Discussing recent trends in European science diplomacy, Kapil Patil and Maria Rentetzi argue that the post-Cold War consensus of high-level co-operation is giving way to more fractured and politicised model grounded in geo-political competition. The wa…
Category: Featured
Article Processing Charges (APCs) and the new enclosure of research
Drawing on a recent analysis of APC pricing and movements within the commercial publishing sector, Gunnar Sivertsen and Lin Zhang argue that APCs have now firmly established themselves as the predominant business model for academic publishing. Highligh…
Fun(ny) facts: Humour as a research communication strategy
If you have read any research produced by universities, civil society organisations or think tanks, you will most likely have struggled to find any good jokes. However, throughout history, humour has played an important role in critiquing society and r…
Book Review: COVID-19 Collaborations: Researching Poverty and Low-Income Family Life during the Pandemic edited by Kayleigh Garthwaite, Ruth Patrick, Maddy Power, Anna Tarrant and Rosalie Warnock
In COVID-19 Collaborations: Researching Poverty and Low-Income Family Life during the Pandemic — available open access— Kayleigh Garthwaite, Ruth Patrick, Maddy Power, Anna Tarrant and Rosalie Warnock bring together contributors to explore the experien…
No Impact People? Reframing research impact in the social sciences
Responding to a call for renewed thinking about how we understand and measure social science impact by Ziyad Marar, Ron Kassimir, outlines how the way in which impact is figured in the social sciences is often dependent on those external to its product…
Open access books: A global preference for regional subjects
For many research disciplines English functions as the global language for research. But, how far does this align with patterns of research use globally? Drawing on download evidence from the OAPEN library of open access books, Ronald Snijder explores …
Autonomous nudges and Ai Choice Architects – Where does responsibility lie in computer mediated decision making?
AI and algorithms shape many aspects of our everyday life, from the familiar algorithms structuring our social media feeds, to those subtly transforming more complex fields, such as policymaking and commerce. Stuart Mills argues that as these choice ar…
Book Review: A Handbook for Wellbeing Policy-Making by Paul Frijters and Christian Krekel
In A Handbook for Wellbeing Policy-Making, Paul Frijters and Christian Krekel offer a new guide to wellbeing-driven public policy, focusing on the proposal to replace GDP with wellbeing as the key metric to assess societal progress. With the book compr…
Do Nudges Work? Debate over the effectiveness of ‘nudge’ provides a salutary lesson on the influence of social science
Two recent papers have again brought into question the value and effectiveness of ‘nudge’ based policy interventions. Tony Hockley argues that as much as these studies reveal about nudge policies, they say more about the complex way social and behaviou…
We need better AI imagery for better science communication
Current images of AI – widely used and available in stock libraries – are dominated by tropes such as white humanoid robots, blue backgrounds, glowing brains and science fiction imagery. Research into narratives as forms of sense-making AI …