Scientific papers with shorter titles might get more citations, study suggests

A study in the journal Royal Society Open Science suggests that articles with shorter titles may be cited more often that those with longer ones, based on 140,000 papers published between 2007 and 2013. Read more about this study in ScienceInsider.

NSF announces public access policy plans

On March 18, 2015, the National Science Foundation announced its plan to provide greater public access to the results of its funded research, "Today's Data, Tomorrow's Discoveries". This will be officially announced in April 2015 and is slated to go into effect in January 2016.

Much of the plan is a re-commitment to data management and the availability of funds to support publication and presentation of data to the public, but the new component is the publications policy: Within a year of publication, either the version of record or the final accepted manuscript in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, and papers in juried conference proceedings, must be deposited into a publicly-accessible database.

This move is not without precedent among Federal sponsors as the NIH has had such a policy in place for years.

Petition: to require free access to taxpayer-funded research articles

We the People on Whitehouse.gov currently has almost 9,000 signatures for a petition to "require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research". Apparently people don't want to pay to read about research projects funded by their own money! Makes some sense, but may be a bit too simplistic. If you'd like to read the full text and decide whether to sign the petition, click here.