Industry trends

A new research project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to evaluate massive open online courses and their impacts on teaching, learning, and education in general

Nature Publishing Group has reported a big increase in papers authored by Chinese researchers. The proportion of papers in Nature-branded journals published by authors based in China increased by 35 per cent between 2011 and 2012

The Wellcome Trust is extending its open-access policy to include all scholarly monographs and book chapters written by its grantholders as part of Wellcome-funded research

Groups representing the research sector, SMEs and open-access publishers have withdrawn from the Licences for Europe dialogue on text and data mining due to concerns about the scope, composition and transparency of the process

Digital Science has launched Projects, which it describes as 'the only data tool designed specifically for scientific researchers that enables them to organise their research outputs in a safe, simple and structured way'

A new survey of UK academics, carried out by Ithaka S+R, Jisc and RLUK, has revealed an increasing reliance on the internet and open resources for their research and publishing activities

The charitable trust Sense about Science has released a Chinese version of its guide to peer review. The aim is to help the public make sense of research claims

The University of Bristol in the UK has made a collection of rare atlases dating from 1574 to the 1970s available online for the first time

Fragile, rolled-up historical documents could be read for the first time in centuries, thanks to new X-ray techniques