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 […]
Debating the Legacy of Ulrich Beck
Amid the encomiums and eulogies surrounding the late German sociologist Ulrich Beck, Robert Dingwall asks how far Beck’s body of published work represents a model that other sociologists should seek to follow
Probing the ‘Informed’ Voter: Philip Converse, 1928-2014
Philip Converse looked at the “informed voter” and questioned just what sort of information that voter really possessed, forever changing the assumptions behind political science research.
When Chasing Prestige Becomes the Prize
A survey by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics suggests that researchers appreciate the benefits of competition but also fear how it can emphasize prestige over quality
The Social Scientist Who Knew Torture Wasn’t Worth the Game
Game theory neatly — and sadly — predicted the futility of using torture to extract meaning information from terror suspects, neatly predicting the results of the recent U.S. Senate report years before its release.
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.
