A key political driver of open access and open science policies has been the potential economic benefits that they could deliver to public and private knowledge users. However, the empirical evidence for these claims is rarely substantiated. In this post Michael Fell, discusses how open research can lead to economic benefits and suggests that if these benefits are to be more widely realized, future open research policies should focus on developing research discovery, translation and the capacity for research utilization outside of the academy.
The future of the academic monograph has been questioned for over two decades. At the heart of this ‘monograph crisis’ has been a publishing industry centred on the print publication of monographs and a failure and lack of incentives to develop business models that would support a transition to open digital monographs. In this post Mike Taylor argues that if monographs are to be appropriately valued, there is a pressing need to further integrate monographs into the digital infrastructure of scholarly communication. Failing this, the difficulty in tracking the usage and discovery of monographs online, will likely make the case for justifying further investment in monographs harder.
Open access is often discussed as a process of flipping the existing closed subscription based model of scholarly communication to an open one. In Latin America an open access ecosystem for scholarly publishing has been in place for over a decade. Could efforts like Plan S actually hurt this established initiative?
A critical blind spot in the impact agenda has been that impact is understood and defined solely in positive terms. Gemma Derrick and Paul Benneworth introduce the concept of ‘grimpact’ to describe instances where research negatively impacts society. Researchers and science systems, they argue, are poorly equipped to deal with.
Promoting public engagement with research has become a core mission for research funders. However, the extent to which researchers can assess the impact of this engagement is often under-analysed and limited to success stories. Drawing on the example of development aid, Marco J Haenssgen argues we need to widen the parameters for assessing public engagement and begin to develop a skills base for the external evaluation of public engagement work.
Twitter and other social media platforms represent a large and largely untapped resource for social data and evidence. In this post, Wasim Ahmed updates his recurring series on the Impact Blog, to bring you the latest developments in digital methods and methodologies for researching Twitter and other social media platforms.
In this post, Lutz Bornmann and Robin Haunschild present evidence from their recent study examining the relationship of peer review, altmetrics, and bibliometric analyses with societal and academic impact. Drawing on evidence from REF2014 submissions, they argue altmetrics may provide evidence for wider non-academic debates, but correlate poorly with peer review assessments of societal impact.
The active use of metrics in everyday research activities suggests academics have accepted them as standards of evaluation. Yet when asked, many academics profess concern about the limitations of evaluative metrics and the extent of their use. Why is there such a discrepancy between principle and practices?
In recent years there has been an increased focus on how research papers and supplemental data can be preserved openly. Andy Tattersall, Liz Such, Joe Langley and Fiona Marshall argue equal attention should also be paid to curating communication outputs aimed at engaging non-academic audiences.
Michael Burawoy, whose embrace of public sociology and the public at work lead him to describe his influential academic niche as “industrial […]
To address research credibility issues, we must reform the role of metrics, rankings, and incentives in universities.
In recent years there has been an increased focus on how research papers and supplemental data can be preserved openly. Andy Tattersall, Liz Such, Joe Langley and Fiona Marshall argue equal attention should also be paid to curating communication outputs aimed at engaging non-academic audiences.
A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of […]
Xenotransplantation is a fascinating subject – for obvious reasons, as it involves transplanting organs or other body parts across species boundaries (in […]
