Science, science everywhere

Off

There seems to be an abundance of articles and posts with the word ‘science’ in the headline lately — at least among those that have been floating around the office.  Sure, ‘science’ is a fairly broad term that can relate to anything from a specific subject to a methodology, but in whatever form it takes, it always seems to grab my attention. Today we have science and gender, science and human rights, and science and open access. We also have bandwidth and open access and a touch of the visual from the Guardian’s datablog.

A recent article from Research Information, ‘Gender inequality continues in science and technology’ (Susan Elan), looks at the National Assessments and Benchmarking of Gender, Science, Technology and Innovation study. The study assessed the level of support, opportunities and participation of women in science in the world’s leading knowledge-based economies.

David Dickson’s article ‘Science and Human Rights: A valuable perspective’ on SciDev.net looks at how a human rights approach to S&T development can help reinforce moves towards inclusive development.

While not exactly hot off the press (it came out in July), but fitting with the theme, the European Commission released ‘Scientific Data: Open access to research results will boost Europe’s innovation capacity’. This outlined measures to improve access to scientific information produced in Europe. A key driver behind this is that “broader and more rapid access to scientific papers and data will make it easier for researchers and businesses to build on the findings of public-funded research”. This page also contains links to the policy background and open data strategy.

Moving on from discussing science to discussing access (to science), Kevin Zelnio’s article ‘Bandwidth and open access in developing countries‘ provides a good summary of the different ways to access research today. As the title would suggest, this discussion includes not only methods of access, but the importance of bandwidth in making use of them as they are made available. It also references one of our reports, which is nice to see…

Finally, the Guardian Datablog posted ‘World Aid Data: Every country ranked for transparency’. While the information is interesting, it is also nice to see that DFID comes out on top.

 

INASP

Comments are closed.