A historic €1.8-trillion (US$2.1-trillion) budget deal reached by European Union (EU) leaders to fund its next seven years — and its recovery from the coronavirus pandemic — has left scientists and research advocates disappointed.

Early data on the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on scientific-publishing output suggest that female researchers, particularly those at early-career stages, are the hardest hit. Submissions to preprint servers, such as arXiv, rose more quickly for male authors than for female authors as nations adopted social-isolation measures.

Following a marathon EU summit in Brussels, national leaders agreed to a €1.8 trillion, seven-year budget and pandemic recovery fund that will spend €81 billion on Horizon Europe, the main EU research program.

Come August, hundreds of universities across the United States are poised to reopen their campuses with a mix of online and in-person courses. Only a handful are aiming for an entirely online semester. But as the machinery of higher education cranks back into action, faculty, staff, and students are voicing concerns that, with COVID-19 cases surging in many parts of the country, employees are being forced to put their health—and the health of others—at unnecessary risk.

Amid concerns that the torrent of research papers on COVID-19 could be leading to an excess of sloppy work, a computer scientist who develops automated programs to spot duplicate images in research papers is running his software across the world’s coronavirus preprints. So far, his efforts have yielded mixed success and some controversy.