Aligning closely with trends in research impact, open government approaches are looking to incorporate public engagement and establish wider transparency as central operations. Samuel Lee, Fabian Seiderer and Lida Bteddini share findings from a World Bank project on digital participation and open data in Morocco. They find that greater access and use of public sector data can result in increased civic participation and socio-economic benefits. […]
Category: Impact
Neglecting to confront conflicts of interest in industry-sponsored research unfairly burdens early career researchers
As public funding shrinks, industry-sponsored research may be a remedy. But Rebecca Cassidy reports back from a workshop on how the pressure caused by scarcity of funding and conflicts of interest in certain fields falls disproportionately on early career researchers, the most vulnerable members of the higher education precariat. Those who have yet to build up the social capital which comes from […]
Sharing is caring, but should it count?
The following is a guest post by Shea Swauger, Data Management Librarian at Colorado State University. Shea and I both participated in a meeting for the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries on 11 July 2014, where he presented survey results described below. It shouldn’t be a surprise that many of the people who collect and generate research data […]
Willingness to incorporate external influences into research process will support strong basis for usable knowledge.
Researchers who are more open to external (non-academic) influences in their research are able to more easily share their research with users, stakeholders and partners. Researchers Julia Olmos, Paul Benneworth and Elena Castro studied researchers’ willingness to include influences from users in the overall research process. The purpose of science has traditionally been linked to continuously challenging the existing knowledge as a […]
Impact Round-Up 19th July: Crafting Op-Eds, fixing peer review, and ethical frameworks for social media research.
Managing Editor Sierra Williams presents a round-up of popular stories from around the web on higher education, academic impact, and trends in scholarly communication. Now that summer is in full swing, this may be the perfect time to set aside that research article and consider some alternative forms of publication. Tressie McMillan Cottom recommends the Op-Ed as an “excellent way to bring […]
Research impact on policy-making is often understood in instrumentalist terms, but more often plays symbolic role.
The idea that research should have an impact on policy is premised on an instrumentalist, or problem-solving theory of research utilisation: namely, that research is valued by policy-makers as a means of adjusting their outputs. Yet Christina Boswell‘s research has shown that expert knowledge is just as likely to be valued for its symbolic function: as a means of substantiating […]
Five minutes with Ha-Joon Chang: “Members of the general public have a duty to educate themselves in economics”
In an interview with Joel Suss, editor of the British Politics and Policy blog, Ha-Joon Chang discusses his new book, Economics: The User’s Guide, and the need for a pluralist approach to economics. He recently gave a public lecture at the LSE, the video of which can be seen here. This post originally appeared on British Politics and Policy (BPP). In a recent article, you […]
Participatory workshops with non-academics foster positive social impact and work as a research validation mechanism.
Non-academic research users are often powerless in the decision-making processes for how research is communicated. Jacqueline Priego-Hernandez shares lessons from a knowledge exchange toolkit which aims to address this imbalance through participatory workshops. Drawing on a Freirean approach to learning, interactions between participants and researchers are seen as a key objective in itself. She argues that plans for impact need to be devised for the benefits to […]
Performance-based research assessment is narrowing and impoverishing the university in New Zealand, UK and Denmark.
Susan Wright, Bruce Curtis, Lisa Lucas and Susan Robertson provide a basic outline of their working paper on how performance-based research assessment frameworks in different countries operate and govern academic life. They find that assessment methods steer academic effort away from wider purposes of the university, enhance the powers of leaders, propagate unsubstantiated myths of meritocracy, and demand conformity. But the latest quest […]
Is the fear of metrics symptomatic of a deeper malaise? On fiefdoms and scapegoats of the academic community.
This Monday marks the end of the open consultation for HEFCE’s Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment. Steve Fuller expands on his submission and also responds to other prominent critiques offered. He argues that academics, especially interdisciplinary scholars, should welcome the opportunity to approach the task of citation differently. Whilst many complain of the high citation rates of […]