Equity for women in science: the role of gatekeepers

Sugimoto and Larivière's unique scientometric approach gained recognition within medicine when they coauthored a bibliometric analysis on gender and authorship in The Lancet's 2019 theme issue on advancing women in science, medicine, and global health. [...]despite women being more than half of all medical and science undergraduates for many years, Sugimoto and Larivière estimate that very slow growth in women's representation among scientists in clinical medicine means gender parity in authorship will not be reached in that field before 2049. By contrast, women science leaders typically advance early career researchers, share credit, and lead gender diverse teams, which have higher scientific impact. An acknowledged limitation is the use of one aspect of social identity, gender, in the binary assignment available in current classification systems and they were unable in most cases to include race or ethnicity indicators except where national census data allowed. The simple recognition of the editorial process being a social one—involving judgement, priority setting, negotiation, inevitable bias, and all the other aspects that define human behaviour—gives rise to seeing how decisions about what to publish and which messages to showcase are the product of a social process in which diverse sets of individuals applying high standards of editorial quality and scientific excellence nevertheless deploy agency, make choices, and exercise privilege.

Not so fast with fast funding.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many have become increasingly dissatisfied with how science funding is distributed. Traditional grant funding processes are seen as stifling the creativity of researchers, in addition to being bureaucratic, slow, and inefficient. Consequently, there have been increasing popular calls to make "fast funding" - fast, unbureaucratic grant applications - a new standard for scientific funding. Though this approach to funding, implemented by Fast Grants, has been successful as a pandemic response strategy, we believe there are serious costs to its wide-scale adoption, particularly for transparency and equity, and that the purported benefits - increased creativity and efficiency - are unlikely to materialize. While traditional funding mechanisms are certainly not perfect, scientific communities should think twice before adopting fast funding as a new standard for funding.

DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: POST-CRISIS ASSESSMENTS

The COVID-19 pandemic, which dragged on for more than two years, led to large-scale shifts in the major sectors of the world economy and affected the S&T sphere. The paper considers the main factors that have influenced innovative development, the choice of S&T priorities by major countries and corporations, as well as the crisis phenomena aggravated in the S&T sphere. It shows the growth of research and development costs in a narrow group of corporations in the biopharmaceutical and information and communication sectors with stagnating costs in other sectors, the large-scale growth of publication activity, the uneven growth of tax incentives from the states, the importance of “open innovations” in modern science. It is noted that the intensity of researches and developments all over the world grew in 2020–2021 even in those companies where the total expenses on science and innovations decreased, thus the consequences of the crisis will be appreciable up to the end of the current decade. Legislative innovations in the technological sphere in the USA were especially noted, comparative estimations with innovative development of China were carried out, and the prospects of technological confrontation between the two countries were outlined. The questions of tax stimulation of innovative activity and ambiguity of definition of expenses on research and development in corporations of information-communication industry were also considered. The trends in the most science-intensive industry, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, which occupies the first place in the world both in terms of spending on science and innovation, and the number of highly qualified jobs, are considered separately. The processes holding back the industry that could not be overcome during the pandemic are shown. Given the fundamental importance of patenting (a strict intellectual property control regime), initiatives to relinquish some of the rights to medicines (including vaccines) associated with the coronavirus and weaken the intellectual property protection regime in the next decade look unpromising. By the end of 2022, we should expect a decline in investor interest in vaccines and a return to the traditional focus of industry companies on rare diseases and the development of drugs against them. © 2022.

Mitigating the impact of conference and travel cancellations on researchers' futures.

The need to protect public health during the current COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated conference cancellations on an unprecedented scale. As the scientific community adapts to new working conditions, it is important to recognize that some of our actions may disproportionately affect early-career researchers and scientists from countries with limited research funding. We encourage all conference organizers, funders and institutions who are able to do so to consider how they can mitigate the unintended consequences of conference and travel cancellations and we provide seven recommendations for how this could be achieved. The proposed solutions may also offer long-term benefits for those who normally cannot attend conferences, and thus lead to a more equitable future for generations of researchers.