The COVID-19 pandemic currently striking the world is accompanied by the marked necessity of communicating reliable and understandable scientific knowledge around the disease. In this situation, the complexity of the scientific language may not necessarily be accessible to the broader public. This makes it necessary to have communicators and scientists able to translate the implications of scientific work for our everyday lives.

Your paper is based on a huge amount of data. How did you manage to get access to so much data? In the internal database system of CWTS, we have access to the raw data of Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic. CWTS is probably the only center in the world that has access to all this data, so we are in a unique position to compare the different data sources.

Yesterday it was announced that the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU), the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and Elsevier have reached a national deal that includes Open Access publishing and reading services. The deal had been long in the making, and the road was bumpy.

This blogpost is a follow-up of the post by Carole de Bordes. She discusses a pre-covid19 workshop she attended on virtual meetings and conferences. Due to the Covid-19 crisis, we are currently experiencing a new way of working at CWTS. All staff needs to work from home. And besides the difficulties some colleagues are facing in this transition because of their home situations, most of the normal work could be taken up quite fast again.

For years I had been moving towards a long-cherished dream: pursuing a PhD. In my academic publishing role, the Leiden Manifesto, Leiden Ranking, and CWTS journal indicators had played an important part. The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), seemed the most suitable place. However, I was wondering if this would be possible for a middle-aged mother of four living in a small Eastern European country.

In this blog we review a sample of funding calls and find out some contrasting research agendas supported in different agencies; however, biomedical research seems dominant in many calls.

Through our master’s programme MARIHE (Master in Research and Innovation in Higher Education), we were supported by the staff members at Tampere University in the selection of internship hosts, but we were also encouraged to suggest our own internship hosts around the world.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, researchers from all disciplines are coming together to contribute their expertise.

Academic organisations have changed substantially in recent decades in terms of their tasks, structure and culture due to increased internationalisation, lower government influence and funding, and larger influence from external stakeholders. Like other public organisations, universities are increasingly financed in an output-oriented manner, and therefore emphasis on performance has grown.

Many scholars at CWTS are now working hard, as they are elsewhere, to make some meaningful and helpful contribution in the current crisis. Being neither biomedical specialists, nor specifically engaged in topics related to disease or epidemics, a Science and Technology Studies research center like CWTS might not be the most logical of places to start doing Covid-19 related research projects.

Open Access (OA) is key to achieve a greater dissemination of knowledge among scholars. Its benefits are acknowledged and advocated by many researchers, universities, and funding agencies internationally. They have produced global manifestos and implemented collective actions to make publicly-funded research open.