In a 2012 Nature article, provocatively titled ‘Conform and be funded’, Joshua Nicholson and John Ioannidis showed that few of the most highly cited US biomedical scientists received funding from the country’s National Institutes of Heath. They attributed this to a reluctance at the agency to support potentially groundbreaking work. Since then, the sense that research funding is risk-averse and biased against novel work has become increasingly widespread within the scientific community. The poss...

Do migration partnerships improve policy and institutional coherence? Do they help countries to promote the positive effects that migration can have while addressing its challenges constructively? Do they reflect an even balance of power between partner countries? Are they a potential model for bilateral cooperation on migration? These were some of the questions explored in a recent evaluation of the Swiss migration partnerships by researchers at UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance. The findi...