The higher education sector in the UK faces the prospect of a university going into administration. How have universities fallen so low and is change possible?

What has science diplomacy been capable of since the turn of the 21st century?

Little work has yet been done on exploring how more ambitious open science principles might be deployed across both the qualitative and quantitative social science disciplines.

The true potential of citizen social science, whereby members of the public participate in the investigation and analysis of social phenomena, remains to be realised.

Research assessment exercises in the UK ostensibly serve to evaluate research, but they also shape and manage it. The author argues that the REF promotes a narrow vision and calls for a wider distribution of research funding to prevent fields being captured by dominant academic cultures.

Open Access often appears to be a monolithic concept, covering all fields of research and publication. However, in practice its application is to a large extent determined by the needs and resource…

The dominant model of Article Processing Charges, whilst lowering financial barriers for readers, has merely erected a new paywall at the other end of the pipeline, blocking access to publication for less-privileged authors.

Demonstrating research integrity is increasingly a demand for institutions receiving funding. However, whilst hundreds of articles have been written on the topic, precisely what this consists of is less clear.

COVID-19 has highlighted the need to work with researchers all around the world at the same time that it has also exposed the inequalities in the global research and knowledge system.

COVID-19 has led to rapid and open sharing of research outputs. But will this new, radically open research communications paradigm result in permanent change? 

Generating new knowledge is a relatively straightforward concept compared with the more unknown territory of getting knowledge to those that might need it.

Preprints servers have become a vital medium for the rapid sharing of scientific findings. However, this speed and openness has also contributed to the ability of low quality preprints to derail public debate and feed conspiracy theories. 

How can qualitative researchers collect data during social-distancing measures?

The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak exposes an inconvenient truth about science: the current scholarly communication system does not serve the needs of science and society.

The author argues that for the humanities to successfully adopt digital technologies, they need to develop an independent open humanities discourse.

Opinion piece argues that Plan S deals have streamlined open access provision in the global North while exacerbating existing inequalities in scholarly publishing, by establishing and entrenching a two-tier system of scholarly publishing based on access to funds. 

Responding to an emerging debate around the changing nature of the impact agenda in the UK, the author argues that the current moment presents an opportunity to exorcise the ghosts of previous regimes of incentivising and assessing impact.

 In this post, Mark Hahnel presents findings from the largest continuous survey of academic attitudes to open data and suggests that as well promoting data sharing, it may also have inadvertently fed into the publish or perish culture of research.