In the foreword to the special feature, the author emphasizes the timeliness and importance of this volume. Against the impression of the title, articles in this volume warn the abuses of evidences. For example, Trump administration of US requests unnecessarily strict scientific evidences for the global warming. The lack of them is abused for the skepticism against scientific results. When we reflex the development of philosophy of science, it was not easy to identify ‘what evidences are'. It was, or still is, theoretically difficult to find out relevant ways to establish truth from evidences. We need to take critical and productive attitude on ‘truth and evidence' for the development of science policy studies.

As seen in the UK referendum asking withdrawal from EU in June 2016 and the US presidential election in November 2016, the politics of "Post-Truth" which put emphasis on personal beliefs and emotions more than objective facts is emerging. In this "Post-Truth" era, furthermore, there is a tendency to discount science & technology and evidence in policy planning, and voices of concern are raised by scientists and engineers against it. Hence, this special issue focuses on the science & technology activities and evidence-based policy making in the "Post-Truth" era. 4 contributors provide information, findings, and discussions on this issue, and some recommendations to science and technology community. Science is not ignored in the politics of the "Post-Truth" era, rather it is used as rhetoric tool in political arena. Therefore, scientific community should establish its own governance suitable for the "Post-Truth" era.

Many scientists in the U.S. are criticizing the Trump Administration because of its lack of adopting scientific knowledge in policy making, and the academic societies are making efforts to enhance the administration's understanding of science. The Trump administration is not positive in adopting scientific knowledge especially that of climate science. This Trump administration's disinterest in science is rooted in sharp political disagreement in the House of the U.S. congress concerning climate science and regulatory policy during Obama administration.

In the article, results of analysis of the documents and statements of the House committee on science, space and technology is presented. The four-quadrant model is proposed to understand the relationship between production of knowledge and use of knowledge. Analysis is done in five points; peer review, uncertainty, reproducibility, consensus among scientists, and motivation. The discussion includes possibilities of furthering the understanding the value of science among policy makers and general public.

"Post Truth" is defined as "Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief" in Oxford Living Dictionaries. However, "Post Truth" and "Evidence based" is not conflicting concepts. It is very difficult to exclude emotion and personal belief in the actual policy making process because of limitation of statistical theory and collection of datasets. In this context, framework of thinking is important rather than numerical analysis itself. The thinking framework has to be depend on common sense in the society. Policy making should not be limited only for politicians and bureaucrats, but also be open for various stakeholders. Diversities of paths of policy proposals made by various stakeholders, openness to the public and historical perspectives are important in policy making process.

The post-truth society facilitates diminished scientific authority and superficial political belief. The flag of ‘science for policy' as an imaginary counterpart again falls under a mud wrestling between incumbent leaders. Going beyond conventional citizen science and public engagement, a prospective participatory approach is positive engagement in dark science. Dark science is reflective and reflexive scientific activity with a sense of anxiety, fear, sympathy or sadness against disruptive impacts as a corollary of scientific development, by reference to structural science-society issues and planetary boundaries in the Anthropocene. Flying away from human-centric interests and thoughts on the ground, it aims to understand, talk and collaborate each other with objects arousing a sense of weirdness or wonder. Positive engagement is to nudge the less-engaged to voluntarily and positively engage in science and its policy. Dark science and positive engagement is reciprocal to make sense of our life and the world to come.

This paper describes science and politics in the era of post-truth. The post-truth politics looks as if it ignores the scientific evidence. However, anti-scientific U.S. Republican has intended to put emphasis on the scientific evidence. Once Republican's war on science insisted on anti-science. Now, Republican emphasizes ‘sound science' providing an evidence with higher probative value than science. The post-truth politics tends to make full use of the scientific-evidence-like rhetoric to compete the evidence-based policy making. The anti-scientific ideology attacks the irreproducibility issues and dysfunction of quality assurance of science, while it attacks science with an immitated rhetoric of the incertitude of science and the science for policy-making in order to remove science's influence on policies. Weak points are attacked. It is difficult for science to counterattack, because science community is a root cause of the ‘crisis of science.' Science community ought to secure social trust and to reconstruct the governance of science.

The purpose of this research is to analyze the relationship between client portfolio and individual performance to clarify what kind of client portfolio increases individual performance. This research focuses on patent agents of patent firm in knowledge-intensive industry. The three hypotheses are tested by using data of 896 patent agents who belong to the top 15 large patent firms in Japan. The results of regression analysis show that both the scope and the degree of concentration of client portfolio are positively related to individual performance. Thus, expanding the client scope and increasing the degree of concentration enhance individual performance. However, the relationship between the degree of concentration of client portfolio and individual performance is inverse U-shape. These results mean patent agents need to expand the client scope and keep the optimal degree of concentration of client portfolio in order to enhance individual performance.

This study examines the effect of rewards on crowdfunding for academic research. Although crowdfunding is a new funding source for academic research, it is limited to being only a complementary source, partly because of the insufficient support scale. Thus, it is necessary to expand the support scale for crowdfunding to become a major funding source. This study surveyed the effect of financial rewards and material or experiential rewards on the support scale (number of supporters and funding per person) using 682 academic research projects that succeeded in fundraising via crowdfunding. The results showed that both rewards increased the number of supporters, although material or experiential rewards decreased funding per person. However, material or experiential rewards had positive effects that increased total amount of funding. Therefore, rewards are an effective strategy for expanding the support scale in crowdfunding for academic research.