A question of optimism

Israel and the US have accused the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) of being an ‘obstacle to peace’. But many of UNRWA’s shortcomings are a deliberate product of its original set-up – which was engineered by the US itself and supported by Israel.

Crossref was created back in 2000 by 12 forward-thinking scholarly publishers from North America and Europe, and by 2002, these members had registered 4 million DOI records. At the time of writing, we have over 23,600 members in 164 different countries.

This month’s news includes: Research software community news, including South Africa’s National Science and Technology Forum Research Software Awards Research Software Community Leadership Forum (CLF) IRSC Program Committee Opportunities to get involved with community initiatives Resources Community events, including eResearch NZ / eRangahau Aotearoa 2026 Read the November newsletter

We are pleased to announce the publication of our fourth guide from the BMFTR-funded (Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space) project “Professionalisierung der Open-Access-Repositorien-Infrastruktur in Deutschland (Pro OAR DE)”: “Publikations- und Kostenmonitoring: Handlungsfeld für institutionelle Open-Access Repositorien” (available in German only). Matthias, L., Pampel, H., Khamis, C. O., & Rothfritz, L. (2025).

The global productivity increase in science is reducing the willingness of researchers to perform peer review. To bring the production of manuscripts and reviews in line with each other, I propose a global publishing credit club. Members of the club receive credits for peer review reports that they complete.

Im September 2018 hatte die aus nationalen europäischen Forschungsförderern und dem European Research Council (ERC) zusammengesetzte cOAlition S den so genannten Plan S vorgelegt, nach dem ab 2021 sämtliche Publikationen aus mit öffentlichen oder privaten Mitteln von nationalen, regionalen und internationalen Förderorganisationen finanzierten Forschung Open Access erscheinen sollte.

For decades, global health policy has approached mental illness primarily as a clinical challenge, a condition to be managed within the walls of hospitals and clinics by medical professionals. This biomedical focus, while essential, has often obscured the broader context in which mental health is shaped.

An AI Manhattan Project for Science and Biotech

There was another lab working on our “favorite” protein. Not in our building, and not even in our time zone but our questions and models were quite similar. We knew of them through the usual channels: their publications, conference talks. And I do believe they knew of our extensive work too. So when their next paper came out, it was surprising to see that none of our lab’s work was cited. Their omission was not an error.

Informationsbudget als Leitungsaufgabe Ein Workshop von Hochschulrektorenkonferenz und open-access.network zur strategischen Steuerung der Open-Access-Transformation Drei Jahre nach den Empfehlungen des Wissenschaftsrates, Informationsbudgets an Wissenschaftseinrichtungen zu etablieren, luden Hochschulrektorenkonferenz und open-access.network Leitungspersonen aus Hochschulen und Forschungseinrichtungen zum Erfahrungsaustausch ein.