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…
Category: Research policy
Less academic freedom leads to less innovation
Drawing on data showing a decline in academic freedom over the past decade, David Audretsch, Christian Fisch, Chiara Franzoni, Paul P. Momtaz and Silvio Vismara, analyse the relation of academic freedom to technological innovation, as represented by pa…
Finding time for impact – Policy choices incentivising academic behaviours are not zero-sum games
Research policy increasingly encourages academics to undertake different activities, such as research, teaching and academic service, yet academic time remains finite. Using the introduction of tuition fees in 2012 as a natural experiment within the UK…
Redistribution of research funding is essential to any project to ‘level up’ the UK
Funding for Research Development and Innovation and the aim of the government to ‘level-up’ the UK and improve productivity are closely linked. However, Adrian Webb argues in its current form these investments often work against this agenda, a state of…
Science policy and ‘scientific populism’ in Mexico: Borrowing academic buzzwords to enact institutional violence
Drawing on his study of recent developments in Mexican science policy, Luis Reyes-Galindo, discusses how common concepts from social science have been weaponised to the expense of academic freedom. Epistemic justice, decolonising the curriculum, ontolo…
Reforming research assessment in Spain requires greater university autonomy
Following the publication of the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment under the auspices of the European Commission, countries across Europe are reconsidering their research assessment systems and policies and how they might align more closely to…
Two minds better than one – Does research funding and support for collaboration lead to more innovative research?
A central tenet of research policy is that funding and the ability to form research collaborations produces better research. However, whilst this may hold true for incremental research building on existing knowledge, does it also support novel research…
Open Access and the enduring myths of the long 1990s
From the dawn of the popular internet in the 1990s to the present day, Open Access (OA) to scholarly research has been a goal for many researchers and advocates. Drawing on research into the early OA discourse of the 1990s, Corina MacDonald argues that…
Research funders can tackle research waste – Lessons from COVID-19 research
Whilst the COVID-19 pandemic promoted faster and more open research practices, it also revealed ongoing issues of research waste, and the widespread duplication of research efforts. Till Bruckner provides evidence for how research waste continues to im…
War in Ukraine heralds a more personalised and politicised science diplomacy
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…