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The Research Excellence Framework is primarily a mechanism for assessing the quality of research and allocating research funding. However, REF outputs and in particularly impact case studies hold value for many actors outside of higher education institutions.
How we spend our time directly impacts how satisfied we are with our lives, and understanding the activities that bolster our wellbeing can help policymakers make better decisions when allocating resources. Research is helping them do just that.
What has science diplomacy been capable of since the turn of the 21st century?
Little work has yet been done on exploring how more ambitious open science principles might be deployed across both the qualitative and quantitative social science disciplines.
This post draws on a recent analysis of different impact evaluation tools to explore how they constitute and direct conceptions of research impact.
The true potential of citizen social science, whereby members of the public participate in the investigation and analysis of social phenomena, remains to be realised.
Research assessment exercises in the UK ostensibly serve to evaluate research, but they also shape and manage it. The author argues that the REF promotes a narrow vision and calls for a wider distribution of research funding to prevent fields being captured by dominant academic cultures.
Open Access often appears to be a monolithic concept, covering all fields of research and publication. However, in practice its application is to a large extent determined by the needs and resource…
The dominant model of Article Processing Charges, whilst lowering financial barriers for readers, has merely erected a new paywall at the other end of the pipeline, blocking access to publication for less-privileged authors.
COVID-19 has highlighted the need to work with researchers all around the world at the same time that it has also exposed the inequalities in the global research and knowledge system.
COVID-19 has led to rapid and open sharing of research outputs. But will this new, radically open research communications paradigm result in permanent change?
An underlying assumption of modern political states is that they are rational systems that 'follow the science' to achieve optimal outcomes for their citizens. Whilst COVID-19 continues to foregrou…
The COVID-19 pandemic is significantly impacting universities and higher education institutions, reducing budgets and presenting new design challenges.
Interdisciplinary collaborations between scientific researchers and artists can often be one dimensional, with artists simply illustrating scientific findings.
Predatory publishing has emerged as a professional problem for academics and their institutions, as well as a broader societal concern, bringing to the fore a debate over what constitutes legitimate science.
Preprints servers have become a vital medium for the rapid sharing of scientific findings. However, this speed and openness has also contributed to the ability of low quality preprints to derail public debate and feed conspiracy theories.
How can qualitative researchers collect data during social-distancing measures?
The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak exposes an inconvenient truth about science: the current scholarly communication system does not serve the needs of science and society.
The author argues that for the humanities to successfully adopt digital technologies, they need to develop an independent open humanities discourse.
Opinion piece argues that Plan S deals have streamlined open access provision in the global North while exacerbating existing inequalities in scholarly publishing, by establishing and entrenching a two-tier system of scholarly publishing based on access to funds.
Academic systems rely on the existence of a supply of "outsiders" ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail.
Responding to an emerging debate around the changing nature of the impact agenda in the UK, the author argues that the current moment presents an opportunity to exorcise the ghosts of previous regimes of incentivising and assessing impact.
Altmetrics have become an increasingly ubiquitous part of scholarly communication, although the value they indicate is contested. A recent study examined the relationship of peer review, altmetrics, and bibliometric analyses with societal and academic impact. Drawing on evidence from REF2014 submissions, it argues altmetrics may provide evidence for wider non-academic debates, but correlate poorly with peer review assessments of societal impact.
In this post, Mark Hahnel presents findings from the largest continuous survey of academic attitudes to open data and suggests that as well promoting data sharing, it may also have inadvertently fed into the publish or perish culture of research.
Concerns about the threat from the Global North to Latin America's exemplary tradition of open access publishing are understandable but ultimately misplaced.
Being able to find, assess and place new research within a field of knowledge, is integral to any research project.
