The median age of scientists and engineers in the US has increased from 40.3 years in 2003 to 42.4 years in 2017, while the proportion of those aged 55 and over has risen from 19% to 27%, according to a report by the National Science Foundation. Factors contributing to the trend include longer life expectancy and decreased numbers of younger people entering the workforce due to high education costs and a lack of job opportunities. The aging workforce risks losing the expertise and knowledge of older scientists, and this could hamper scientific progress and innovation. The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are universal goals for sustainable development adopted by all member states. Considering the challenges of an aging scientific workforce seen in the NSF data on the one hand, and the global importance of SDGs-related science on the other, this study demonstrates the academic age of researchers in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America based on their regional SDG priorities. Researchers have been categorized by their academic age, as measured by their years of experience in academia and their publication records, to identify which countries need more early-career researchers and in which areas of SDGs research. Our preliminary findings show an aging scientific workforce in the Global North with differences in prioritizing SDGs by region and the average academic age of scholars working in each SDG. As a result, we have developed an interactive dashboard that allows users to explore the complete dataset: https://compare-project.eu/tool/academic-age-and-sdgs-worldwide

Open access publishing has quite a significant cost associated with it. Article Processing Charges (APCs) are fees charged by publishers to authors for the publication of their articles in open access journals. These fees can present a new type of “paywall” to researchers and institutions who cannot afford to pay these amounts. Considering previous studies that showed barriers to publishing open access between countries as a result of high costs, in this study, we aimed to examine whether there are differences in open access publishing, expenditure and overall participation within universities in the United States. Our analysis shows that the majority of states published between 1,000 – 7,000 Gold Open Access publications and spent up to 6million dollars in the past 10 years. However, there are some noteworthy outliers’ states that publish a high number Gold Open Access papers but pay significantly less than other states that publish a lower number of Gold Open Access papers and pay significantly more