1. How proximity and trust are key factors in getting research to feed into policymaking
Policymakers frequently fail to use research evidence in their work. Academia moves too slowly for the policy world and its findings do not translate easily into policy solutions. Using the Department of Health as a case study, Jo Maybin, in her post in The Impact Blog, outlines how research most likely has an impact as a result of personal interactions between individual researchers and policymakers. But this can limit the range of knowledge being used to inform policy and be problematic when individuals change or leave jobs.
The blog post says (quote): The qualities of the knowledge brought by individual researchers (in comparison to research documents) made it particularly well suited to the civil servants' interests, because it was seen as up-to-date, candid, synthesised and editorialised. Conversations enabled the civil servants to 'drill down' into what they were most interested in, and to discover 'unknown unknowns'. But one major downside of 'embodied' knowledge like this is that policymakers move jobs and leave, which risks severing the relationships through which research knowledge flows. A succession of recent and planned cuts to the Department's own staff brings this weakness into sharp relief.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. Why ScienceOpen Research doesn't have an impact factor
ScienceOpen is more than just a publisher – They are an open science platform! ScienceOpen publishes from across the whole spectrum of research: Science, Technology, Engineering, Humanities, Mathematics, Social Sciences. Every piece of research deserves an equal chance to be published, irrespective of its field, notes Jon Tennant, in his post in the ScienceOpen Blog.
The blog post says (quote): At ScienceOpen, they believe that the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a particularly poor way of measuring the impact of scholarly publishing. Furthermore, ScienceOpen think that it is a highly misleading metric for research assessment despite its widespread [mis-]use for this, and they strongly encourage researchers to adhere to the principles of DORA and the Leiden Manifesto. This is why for the primary publication, ScienceOpen Research, they do not obtain or report the JIF.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. