A proposed overhaul of US federal grant rules has been debated mainly as a fight over political control of science. But, Rob Johnson argues, it would also reshape how publicly funded research is communicated and shared across borders, with consequences far beyond the United States.

An open access book mandate is one Research Excellence Framework (REF) cycle away. If implemented, research funders should focus on enabling infrastructure rather than compliance.

As proponents of AI claim it will soon replace software engineers, what does this mean for qualitative researchers and research software development?

Advances in agentic AI combined with increasingly large reserves of openly accessibly and machine-readable data are creating a perfect storm for the mass-production of AI authored research papers.

Re-examining a 1997 paper claiming women academics need to work 2.4 times harder than their male counterparts, Ulf Sandström suggests what policymakers can learn from overreliance on single studies.

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.