How can we foster a collaborative, fair, and healthy research culture that enables researchers and research communities to do their best work? This question lies at the heart of the new strategy of th...

Focusing on journal publishing as one key dimension of research culture, this blogpost compares Spain and Lithuania to show how infrastructures shape whether uncertainty in publication and recognition...

Citation counts have a prominent role in bibliometrics, but do they really represent all citations of a document? Paul Donner shows the different ways in which citation counts can vary and proposes a ...

CWTS has developed a Scholarly Communication Policy that treats publishing as a collective responsibility rather than an individual choice. In this blog post, we introduce the policy, reflect on its c...

Caroline S. Wagner (1955-2026) was a highly regarded scholar in the field of science and technology policy. Paul Wouters reflects on her impressive contributions to research on science policy, the glo...

As research culture increasingly becomes an object of governance, it also raises important conceptual questions. Based on a pitch at the Research Cultures in Transition Roundtable (STS NL 2026, Univer...

How can we foster diverse and inclusive knowledge systems that genuinely engage with societal needs and challenges? This question lies at the heart of the new strategy of the CWTS Focal Area Engagemen...

Scientific collaboration across disciplines resembles a mosaic, with each piece contributing to a composition more coherent than any fragment on its own. This diversity is widely seen as necessary for...

Dutch universities need to quickly establish standards or guidelines for the responsible use of generative AI in research. Currently, individual researchers carry too much responsibility. What do inte...

Today we published the 2026-2028 strategic plan for the Information & Openness focal area. This blogpost provides an overview of the plan, describing our vision and objectives for advancing the uptake...

Developing long-term OS policies and roadmaps can be a daunting task for research units. This blog post proposes to develop an Open Science Readiness Assessment Framework tool, aligned with the Dutch ...

Metric-driven research systems persist because governance structures often matter more than metrics themselves.

The ORION dashboard enables easy exploration of CWTS OpenAlex data on BigQuery, letting users analyse institutions, funders, and research topics via interactive visualisations and reproducible SQL que...

As publication and citation signals face structural distortion, performance metrics require contextual interpretation. This essay introduces RI² as a diagnostic overlay to support more cautious and go...

In this blog post, we report a global funding landscape created using semantic relations of all EU R&I Framework Programme grants that helps locate regions, organisations and funders in the disciplina...

In the first research seminar at CWTS of 2026, Samuel Moore argued that Open Access publishing took the wrong path and proposed alternatives with a new ‘commons’ approach. As PhD candidates studying s...

In late 2025, the Netherlands Barcelona Declaration Network met in Leiden to reflect and set priorities for 2026. This blog outlines those priorities and highlights how the growing network of universi...

How can open science be resilient in the face of geopolitical pressures? Drawing on findings from a recent workshop, we suggest four discussion points that need further consideration as funding agenci...

How global is research assessment reform? Our author explores a practical, interactive dashboard she developed, allowing users to easily view up-to-date information on CoARA signatories worldwide, the...

Commercial academic publishing oligopolies are draining science. Beigel et al. (2025) call for community control, but the Lithuanian case shows this is difficult after dismantling domestic journal pub...

Generative artificial intelligence poses significant challenges to copyright law and the principles of open science. In a new preprint, I study this complex interplay and existing regulatory framework...

The withdrawal of the US from UNESCO and US legislation being increasingly at odds with Open Science values raises concerns regarding Open Science infrastructure in the US. While much is still unclear...

The release of the CWTS Leiden Ranking 2025 marks a next step toward more open and more inclusive research analytics for universities. This post highlights the most significant developments.

Amid international concerns over the China Scholarship Council (CSC), especially regarding academic freedom and sensitive knowledge transfer, our study analyses CSC-funded research (2009–2021) to reve...

Crossref is a crucial source of open bibliographic metadata for articles published in scientific journals. Importantly, however, Crossref can also serve as a source of bibliographic metadata for prepr...

Transparency of AI use in academia matters for authors, editors, reviewers, readers and repository moderators. This blog post introduces GAIDeT, a taxonomy for the structured disclosure of Generative ...

Transparency of AI use in academia matters for authors, editors, reviewers, readers and repository moderators. This blog post introduces GAIDeT, a taxonomy for the structured disclosure of Generative ...

Facing pressures to stay competitive, researchers publish ever more, often at the cost of quality. Our author shows how this strategic trap can be compared to a prisoner’s dilemma, explains how this s...

The team behind the GLOBAL reporting guideline invites researchers who are preparing or reviewing a bibliometric article to take part in a pilot test of the guideline.

In a context marked by deep asymmetries in access to research resources, the research project “Tracking Research Funding Flows in the Global South” aims to make visible and analyze the ways in which i...

Open Science and the reform of research assessment are increasingly growing together. Time to also rethink the evaluation of PhD candidates! Talking to six PhD candidates, the authors found that PhD p...

To accelerate the sharing of scientific knowledge, researchers in many disciplines increasingly publish their work on preprint servers. In this post, Ludo Waltman and colleagues discuss the state of p...

To accelerate the sharing of scientific knowledge, researchers in many disciplines increasingly publish their work on preprint servers. In this post, Ludo Waltman and colleagues discuss the state of p...

The Evaluation and Culture focal area at CWTS is dedicated to studying, discussing, and advocating for renewed forms of scholarly communication, fair research evaluation, and inclusive research cultur...

Most implementations of Open Science do not fulfil the expectations that Open Science will lead to more equity and improve the societal impact of research. We discuss these worrying trends through the...

PhD candidate Paper Mills and Systematic Manipulation in Research PublishingThe past decade has seen the rise of distinct new challenges for research integrity in the context of scientific publishing....

The Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, in collaboration with the publishing company Wiley, is opening a new position for a PhD candidate to carry out research on paper mil...

Science in the US is under attack, with banned words, funding cuts, and threats to diversity, equity & inclusion and climate science. These actions harm science. CWTS’ focal areas respond, aligned wit...

The need to reform research assessment and scientific publishing practices is widely recognized. However, Ludo Waltman argues that the assessment and publishing reform movements will be successful onl...