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 […]
Playing the Game of REF
A very strong overall REF performance signifies a large concentration of outstanding work. It is an unambiguous plus. All the same, precise league table positions in the REF, indicator by indicator, should be taken with a grain of salt.
A Quick Q&A on the REF With Its Creator
The Conversation asked the man who developed Britain’s Research Excellence Framework back in 2008, Rama Thirunamachandran, vice-chancellor and principal at Canterbury Christ Church University, to talk through it. We repost that conversation here.
‘Free Access’ Is Not ‘Open Access’
The ‘free access’ to subscribers of the journal Nature isn’t OA-lite, argues Martin Eve. It’s not even OA. But it is a start.
NSF Changes Guidelines for Informative Titles, Abstracts
UPDATED: Amidst calls by politicians for greater transparency in how the National Science Foundation arrives at grant decisions, the federal agency institutes new guidelines for more accessible descriptions of projects.
Let’s Abandon That Qualitative/Quantitative Dichotomy
Are you doing qualitative research? Quantitative research? Howard Aldrich suggests that rather than defaulting to one of those terms and their tail of connotations, why not just describe your good research.
View From Korea: Higher Education Without Utopia
South Korea’s educational edifice has been praised near and far. But after a year spent among attentive and excellent students, Daniel Nehring wonders if the ‘pressure cooker’ apsects of the system aren’t sowing the seeds of a permanent status quo.
Social Science in the News
Ambedkar Institute to be India’s first Social Sciences university The Free Press Journal Mhow-based 25-year-old Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar National Institute of Social […]
Let’s Make Them All ‘Research Multi-versities’
Although universities and funding bodies pay lip-service to the importance of multi-discipline research, a physicist and an anthropologist argue there is a long way to go before the reality matches the rhetoric.
