Follow COGR on LinkedIn4/20/26Nature
How hidden contributions power modern research
As a scientist in a research-support role, he doesn’t independently write academic papers or conduct experiments. Instead, Hemmings meticulously gathers and preserves the samples that other scientists use to collect data and make discoveries. “I’m not obligated to produce research from these data,” he explains. “My responsibility is to make them available so others can use them in their research.”
4/19/26Washington Post
Where U.S. science has been hit hardest after Trump’s first year
The Trump administration has slashed the number of grants from the National Institutes of Health, with far fewer focused on women, cancer and mental health
4/18/26STAT
How Trump is pushing psychedelics reform through the health agencies
President Trump moved on Saturday to “reverse the crisis of serious mental illness in America” by boosting access to psychedelic drugs in clinical settings. In an executive order, he directed the federal government to rush access to treatments and reevaluate their status as controlled substances. The order directs the Food and Drug Administration to expedite some psychedelics as breakthrough drugs, as well as allowing them to be used through right-to-try legislation, which allow terminally ill patients to try experimental drugs outside of usual regulatory pathways.
Bloomberg LawSee also
Trump Signs Order on Psychedelics to Ease FDA Restrictions
4/17/26Nature
US lawmakers intensify scrutiny of scientific-publishing practices
A congressional hearing covered the rise of paper mills and the costs of open-access publishing — but there was little agreement on what reform would entail.
Inside Higher EdSee also
See also: Lawmakers Question Publish-or-Perish Culture of Scientific Research
4/16/26Nature
‘Science needs defending’: record number of researchers run for office in US mid-terms
Many Democrats making the switch to politics are motivated by the Trump administration’s cuts to science — whereas energy and AI are a pull for some Republicans.
4/15/26Bloomberg Law
Harvard US Funding Victory Appealed by Trump Administration (1)
The Trump administration urged a federal appeals court to restore its freeze of $2 billion in research funding for Harvard University over the Ivy League school’s refusal to comply with government demands over governance. In an appellate brief filed Wednesday in Boston, the administration asked the court to overturn US District Judge Allison Burroughs’ September ruling that the government’s demands and subsequent funding freeze violated Harvard’s free-speech and due-process rights.
4/15/26NOT-OD-26-069
Continuation of Modifications to Peer Review Practices
This notice is to provide NIH’s extramural community with information on the continuation of select peer review practices implemented following a lapse of appropriations in 2025
4/10/26DOE Policy Flash
PF 206-38 301 Congressional Notifications and Quarterly Reporting to the Appropriations Committees for Contract, Financial Assistance, or Other Transaction Actions
4/8/26The Chronicle
AI Is a Better Researcher Than You
There is one surefire way to poke the academic beehive: 1) Declare that artificial intelligence can already do research more capably than many professors. 2) Embed that claim in an essay that lays out nine additional theses — “The academic paper is a dead format walking”; “Much of the opposition to AI is status protection dressed up as principle” — equally guaranteed to provoke outrage. 3) Reveal in a second essay that the first essay was in fact written by AI.