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 […]
Promoting public engagement with research has become a core mission for research funders. However, the extent to which researchers can assess the impact of this engagement is often under-analysed and limited to success stories. Drawing on the example of development aid, Marco J Haenssgen argues we need to widen the parameters for assessing public engagement and begin to develop a skills base for the external evaluation of public engagement work.
Britain’s Labour Party historically had strong ties to the idea and later the state of Israel. Now a host of factors are challenging the traditional connection to Zionism and even raising concerns of antisemitism.
For centuries, being a scientist has meant learning to live with limited data. People only share so much on a survey form. But, at least in the area of text analysis (AKA content analysis, or natural language processing), the old limits are crumbling
Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, threatens to slash funding to sociology and philosophy departments. It was just the opening shot in a new battle against the humanities.
In the wake of Elsevier shuttering access to its current journal articles at the University of California, the university librarian at UC-Davis reviews the context of the dispute and argues open access offers the best path for academia’s future.
One long-standing concern with connecting research and practice is that the implications of research findings are often presented in a highly “decontextualized, distant way” that makes it difficult for practitioners to apply them to the specific context where they work.
Plan S, a funder led initiative to drive open access to research will influence how learned societies, the organizations tasked with representing academics in particular disciplines, operate, as many currently depend on revenues from journal subscriptions to cross-subsidise their activities. Here, Alicia Wise and Lorraine Estelle update the first phase of the SPA-OPS project assessing the options available for learned societies to make the transition to open access.
Is singing is a behavior that evolved to bond groups together? This question launched a research project that involved London’s Megachoir and the charity Workers’ Educational Association.