Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
New Teaching Excellence Framework Shows the Power of Marketing
The UK’s proposed Teaching Excellence Framework focuses strongly on ‘value for money,’ which, argues our Daniel Nehring, further elides the intellectual dimensions of scholarship and replaced it with the reduction of academics’ labor to the production of a skilled labor force.
All Eggs in a Few Baskets Doesn’t Work for Universities, Either
The Russell Group argues that research funding should be concentrated in the most elite institutions, Two sociologists who have studied how Asian universities have fared in global rankings argue just the opposite.
ResearchGate Score: Good Example of a Bad Metric
Remember that call for a ‘Bad Metric’ prize in the recent ‘The Metric Tide’ report? Peter Kraker, Katy Jordan and Elisabeth Lex take a closer look at one particularly opaque metric, the ResearchGate Score, and suggest they’ve found a real contender.
From Agora to Shopping Mall: Tone-of-Voice Policies, Marketing and the Re-making of British Universities
Tone-of-voice policies raise serious questions about the future of academic freedom in Britain and the extent to which academic labour may come to be subject to the financial and political objectives of the corporate managers that form universities’ leadership.
The Image-Driven University
While academics have not just recently become image-conscious, noted Daniel Nehring, the increasing infiltration by corporate interests into universities is changing the face of what that consciousness results in.
The Value Added by Universities Exceeds Their Constituent Services
Academics do not simply teach and do research: they are teacher-researchers, notes Steve Fuller. In reviewing the UK spending review, he says, it is the value added to society by nurturing this complex role that should be at the forefront of the state’s thinking about the criteria used to fund universities.
Between the Public Good and Private Pursuits
We need more research that analyzes the relationship between university rankings, citation indexes, and academic publishers, argues Michelle L. Stack.
Looking for Leiden: Let’s Make Use of ALL Available Metrics
The Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA, has yet to achieve widespread institutional support in the UK. Maybe its reception might be warmed if DORA was more like its cousin, the Leiden Manifesto.
