From Special Ed to Higher Ed" (Schmidt, Peter); (2) "University…