Category: Featured

To make academic publishing scholar-led, we need a Norwegian-style dugnad!

The Council of the European Union recently announced its support for scholar-led open access infrastructures. Per Pippin Aspaas draws on the Norwegian concept of the ‘dugnad’ to project the kinds of social infrastructures scholar-led academic publishin…

Embodying social science research – The exhibition as a form of multi-sensory research communication

Interest in and recognition for communicating academic research in creative ways that reach different audiences is growing. Deborah Lupton reflects on how adopting the role of curator enabled her to bring together different skills, people and ideas to …

The REF needs to trust academics

Discussing recent research into how the REF distorts research and academic publishing patterns in the UK Moqi Groen-Xu and Peter Coveney argue for a researcher, rather than a rules centred REF. All governance systems – states, parents, or research eval…

Does the REF add any value to UK research?

Since the UK decided to link research assessment to research funding, there have been critiques that the competitive nature of the REF assessment creates a winner takes all environment. Whilst this is difficult to assess, Banal-Estanol et al. use a nov…

The bias puzzle – Understanding gender differences in academia

Bias in academia can often be difficult to pinpoint and separate out from difference. Responding to a recent call from the journal Nature to set new guidelines for studies dealing with race and ethnicity, Vincent A. Traag and Ludo Waltman, outline how …

Book Review: The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education edited by Michelle Addison, Maddie Breeze and Yvette Taylor

In The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education, editors Michelle Addison, Maddie Breeze and Yvette Taylor bring together contributors to reflect on the crisis of imposter syndrome in higher education. The book gives fascinating insig…

Reconnecting community, research and policy through post-Covid recovery

In the aftermath of COVID-19, the Falkland Islands Government has taken concrete steps to tackle long-standing inequalities, prompted by evidence of the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on local communities. How was the evidence-policy gap bridged in th…

If UKRI wants to support a diverse research environment, it should include independent researchers

Responding to the publication of UKRI’s EDI strategy, Helen Kara and Linda Baines argue that by excluding the work of independent researchers, the strategy will struggle to achieve its objective of promoting an inclusive research system. Earlier this y…