Saudi Arabian colleges may now enroll women in their political science departments, the Saudi Minister of Education announced on Saturday, Al Arabiya News reported. The change is intended to prepare women to run in municipal elections beginning in 2015, King Abdullah announced in a speech to the Shura Council last year. Sarhan al-Otaibi, a politics professor at King Saud University in Riyadh, recommended that women be granted permission to study political science because the number of women interested in the discipline greatly exceeds the number of men. As a result, King Saud University will be the first college in the country to welcome women into its political science department. Female students who wish to study other subjects in the future may be required to take a certain number of political science courses to form a "clear political vision," Al Arabiya reported.
Republican presidential candidate and former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass., announced at a closed-door fundraiser that he would greatly reduce the size of the U.S. Department of Education if elected, according to MSNBC. Romney said he would either consolidate it with another department or restructure it on a much smaller scale. He cited the department's usefulness in combating teachers' unions and the political volatility of the issue as reasons not to eliminate the Education Department entirely, MSNBC reported. Romney's speech on Sunday, which went into great detail about his policy views, was given at a private home in Palm Beach, Fla. and was overheard by journalists on the sidewalk below, according to MSNBC.
Wellcome Trust, the second largest non-governmental sponsor of scientific research in the world, bolstered its support for open access scientific publishing last week when it announced that it would consider sanctions against scientists who do not release their results freely to the public, according to The New York Times. The trust, which is based in London, spends approximately $1 billion each year funding medical and scientific research. Although existing Wellcome policy encourages open access internet publication, only about 55 percent of scientists comply, with many preferring to publish in subscription journals such as Science or Nature, according to The Times. Such journals are problematic because subscriptions can cost thousands of dollars for university libraries, The Times reported.
