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"Academia.edu, a social network for scholars, is unveiling a new feature today that its founder Richard Price hopes will help address part of the "credit gap" for research. Academia.edu allows users to upload and share their research papers, and the site is launching its Analytics Dashboard for Scientists today that Price says will let scholars see the "real-time impact" of their work. Academic publishing has long been a black-box in terms of both who's reading and who's citing. Publishing in journals may be expected (required, even), but the delays in the publishing process can make it challenging to ascertain how much influence work has. "It typically takes about 3 to 5 years for citations to actually appear back in the process," argues Price, pointing to the lengthy time between researching, writing, peer-reviewing, and publishing."

Becoming a university professor requires a lot of work for very little financial reward, compared to most other professions. In STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields, the minimum requirement is four years of undergraduate education, plus anywhere between four and a half and eight years of graduate studies, followed by an (ever increasing) number of years of post-doctoral work. That may get you an assistant professorship where, at a state university, the starting salary is in the $60k-70k range. 

For me, roller derby began with a very steep learning curve. I didn't know how to skate, I didn't know the rules, and so every practice left me physically and mentally exhausted. I did bring my own skill set to the sport: I've been an athlete my whole life, and played many a contact sport, and so some parts of roller derby - the physical fitness, hitting, body awareness, cross-training and nutrition - came easily.

The sustainability crisis has provoked an unexpected and dramatic response from academia. Until now, higher education institutions have tended to focus on sustainability within their own borders. This has predominantly been via sustainability education, research and designing green or carbon neutral campuses.

Launched by two Stanford professors who left academia to create a new networked vision of education. 

Reproducibility is a key part of science, even though almost nobody does the same experiment twice. A lab will generally repeat an experiment several times and look for results before they get published. But, once that paper is published, people tend to look for reproducibility in other ways, testing the consequences of a finding, extending it to new contexts or different populations. Almost nobody goes back and repeats something that's already been published, though. But maybe they should. At least that's the thinking behind a new effort called the Reproducibility Initiative, a project hosted by the Science Exchange and supported by Nature, PLoS, and the Rockefeller University Press.