Preprints – rapidly published non peer reviewed research articles – are becoming an increasingly common fixture in scholarly communication. However, without being peer reviewed they serve a limited function, as they are often not recognised as high quality research publications. In this post Wang LingFeng discusses how the development of preprint servers as self-organising peer review platforms could be the future of […]
Category: Academic communication
Book Review: Scholarly Communication and Measuring Research – What Does Everyone Need to Know?
Academics are required to not only find effective ways to communicate their research, but also to increasingly measure and quantify its quality, impact and reach. In Scholarly Communication: What Everyone Needs to Know, Rick Anderson puts us in the picture. And in Measuring Research: What Everyone Needs to Know, Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Lariviere critically assess over 20 tools currently available for evaluating the quality […]
Dealing with Rejection in Academia
In this repost, Staci Zavattaro, reflects on rejection in academia and gives 6 tips on how to manage the inevitable rejections that are part of academic life. This post originally appeared on Regions eZine. I just graduated from my doctoral program and was attending my discipline’s annual conference. That week, I had gotten several papers rejected in a row. Back […]
Don’t be a giraffe – How to avoid trolls on academic social media
Social media has acquired a reputation for being a highly polarised and argumentative public sphere. Whereas, the vast majority of academic social media is generally good natured, it can also be plagued by bad actors. In this post, Andy Tattersall shares a number of simple measures and tips on how to deal with the dark side of social media. When […]
Negative Impact – Is it possible to manage potentially harmful research findings?
What do you do with research that produces potentially harmful results? In this post Andrew Crane, explores how research can produce negative as well as positive impacts on society and discusses how his own research group has approached dealing with the complex issue of ‘negative impact’. “If you put these things in your report it will kill our industry”. The […]
A PhD is not just a degree – it is an opportunity to develop the skills needed to deliver impact
Some PhD students and early career academics feel that the demands placed on them are so intense that they can never devote time to ‘secondary’ activities. Research comes first and last, and the doctorate ‘grind’ is something that has to be ‘got out of the way’ before they can focus on anything else. In contrast, Hayley Teasdale argues that PhD […]
“If you use social media then you are not working” – How do social scientists perceive altmetrics and online forms of scholarly communication?
Altmetrics – web-based measures of research usage – have existed for a decade. However, a significant proportion of social science research fails to register any online attention at all. This impairs the usefulness of altmetrics as a tool to understand the relevance of social science research and also suggests social researchers are less inclined to engage in online arenas. In […]
Academic travel culture is not only bad for the planet, it is also bad for the diversity and equity of research.
Responding to Jürgen Gerhards’ post on the ecological damage being done by excessive academic travel, Race MoChridhe observes how the financial and social burdens of academic travel add an additional barrier to participation in research and argues that if academia wants to address issues of diversity and equity in research, it must first acknowledge the effects of academic travel culture. […]
Making Waves – Assessing the potential impacts of Plan S on the scholarly communications ecosystem
The potential impacts of Plan S (a funder led plan to accelerate a global flip to open access to research publications) on the wider research ecosystem are only beginning to be understood. Citing evidence from a recent report by the Institute for Scientific Information on Plan S funded research papers, Dr Martin Szomszor, outlines what the impact of the plan might […]
Say blockchain one more time! What is the real value of blockchain to higher education?
The revolutionary potential of blockchain has been much touted in many fields including research and higher education. In this post, Martin Hamilton discusses some of the potential applications of blockchain to academia and raises key questions about how these systems could be implemented and safeguarded from malicious exploitation. Blockchains are all the rage right now. They’ve joined cloud computing, […]