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 […]
First, Do No Harm: Five Tips for Collaborating With Government and Development Orgs
The appeal of collaborating with a government agency, or an organization funded by one, seems obvious. In practice, however, it’s not always easy to make collaborative research work well. Susan Dodsworth and Nic Cheeseman outline some simple lessons for those looking to collaborate while avoiding the common pitfalls.
Campaign for Social Science Adds Four to Board
Britain’s Campaign for Social Science has announced the appointment of four new board members, drawing on extensive research, public policy and practitioner social science expertise.
Storify is Dead. Responsible Data Stewardship Must Live
Storify is dead The service, which let you take social media content like Twitter and Facebook posts and aggregate them together into stories, announced that they’ll be shutting down and deleting all content as of March 16th, 2018. It’s not as bad as some platform shutdowns – there is notice and at least you can export your own content (one story at a time) – but it’s still a reminder of how vulnerable user-generated content can be online.
Cry from Publons: Let’s End Reviewer Fraud
Peer review has become a major editorial challenge for publishers worldwide, but options do exist to help tackle fraudulent peer reviewers. In this post from the Publons blog, some options for what publishers can do are examined.
Is There a Need for Novelty in Science?
In a recent survey of over 1,500 scientists, more than 70 percent of them reported having been unable to reproduce other scientists’ findings at least once. Reproducibility of findings is a core foundation of science and realizing how difficult it is to assess novelty should give funding agencies and scientists pause. Progress in science depends on new discoveries and following unexplored paths – but solid, reproducible research requires an equal emphasis on the robustness of the work.
Sexual Harassment and Universities
Developing an effective response to sexual harassment in the academic industry — by no means a new phenomenon, notes Robert Dingwall — requires us to consider questions about institutional memory, occupational cultures, and organizational silos, rather than badly behaved individuals.
Share Your Research on a Blog
How can researchers provide information about their studies in ways that would be useful and interesting to prospective and current research participants? With that question in my mind, MethodSpace’s Janet Salmons began to explore the potential for blogs to recruit and inform participants. As with almost any online exploration, she discovered a much broader potential for blogs in the academic world.
Science’s Uphill Journey Out of Its Credibility Crisis
The credibility of science is under siege, says Andrea Saltelli. On the one hand doubt is shed on the quality of entire scientific fields or sub-fields. On the other this doubt is played out in the open, in the media and blogosphere.
