At CWTS, many researchers travel around the world to attend conferences, meet with relevant stakeholders, give lectures and/or provide trainings. But what are the costs of all these travels? There are many reasons to avoid flying and to facilitate virtual conferencing, including climate change, work pressure, and seeking to include a diverse audience.

How scholarly knowledge is communicated – using natural language, data in tables and images as digital PDFs – severely limits the extent to which machines can help us in searching, exploring and exploiting scholarly knowledge. In the age of modern information infrastructures and digitalization, it is unsatisfactory to continue presenting scholarly knowledge solely as text-based documents.

What is PREP? PREP is an online platform contributing to the responsible organisation of editorial procedures by scholarly journals. It facilitates journal editors to become transparent about their editorial procedures, advises journal editors and publishers on potential improvements of their peer review procedures, and presents integrated information about the variety of review procedures currently in use.

Taking place in the beautiful sunny Lisbon, PIDapalooza 2020 feels like a festival from the start. With free festival t-shirts, wrist bands and a Nails and Instant Tattoos corner, participants easily got into the fun mood of the event. Some of those who have attended the previous editions of the event were wearing festive hats and t-shirts from the previous edition of the festival. I also picked up my first PIDapalooza merch.

Walking through the halls of Sorbonne University last month, I find an announcement on a wall that would catch the eye of anyone interested in Open Science (OS): it was the Sorbonne Declaration on Research Data Rights. Signed at this very university a few weeks ago, the Declaration was published on January 28 at the LERU website, and it is an important document to promote Open Data. But what exactly is Open Data?

The Gender Inequalities in Science workshop took place at Leiden University on 7th-8th October 2019, organized jointly by CWTS and Elsevier’s International Center for the Study of Research (ICSR). For two days, researchers from different research institutions, universities and science stakeholders discussed issues concerning gender in science from diverse perspectives and contexts.

"Welcome to the quackathon!". That is how we invited researchers from the CWTS to an afternoon workshop during our yearly first research retreat. But what on earth was that supposed to mean? The reference to a hackathon is fairly obvious. In a hackathon, programmers come together to jointly work on a computer problem and try to solve it during the meeting. We have programmers at our centre.

I love quantitative research, because it gives me the feeling that I understand what I am doing and I can explain it clearly to anyone. On the other hand, I like qualitative research just as much as cats like water. Just thinking about analyzing a round of interviews gives me a headache. My mind imagines a scene of researchers arguing over the meaning of the words in the interview. What a nightmare!

Some universities love to boast about their positions in university rankings, almost as if they were part of a football championship. However, these rankings were never intended to be used this way. This is common knowledge within the science and technology studies community, but the causes are open for debate. For example, who is to blame for the misuse?

This is our last blog post of the year. 2019 has been a very fruitful year for us, and we are looking forward to what 2020 will bring. For now, we would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a new year full of scientific discoveries.

I'm sure the following scenario is familiar to most of the readers: You're writing a new scientific paper and are scanning the reference lists of your most important sources to see if you've missed anything interesting, maybe even a seminal paper cited by several of your current sources. Recently, a couple of web apps have come up to simplify this process by constructing and visualizing the underlying citation networks.