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 […]
Giving Reviewers Some Credit: The R-index
Peer review is flawed, and a new index proposes a simple way to create transparency and quality control mechanisms. Shane Gero and Maurício Cantor believe that giving citable recognition to reviewers can improve the system by encouraging more participation but also higher quality, constructive input, without the need for a loss of anonymity.
The Never-Ending Audit®
In a society in which the remit of critical public debate is narrowing, in which protest and dissent are increasingly being criminalised, in which public space is being supplanted by private and commercial space, and in which the meaning of democracy is now altogether questionable, critically and politically engaged scholars may come to be figures of suspicion.
Divining the Future of College
Kevin Carey deftly explains how a series of historical contingencies combined to create the peculiar mash-up that is the contemporary research university, according to a new book by Kevin Carey.
Stop Fighting Wikipedia and Co-Opt it
Although it’s been ruled off-limits by many academics, of sociology prof actually makes his students engage with Wikipedia — making the web safer for (looking up) social science in the process.
Campaigning for Social Science: Public Sociology and ‘Public Sociologists’
The arrival of a report calling for the British government to better support social science has raised questions about the role, responses and responsibilities of a ‘public sociology.’
A Marketplace of Ideas? Yes. A Market? No
Research and teaching have never been free from external constraints and public universities have long been expected to justify the resources society devotes to them. But universities feel threatened and increasingly incapable of fulfilling their primary functions.
Freeing Biz School from the Blah-Blah-Blahs
The eternal conflict between the abstract and the applicable haunts the halls of many business schools. One way to help close the gap between research and practice is to re-examine how ‘impact’ is measured in the field.
Book Review: Rank Hypocrisies: the Insult of the REF
Publication of the results of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework evaluation of the quality of work undertaken in all UK universities last December attracted much attention. Ron Johnston reviews a book that savagely criticizes the peer reviews undertaken at the heart of the REF but also the mock exercises as universities prepared their submissions.
