Narrative academic CVs present a means to bypass aspects of a research evaluation culture that is focused on the volume and venue of publications. Drawing on work promoting this format, researchers show how these texts more often foreground the problems they are meant to address, than how the format works in practice. 

Hyberbolic adjectives have been on the rise in academic writing. A study explores how this persuasive language is deployed across different fields of research

Since its purchase by Elon Musk last year, Twitter has undergone a series of rapid changes, largely with an eye to making the platform profitable. Considering these developments and those on other platforms, Mark Carrigan, suggests that just as academic social media has become relatively mainstream the dynamics underpinning academic engagement on social media have fundamentally shifted towards a pay to play model.

This post highlights four different approaches to evidence in policymaking and suggest how researchers and policy organisations might use these findings to engage differently with policy

The authors critically discuss their experience as guest editors for a Frontiers journal. They aim to foster open scholarly debate about Frontiers publishing practices, triggered by Frontiers hindering such debate on their own pages.

The shift to 'open' working across the social sciences as a discipline group entails a welcome but demanding cultural change - but have there been false starts along the way?

Social mobility champions are accused of having ‘lost focus on the role that a socially mobile society should have in matching all members of society into occupations and roles which they are suited for and enjoy, and at which they excel.’ Indeed, they give little attention to ‘the actual aspirations and ambitions of real people’. 

This post argues that for academic books to be genuinely open, an emphasis should be placed on collective funding models that limit the prospect of new barriers to access being erected through the imposition of expensive book processing charges (BPCs).

Australia’s ERA and EIA research assessment exercises lack a clearly defined purpose, or return on investment for Australian universities. In a climate of declining trust in the Australian Research Council, together with a confused idea about how research should be funded, the assessment regime itself is at a critical point of juncture.

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Rankings are artificial zero-sum games. Artificial because they force a strict hierarchy upon universities. Artificial also because it is not realistic that a university can only improve its reputation for performance exclusively at the expense of other universities’ reputations.