The ways in which journals are indexed online is essential to how they can be searched for and found. Inclusion in certain indexes is also closely linked to quality assessment, with research funders often requiring their grantees to publish in outlets listed in certain indexes. In this post Danielle Padula explains the importance of good journal indexing and how journals […]
Author: Taster
Fitting the mould – What the European Commission’s second tender for an Open Research Publishing Platform tells us about the future of scholarly communication
The European Commission recently announced a second tender for its Open Research Publishing Platform, a venture designed to meet the publication requirements of Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe funded research and to provide an open publishing venue for all interested researchers. In this post Bianca Kramer analyses what changes to the tender might mean for a future European Commission publishing […]
Reflections on academic fundraising: the art of getting there
Fundraising, or grant capture, has become an increasingly established part of a career in the social sciences. Whereas, in the UK this process has become institutionalized, in other research systems grant capture remains less central. In this post Abel Polese reflects on his own experiences of academic fundraising and argues that for researchers seeking research funding, failure is relative and […]
Book Review: Getting the Most out of Your Doctorate: The Importance of Supervision, Networking and Becoming a Global Academic edited by Mollie Dollinger
In Getting the Most out of Your Doctorate: The Importance of Supervision, Networking and Becoming a Global Academic, editor Mollie Dollinger brings together commentary and analysis from an international group of students and scholars to offer reflections on the doctoral researcher’s journey through a PhD programme. This is a smart, handy and pragmatic contribution to any doctoral student’s bookshelf, writes Sabrina Wilkinson, and may […]
The hidden cost of having a eureka moment, but not being able to put it in your own words
Accessibility in scholarly communications is often framed as an economic and technical question of enabling more people to have access and engage with research literature. However, the dominance of the English language especially in the most prestigious academic journals, poses a different barrier to researchers who do not have high quality English writing skills. In this post Sneha Kulkarni discusses how […]
To achieve a truly ‘Global Britain’ we need to take international research policy partnerships seriously
The relationship between the UK’s research endeavour and its international partners is likely to change in coming years as a result of changes in domestic funding streams and a potentially sharp exit from EU funded research projects. In this post James Georgalakis argues that if the UK is seeking to be truly ‘Global’ in terms of research, there is a […]
Using mobile applications for social science research
In this post Dr Reka Solymosi & Dr Michael Chataway discuss the use of mobile phone applications as a research method in the social sciences. Reflecting on their own use of apps to study fear of crime, they highlight the methodological advantages of incorporating apps into research designs and provide four key points to consider for researchers seeking to use […]
Book Review: The Joy of Search
In this repost, Jill O’Neil reviews Daniel M. Russell’s The Joy of Search: A google insiders guide to going beyond the basics. Finding the book to offer a lively means of helping users to develop the thinking skills needed in strategically approaching available tools for solving an information problem. At ALA this year, I had the happy experience of sitting down in the […]
India’s retrospective review of PhD research quality is set to significantly change research practices
India’s University Grants Commission recently invited proposals to retrospectively assess the quality of PhD theses awarded by the country’s universities over the past 10 years. In this post Santosh C. Hulagabali, outlines the potential impacts of this review on Indian universities and scholars and highlights the role of this review in signaling the quality of Indian research. In the […]
AmeliCA before Plan S – The Latin American Initiative to develop a cooperative, non-commercial, academic led, system of scholarly communication
Open access is often discussed as a process of flipping the existing closed subscription based model of scholarly communication to an open one. However, in Latin America an open access ecosystem for scholarly publishing has been in place for over a decade. In this post, Eduardo Aguado-López and Arianna Becerril-Garcia discuss open access developments in Latin America and the AmeliCA initiative to develop a […]