Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
No More Tradeoffs: The Era of Big Data Analysis Has Come
For centuries, being a scientist has meant learning to live with limited data. People only share so much on a survey form. But, at least in the area of text analysis (AKA content analysis, or natural language processing), the old limits are crumbling
Sociology & Philosophy the First Victims in Bolsonaro’s Culture War
Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, threatens to slash funding to sociology and philosophy departments. It was just the opening shot in a new battle against the humanities.
UC Librarian Foresees Seismic Shift from Elsevier Showdown
In the wake of Elsevier shuttering access to its current journal articles at the University of California, the university librarian at UC-Davis reviews the context of the dispute and argues open access offers the best path for academia’s future.
Do Practitioners Prefer to Connect with Researchers who are Local?
One long-standing concern with connecting research and practice is that the implications of research findings are often presented in a highly “decontextualized, distant way” that makes it difficult for practitioners to apply them to the specific context where they work.
How Learned Societies and Open Access Will Learn to Co-Exist
Plan S, a funder led initiative to drive open access to research will influence how learned societies, the organizations tasked with representing academics in particular disciplines, operate, as many currently depend on revenues from journal subscriptions to cross-subsidise their activities. Here, Alicia Wise and Lorraine Estelle update the first phase of the SPA-OPS project assessing the options available for learned societies to make the transition to open access.
Why the Community that Sings Together Stays Together
Is singing is a behavior that evolved to bond groups together? This question launched a research project that involved London’s Megachoir and the charity Workers’ Educational Association.
Have We Outsourced Impact Measures to Database Providers?
Arlette Jappe, David Pithan and Thomas Heinze find that the growth in the volume of ‘evaluative citation analysis’ publications has not led to the formation of an intellectual field with strong reputational control. This has left a gap which has been filled by commercial database providers, who by selecting and distributing research metrics have gained a powerful role in defining standards of research excellence without being challenged by expert authority.
When Do Practitioners Want to Connect with Researchers?
In the first of a series of short posts by Adam S. Levine spotlighting what the organization Research4Impact has learned about connecting social science researches with practitioners, he identifies four reasons why nonprofit practitioners have wanted to engage with social scientists.
