By Rob Cuthbert Tips from an editor on how Times Higher Education can shift the negative perceptions of people in higher education to reassert its value to the sector. Times Higher Educat…

26 ways that digital ledger technology could be deployed by school districts, networks, postsecondary institutions and community-based organizations to improve learning opportunities.

If 'money makes the world go round' then the world of scientific publishing has proved to be no exception to the rule.

Mobilising value from science and technology needs help from thinkers, designers, makers, policymakers, and enablers - and this expertise often sits in the humanities, arts and social sciences domain.

From a failed coup in Turkey, to prolonged financial crises in Greece and Spain, researchers in the region are struggling to keep up. 

Economist and adviser Mariana Mazzucato says the European Commission should 'welcome risk and uncertainty' with new research missions, but the desired outcome must be clear.

After being given the green light by research ministers earlier this year, an ambitious initiative to enable Europe’s 1.7 million researchers to share data and research tools is now on course to be launched before the end of the year. But what should the next steps be?

By tying rewards to metrics, organisations risk incentivising gaming and encouraging behaviours that may be at odds with their larger purpose. The culture of short-termism engendered by metrics also impedes innovation and stifles the entrepreneurial element of human nature.

In the digital era, each publisher has established its own content platform, to the detriment of the researcher experience. Discovery is fragmented, leading to substantial library investment in order to provide single-index whole-collection search.

Sneha Kulkarni from Editage takes a look at the ever-increasing global scientific output, and asks questions about quantity versus quality.

One way to push back against the pressure to “publish or perish” is to randomly audit a small proportion of researchers and take time to assess their research in detail. Auditors could examine complex measures of quality which no metric could ever capture such as originality, reproducibility, and research translation.

Let’s not tell ourselves that "science is broken". Let’s agree that we all share in the responsibility to improve it, by keeping open the mental bandwidth to ask and explore hard questions.

When researchers write, we don't just describe new findings - we place them in context by citing the work of others. Citations trace the lineage of ideas, connecting disparate lines of scholarship into a cohesive body of knowledge, and forming the basis of how we know what we know.

Economists show increased research efforts are yielding decreasing returns. Too much innovation veneration! One driver of the replication crisis is our culture’s growing obsession with “innovation.” As technology historians Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell state in their influential Aeon essay Hail the Maintainers: “Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value."

A short list of seven functionalities that academic publishers looking to modernize their operations might invest in; from unencumbered access and improved social components, to dynamic data visualisations and more precise hyperlinking.