Send us a link
The trend for the politically motivated forensic scrutiny of the research records of academics has a chilling effect on academic freedom and distracts from efforts to address more important systemic issues in research integrity.
After another year of conflict and war in 2023, there is a ray of hope for a peaceful New Year: the emergence of the EU's Horizon Europe programme as an extraordinary engine of global scientific cooperation.
The pressure for EU legislation to protect academic freedom ramped up towards the end of 2023 when the European Parliament's STOA panel for the future of science and technology set out its plan of action. Amongst other measures, STOA is calling for a formal definition of academic freedom and a monitoring system to ensure these principles are enforced.
2023 has been one of the most interesting and intense years in European and international research and innovation policy.
New Presidential Science Council to advise on policy
EU leaders failed to reach a deal on a seven-year budget review, postponing until January a decision that includes potential cuts to Horizon Europe.
Retractions are the stuff of nightmares for most academics. But they aren't necessarily a career obstacle, and sometimes may be the only way forward, according to Andrew P. Anderson.
Students campaigning to stop sexual violence say they will fight to ensure Cardiff University acts after a meeting with senior staff. One student said they were laughed at by three male employees when speaking on sexual violence at a staff meeting. The university said it took sexual assaults seriously and investigated them robustly.
At Lund University in Sweden this week, astronomers moved out of a building that was custom-built to hold telescopes and other artefacts from their 350 years of history, and they relocated to a physics building down the road. That’s because the astronomy department no longer exists, having been dissolved in the wake of a bullying scandal.
With EU relations patched up, UK researchers and policymakers are planning the next moves. There are no firm plans for AI legislation, but an international collaboration fund set up during the wilderness years will continue, and there will be a focus on South American links.
Despite the importance of ambitious policy action for addressing climate change, large and systematic assessments of public policies and their design are lacking as analysing text manually is labour-intensive and costly. POLIANNA is a dataset of policy texts from the European Union (EU) that are annotated based on theoretical concepts of policy design, which can be used to develop supervised machine learning approaches for scaling policy analysis.
