Where the news comes from
The News tab of an institution, country, field or topic is built from the sources below and from nothing else. Each source has its own terms, and the site follows them: some stories are shown in full, some as a headline and a few sentences, and every one links to the original publisher.
Sources
The Conversation
Articles by academics. Shown in full on this site, unchanged, with the authors and their institutions, a link to the original and The Conversation's page counter, as its republishing guidelines ask. A picture is shown only when its credit names a licence that allows reuse; pictures from commercial agencies are left out.
CORDIS, European Commission
News and results of EU-funded research. Shown in full with the attribution "European Union, CORDIS, CC BY 4.0". Its pictures belong to the projects, so one appears only as a small picture beside the story, with its credit.
ESO and NASA
Press releases from two observatories and agencies whose licences allow reuse. The feed's own text, with its licence.
University and institute newsrooms
The newsroom feed an institution publishes on its own website: the headline, the first sentences the feed offers, the date and a link to the original. Where an institution offers no feed, the list of headlines on its news page is read in the same way, for the headline, date, first sentences and picture shown there. Nothing else is kept. An institution that would rather not appear can write to info@veste-software.com.
ScienceDaily
Headlines and summaries from ScienceDaily's section feeds, as its terms allow, with a link to the full story. They are held in memory while fresh and never stored.
How an item finds its page
An institution page shows items from its own newsroom and items whose authors name it. A country page shows the items of its institutions. A field, subfield or topic page shows items whose text is closest to that part of the OpenAlex classification, scored against the name, keywords and description of its topics; where a source labels its own stories (a section, a topic), that label is used first. Matching is deliberately cautious: an item that fits nothing clearly is left off the field pages, and the reason for a match is shown when the cursor rests on the small label under it.
Dates are the publishers' own. Nothing here claims a story is the latest on its subject: only that these sources published it, and when.
Pictures
A picture next to a story is the publisher's own and is loaded from the publisher's server, so that server sees the visit (the address and the browser type, and no page address). The pictures of The Conversation's articles are shown only when their credit names a licence that allows reuse: Creative Commons, Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, Wikimedia, a public agency such as NASA or NOAA, or the author. Pictures from commercial agencies (Getty, iStock, Shutterstock, AP and the like) are never shown, because The Conversation's own guidelines say they may not be republished. For newsrooms, observatories and CORDIS the picture is the one the publisher's feed or page names for the story, with its credit when it gives one. ScienceDaily's pictures are not shown.
A publisher that would rather its pictures were not shown can write to info@veste-software.com and they are taken out at once.
Reading, and being read
Sources are read by one program that announces itself as ScienceExplorerBot, obeys each site's robots.txt, waits between requests to a site, and asks for a page again only when it has changed. Its requests are signed (HTTP Message Signatures, with the public key published at /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory), so that a site can tell that they come from this program. Articles of The Conversation are shown with its page counter, as its republishing guidelines require; the counter tells The Conversation which address showed the article, the browser type and the approximate city of the reader, and no more.
An institution or publisher that would rather not appear, or has a feed to suggest, can write to info@veste-software.com and it is dealt with at once. Stored now: - items, the newest from today.