The increasingly hostile attitude of the new U.S. government towards science and academia leaves many of us deeply concerned— if not outright alarmed. In an effort to better understand the unfolding situation and navigate its potential impacts, we provide an overview of five types of threats, each supported by links to documented sources.

[Author's Note: This is Version 2 of this Editorial Blog Post. Version 1 was openly reviewed through MetaROR and this version reflects changes made as a result of those reviews. The response to reviewers is here.] Academia is undergoing a rapid transformation characterized by exponential growth of scholarly outputs.

A few months back, Upstream editor Martin Fenner suggested that I submit my Upstream blog post titled, Drinking from the Firehose? Write More and Publish Less , for peer-review as a sort of experiment for Upstream through MetaROR. MetaROR, a relative newcomer to the scholarly communication community, provides the review and curate steps in the "publish-review-curate" model for meta-research.

The Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) has released a Community Call to Action, inviting organizations and individuals to contribute resources (funding, expertise, metadata, and infrastructure) to support the first phase of a community-driven infrastructure for making persistent identifier (PID) metadata better and more complete. Informational Webinar :  March 5, 2025 at 3pm UTC. Register Now!

Worldwide, science is under attack by anti-scientific movements. The new US administration has thrown the entire academy into chaos, threatening global health. This article is a call for the open science community to practice what it preaches and lead by example in defending science.

In recent years, interoperability has become an important concept in the field of research data management.  Discussions about interoperability have taken place in published articles and numerous presentations [1] [2], and several interoperability standards have been developed [3], [4], [5].  The term has been applied, among other things, to data, metadata and research tools.

Bibliographic databases should support innovation and experimentation. Here, we offer four criteria for innovation-friendly bibliographic databases. We urge the global research community to use databases that support and do not hinder innovation in scholarly communication and research assessment.

Open community resources are increasingly used to promote open research practices, and are themselves an open practice. They are a powerful way to create shared ownership of a resource and provide agency to add or change them. However, they also present new struggles around embedding them in institutional practice, which we experienced in our own work.

Do you think the FAIR principles for Research Software are working? The FAIR Principles for Research Software were published in March 2022 and described in a paper in October 2022.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of research, the importance of high-quality metadata and persistent identifiers (PIDs) cannot be overstated. PIDs and metadata are the connective tissue that binds together diverse research outputs, enabling discovery, accessibility, and reuse. Despite their critical role, the current model for metadata creation and enrichment is fraught with inefficiencies.

This post expands further on the assertion recently made by Danny Kingsley in her post on “Language co-option in the open space” that “words matter” when trying to have meaningful conversations about open access. Not only do words matter for creating common agreement, but words can also actively create biases, inform decision-making, and even thwart the visions of open publishing and infrastructure advocates most want to champion.