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 […]
Sharing our findings beyond academia isn’t typically seen as part of our academic workload. This is problematic for academics who are already struggling to find time to do all the things their complex workload requires of them
David Canter considers why the social sciences failed to influence behavior in order to stop the spread of COVID-19. The virologists had been preparing for a new virus for some years, so were already ahead of the game when they had to start creating a new vaccine. What preparations had social psychologists, sociologists or anthropologists for the inevitable emergence of a new pandemic?
Ziyad Marar, Sage’s president of global publishing, reflects on how his career and his studies of psychology, linguistics and philosophy leave him thinking a social science imagination benefits us as individuals and improves society more generally, especially in times of upheaval and reconfiguration.
As the ‘impact agenda’ weighs ever more on political scientists (and the academy as a whole), ). this should be seen less a threat to autonomy than an opportunity to rise to political science’s inherent public responsibilities.
If there is one thing that has become abundantly clear through this pandemic it is that a pandemic, like so many of the other really big and pressing issues facing us such as structural racism or climate change, are not problems to be faced by one discipline or sector alone.
Leith Mullings, an anthropologist whose work on what she dubbed the Sojourner Syndrome created a baseline understanding of the “weathering” that the amplified stresses of race, class, and inequality have on African Americans, and in particular African American women, died on Cancer on December 12.
As a precondition to receiving research funds, many research funders require applicants to state how their project will ultimately achieve impacts prior to any work being undertaken. Reflecting on a study of these impact statements made to the Science Foundation Ireland Investigators Programme, Lai Ma, argues that such statements often introduce a narrow short-term bias to considerations of impact and presents four ways impact statements could be used more productively.
Calls to align incentives in academia to promote open research practices are not new. However, in recent years research funders are increasingly implementing policies and schemes designed to promote open science practices amongst researchers. In this post, Maria Cruz and Hans de Jonge outline details of the Dutch Research Council’s (NWO) new Open Science Fund, which they suggest is the natural next step towards a culture of open science in Dutch research.