As California’s stem cell research agency runs through the last of its $3 billion in state funding, a delicate negotiation is underway between its leadership and the man developing the 2020 ballot initiative to keep it alive.

Robert Klein, the real estate investment banker behind the 2004 ballot initiative that created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) in Oakland, last month submitted a new proposal to the California attorney general’s office that would allocate another $5.5 billion in proceeds from state bond sales to the agency. At a meeting today of CIRM’s board, Klein, who heads the advocacy group Americans for Cures in Palo Alto, California, explained and defended aspects of the new proposal that have drawn some criticism.

“Most of us are individually very supportive of this upcoming initiative,” George Blumenthal, chancellor of the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz, said at the meeting. “We don’t want to make the perfect the enemy of the good.”

For a scientist working on their university’s campus, accessing a journal article is painless and invisible, if their institution subscribes. The article automatically appears because the publisher recognizes that the request came from the university’s internet address.

But many researchers gripe that the minute they step off campus and try to access the same article—through a home internet provider, a coffee shop’s WiFi, or a cellphone—they often face a frustrating experience. Even though many universities allow remote users to gain access by logging in through an online portal, many articles don’t clearly flag that possibility, and following the steps can be cumbersome.

This week, one major publisher—the Nature family of journals—launched an effort to make things easier for off-campus readers. It became the first to offer a consistent, streamlined method of access, through a standard button displayed prominently atop articles in its 150 journals. And more publishers, including Springer Nature, Nature’s parent, are expected to roll out the feature over the next year through an international consortium.

Critics are blasting a revised Trump administration plan to give the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broad power to ignore research results when setting public health rules if officials decide the underlying data are not adequately accessible to the public.

The draft document, a version of which was leaked to The New York Times this week, supplements a 2018 data transparency proposal from EPA that was harshly criticized by scientific, environmental, and patient groups, prompting the agency to say it would issue a revision. Although EPA said in a 12 November statement that the leaked document is not the final version it sent earlier this month to the White House for review, the agency did not dispute its core substance.

The proposed supplement “is even worse than we thought it would be,” says Gretchen Goldman of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. “We didn’t think [the transparency proposal] could get any worse, but we were wrong.”

The U.S. National Institutes of Health last week released a draft policy that will require all investigators with NIH funding to make their data sets available to colleagues. For the first time, grantees holding any NIH-funded grant—not just those above a $500,000 threshold in direct costs—will need to submit a detailed plan for sharing data, including steps to protect the privacy of research subjects.

For the biomedical research community, the draft rules, which update a 2003 policy, aren’t a big surprise: NIH has been gathering input on its ideas for the past 3 years. “We knew there was a lot of anxiety in the community about this and so we slowly shared our thinking and its evolution,” says Carrie Wolinetz, associate director for science policy at NIH in Bethesda, Maryland. Now, she says, “This is what the policy looks like in draft form.”

NIH will collect comments through 10 January 2020 and hopes to finalize the new rules next year. Here is more background on the policy:

The top Democrat in the U.S. Senate wants the government to create a new agency that would invest an additional $100 billion over 5 years on basic research in artificial intelligence (AI). Senator Charles Schumer (D–NY) says the initiative would enable the United States to keep pace with China and Russia in a critical research arena and plug gaps in what U.S. companies are unwilling to finance.

The proposal, which Schumer outlined publicly for the first time last week in a speech to senior national security and research policymakers gathered in Washington, D.C., reflects the growing interest in AI and related fields, including a recent presidential executive order. And being the minority leader gives Schumer the chance to turn his ideas into concrete action.

Schumer wants to create a new national science tech fund that would pour $100 billion into “fundamental research related to AI and some other cutting-edge areas.” His list includes quantum computing, 5G networks, robotics, cybersecurity, and biotechnology. The money would fuel research at U.S. universities, companies, and other federal agencies, he explained, as well as paying for “testbed facilities” to carry out work needed to transform discoveries into potential commercial products.

The U.S. government routinely sues pharmaceutical companies for making false claims, bilking Medicare, illegal kickbacks, and sloppy manufacturing practices. But on 6 November, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed suit against Gilead Sciences Inc. of Foster City, California, for reasons that cannot easily fit on a bumper sticker. At the center of the dispute are monkey studies done by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with a Gilead drug called Truvada, and the drug’s use as part of a highly effective HIV prevention strategy called pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).

