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 […]
Accountability, Compliance and Bureaucratisation in Higher Education
Around the educational mission we are now spinning a web of ‘accountability’ that has little to do with explaining or justifying our activities, and much to do with obscuring our responsibility through the creation of elaborate processes.
The Papers That Could Change Politics in the Coming Years
A review of new material presented at the Midwest Political Science Association’s annual conference in Chicago.
Please – Not a Heroic Impact Narrative
Recently I’ve seen a lot of hero/heroine narratives. They now seem to be popping up in research impact plans and claims about impact.
New Social Media, New Social Science? Blurring the Boundaries: One Year On
Last year, SAGE, the National Centre for Social Research and the Oxford Internet Institute set up a network for social media researchers […]
Ann Oakley on Women’s Experience of Childbirth
In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast sociologist Ann Oakley discusses her research into a range of questions about women’s experience of childbirth.
So Much Noise: Are Academics being Over-Branded?
The Ivory Tower has been toppled and academia has an impact in the ‘real world’. The problem is that this may have come at the expense of truly innovative and critical scholarship.
Open Access increases citation? A brief overview of two reports
A comparison of two studies on the coverage and range of citations in Open Access, comparing OA and non-OA journals.
Open Access and the Privatisation of Knowledge
Is OA the flip side to privatisation of Higher Education? Is there a way in which OA is a means of justifying the economic inaccessibility of HE by providing a public good?
