Publishing is part and parcel of a successful academic career, and Covid-19 has amplified gender disparities in manuscript submissions and authorships. We used longitudinal publication data on 431,207 scientists in biology, chemistry, and clinical and basic medicine to quantify the differential impact of Covid-19 on women's and men's annual publishing rates. In a difference-in-differences analysis, we estimated that the average gender difference in publication productivity increased from -0.26 in 2019 (corresponding to a 17% lower output for women than men) to -0.35 in 2020 (corresponding to a 24% lower output for women than men). An age-group comparison showed a widening gender gap for both early career and mid-career scientists. The increasing gender gap was most pronounced among highly productive authors and scientists in clinical medicine and biology. Our study demonstrates the importance of reinforcing institutional commitments to diversity through policies that support the inclusion and retention of women researchers.

The objective of this article is to contribute to the emerging attempts to foster empirical, quantitative approaches to Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), and to provide a low-resolution map of the European RRI landscape, which can serve as a vehicle for international learning. The article presents indicators of RRI aimed at characterising countries. It examines the empirical structure of the data collected in the ‘Monitoring the evolution and benefits of Responsible Research and Innovation’ (MoRRI) project and reports patterns across Europe. Factor analysis is applied to identify 11 empirically-anchored dimensions of RRI. Based on indices for these dimensions, cluster analysis reveals four distinct clusters of countries. These results point to diversity regarding the empirically-manifest components of RRI as well as diversity in the RRI profiles of the 28 European Union Member States.

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The degree of concentration in research funding has long been a principal matter of contention in science policy. Strong concentration has been seen as a tool for optimizing and focusing research investments, but also as a damaging path towards hypercompetition, diminished diversity and conservative topic selection. While several studies have documented funding concentration linked to individual funding organisations, few have looked at funding concentration from a systemic perspective. In this article, we examine nearly 20,000 competitive grants allocated by fifteen major Danish research funders. Our results show a strongly skewed allocation of funding towards a small elite of individual researchers, and toward a select group of research areas and topics. We discuss potential drivers, and highlight that funding concentration likely results from a complex interplay between funders’ overlapping priorities, excellence-dominated evaluation criteria, and lack of coordination between both public and private research funding bodies.

In this paper we examine the impact of the Fukushima accident (March 2011) on public perceptions of nuclear power on a global scale. It is widely recognized that any future of nuclear power critically depends on public acceptance to sustain massive public subsidies. We will contrast conceptually and empirically two models of the 'Fukushima effect', an event & effect (EE) model (Kim, Kim & Kim, 2013) and our own challenge & response (CR) model. Firstly, we replicate Kim et al. (2013) who modelled retrospective opinion changes after March 2011 across 42 countries on a set of 'objective' predictors including geographical distance from Fukushima. But, instead of survey data ex-post-facto, we use historical opinion data 1996-2016 for 23+ countries. On historical data, the EE model has little explanatory power for opinion shifts, beyond the dependency on nuclear power in the energy mix. Secondly, we introduce the alternative CR model. Our hypothesis is that individual and societal responses to nuclear accidents are constrained by cultural memories. Memory, both individual and collective, is primarily adaptive and makes available schematic information to deal with novel situations. Memory creates familiarity and facilitates coping with uncertainty. The CR model introduces symbolic factors such as 'Past Responses to Nuclear Incidents', 'Nuclear Renaissance', and 'Long-term Acceptance Level' to explain the Fukushima effect of 2011.