Truvada for PrEP has earned Gilead billions of dollars, and the government contends it deserves some of those earnings because it helped develop the intervention. Specifically, the government alleges Gilead failed to obtain licenses to use four patents that CDC obtained on research results related to PrEP. “Gilead has repeatedly refused to obtain a license from CDC to use the patented regimens,” the federal lawsuit states. “Meanwhile, Gilead has profited from research funded by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars … but has not paid any royalties to CDC.” The lawsuit contends that “Gilead’s conduct was malicious, wanton, deliberate, consciously wrongful, flagrant, and in bad faith.”

Gilead has rejected the allegations, arguing that each of the four government patents at issue is invalid. The work conducted by CDC researchers was obvious and proposed by others before they even published their experiment, the company argued in petitions sent to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) earlier this year. It has asked the agency to cancel the patents.

For the first time, a state judge has forced a public genealogy site, GEDmatch, to allow police to search its entire database of DNA profiles. A detective wanted to find distant relatives of a serial rapist in hopes that their family trees could help him home in on a suspect—even though most of the 1.3 million people who have shared their DNA data with the site haven’t agreed to such a search.

The search warrant, reported this week by The New York Times, raises the alarming possibility of similar police searches of giant direct-to-consumer DNA sites such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe that are now closed to everyone except company customers who willingly submit a saliva sample.

Since police tracked down the suspected Golden State Killer in April 2018 by uploading crime-scene DNA to GEDmatch, forensic genealogy has led to arrests in scores of cold criminal cases. But privacy concerns have arisen because users didn’t know their DNA data were being searched, and because relatives who never took a DNA test could come under suspicion. In May, GEDmatch restricted police searches to participants who had given consent, cutting the number of available DNA profiles to 185,000. Then in September, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) eased some concerns by issuing a policy that limits searches by federal law enforcement agencies to violent crimes and DNA profiles with user consent.

The journal Biology Letters will not retract a paper about lionfish behavior that had come under suspicion of fraud after another paper by the same first author was found to be fabricated. In a statement published today, Biology Letters says it concluded no misconduct marred the study, although the journal is “concerned” by a photo collage submitted by one of the authors during the journal’s investigation that experts say contain manipulated images.

The decision is “disappointing,” says the whistleblower in the case, who asked not to be identified. He says the journal, published by the Royal Society in London, chose to ignore key parts of the evidence.

At issue was a 2014 paper showing that zebra lionfish (Dendrochirus zebra) living at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef can invite each other to a collective hunt by flaring their fins. The first author of the paper, Oona Lönnstedt, was found guilty in 2017 of making up data for a Science paper, and the whistleblower had warned Biology Letters editors that the data behind the 2014 paper might be fabricated as well.

Yehuda Shoenfeld is a well-known immunologist with a long career. Formerly at Tel Aviv University in Israel, he now runs a center for autoimmune diseases at Sheba Medical Center, Israel’s largest hospital. He is editor-in-chief of both journals of the Israel Medical Association (IMA), serves on the editorial board of dozens of other journals, and was elected a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in June.

Yet a group of Israeli doctors says his ideas are a danger to public health.

Shoenfeld has long espoused theories popular among antivaccine advocates and spoken at their meetings, causing tensions with the Israeli medical community. The issue came to a boil in September, when Shoenfeld decided to publish a positive review of an anonymous antivaccine book in Harefuah, IMA’s Hebrew-language journal. The two reviewers, who did not have a medical background, wrote that the book “raises a strong suspicion that key aspects of vaccine safety have not been properly tested.”

When it comes to Brexit, many U.K. researchers are hoping the whole thing will eventually be canceled—or that they will at least still be able to tap into EU funding through some sort of deal. Today, an eagerly awaited external report, commissioned by the government, lays out research priorities and options if those relationships with Europe are severed. It calls for increased spending on R&D nationwide, a new research fellowship program, and larger chunks of money for universities to quickly target research opportunities.

In March, the U.K. science minister, Chris Skidmore, asked for independent advice about how the government should bolster the nation’s R&D after its departure from the European Union, now scheduled for 31 January 2020. The key question: what to do if the United Kingdom decides not to participate, or “associate,” in the European Union’s main funding program, called Horizon 2020. It provides about £1.5 billion to U.K. researchers each year, and the grants make up about 11% of research funding for top U.K. research universities. They also attract talent from Europe and create vital international collaborations.

The new report, by Adrian Smith, director of the Alan Turing Institute in London, and Graeme Reid, a science policy expert at University College London, sketches out a strategy. (Scientists have urged the government to keep close ties to Horizon 2020, and its successor, Horizon Europe, and ministers have said they will consider participation, if it offers value for money.)