News & Comment

Being the first in her family to graduate from university, Charisma Hehakaya discusses how academic institutions can help first-generation students to thrive.

Bullying and harassment are systemic, pervasive problems in academia. We reflect on our role as editors and commit to taking steps that we hope will contribute to ongoing efforts to make academia safer for all.

A number of US cities and states have introduced regulations on government use of facial recognition and surveillance technologies. These efforts are vital to prevent these methods from becoming tools of oppression, argues Kade Crockford.

Financial, informational and other constraints lower the adoption of welfare-improving technologies amongst people living in poverty. Field trials have identified effective strategies to facilitate behaviour change. Researchers and policymakers need to apply this knowledge, and form institutional partnerships to implement solutions at scale.

Although large-scale data are increasingly used to study human behaviour, researchers now recognize their limits for producing sound social science. Qualitative research can prevent some of these problems. Such methods can help to understand data quality, inform design and analysis decisions and guide interpretation of results.

The stories that US universities tell about diversity, equity and inclusion do not translate to actions, explains Neil A. Lewis, Jr. Instead, their actions disadvantage the people they allegedly support.

Olfaction has profoundly shaped human experience and behaviour from the deep past through to the present day. Advanced biomolecular and ‘omics’ sciences enable more direct insights into past scents, offering new options to explore critical aspects of ancient society and lifeways as well as the historical meanings of smell.

Computational psychiatry holds promise for basic research and clinical practice in safeguarding mental health. In this Comment, we discuss why China needs computational psychiatry, why its development in China will benefit the field globally, and the challenges of promoting computational psychiatry in China and how to tackle them.

There are a lot of myths surrounding the peer review process. Here, we separate misconceptions from reality in the peer review process at Nature Human Behaviour.

Women are underrepresented in prestigious science roles in many countries. This is also true in China, where they are less likely to succeed in election to the Chinese Academies of Sciences and Engineering — for reasons unrelated to scientific merit. Reform of election procedures is needed to foster gender balance.

Open scholarship has transformed research, and introduced a host of new terms in the lexicon of researchers. The ‘Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Teaching’ (FORRT) community presents a crowdsourced glossary of open scholarship terms to facilitate education and effective communication between experts and newcomers.

Science could hold the answer to many of society’s challenges, if only scientists engaged with policy-makers. Alma Hernández-Mondragón explains how this realization led her to pursue a career outside the laboratory, at the science–policy interface.

Teaching students the nature of science can be difficult, but the COVID-19 pandemic offers a range of teachable examples in a form of ‘living textbook’, explains Wei-Zhao Shi.

Ethical principles dictate that limited, life-saving resources should be allocated fairly. Keymanthri Moodley affirms that achieving global distributive justice is one of the greatest challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, and current distribution strategies are ethically indefensible.

Breaking pharmaceutical monopolies helped to address the HIV crisis. The same could be done to end the COVID-19 pandemic, but we must act decisively, writes Winnie Byanyima.

Global crises require tight international cooperation. Unilateral measures such as travel bans are often not rooted in science; instead of fostering cooperation, they impede communication, discourage transparency and hinder evidence-based decision-making, writes Philani Mthembu.

Global vaccine inequity reflects deeper issues within our market-driven global health system that fixates on innovation, intellectual property and the individual good as the solution, argues Tahir Amin. To end COVID-19 and achieve real progress, we need to incentivize the collective good instead of clinging to the current system, which only fuels divisions.