Thousands of Canadian researchers will be gratified to learn that the Canada Foundation for Innovation is investing $25 million in two national projects that will improve access by faculty and students to electronic research materials in the social sciences and humanities. "It's incredibly exciting.

If universities want to avoid scientific fraud, they need to set up formal repositories for raw data that all researchers would be obliged to use. That's the main lesson of the so-called Chandra affair at Memorial University, according to the Toronto physician who looked into how the Newfoundland institution handled allegations of scientific fraud against one of its researchers.

A new centre at the University of Calgary and a graduate program to train student-affairs specialists at the University of Toronto are set to fill a gap in research on postsecondary students in Canada. The Canadian Centre for Studies in Higher Education, headed by Peggy Patterson in U of C's faculty of education, will bring together a multidisciplinary team to form research partnerships with institutions across Canada and in other countries, including the U.

For university presidents, life at the top has never been much of a picnic. But lately the challenges seem to have multiplied.

The Canada Foundation for Innovation announced more than half a billion dollars in new investments in research infrastructure in November and December, and planned to make one other funding announcement early this year worth about $35 million. But once that's done, the foundation will have essentially run out of money with four years still to go in its mandate.

The voices calling for more "transparency" from the postsecondary sector are starting to build, with several reports released this fall from different quarters asking for more data and, in particular, more comparative data about Canadian universities and colleges. The latest comes from the Canadian Council on Learning, a federally funded, non-government agency that issued a report in December calling for explicit national goals for postsecondary education as well as a clear set of indicators to measure progress in meeting those goals.

A new academic centre based at the University of British Columbia aims to bridge the well-identified gap in Canada - the so-called "Valley of Death" - between university discovery and commercialization. The Centre for Drug Research and Development, in the works for several years, is a non-profit agency supported by four B.