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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?
The Research Excellence Framework is primarily a mechanism for assessing the quality of research and allocating research funding. However, REF outputs and in particularly impact case studies hold value for many actors outside of higher education institutions.
How we spend our time directly impacts how satisfied we are with our lives, and understanding the activities that bolster our wellbeing can help policymakers make better decisions when allocating resources. Research is helping them do just that.
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.
This post draws on a recent analysis of different impact evaluation tools to explore how they constitute and direct conceptions of research impact.
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.
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?
An underlying assumption of modern political states is that they are rational systems that 'follow the science' to achieve optimal outcomes for their citizens. Whilst COVID-19 continues to foregrou…
The COVID-19 pandemic is significantly impacting universities and higher education institutions, reducing budgets and presenting new design challenges.
Interdisciplinary collaborations between scientific researchers and artists can often be one dimensional, with artists simply illustrating scientific findings.
Predatory publishing has emerged as a professional problem for academics and their institutions, as well as a broader societal concern, bringing to the fore a debate over what constitutes legitimate science.
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.
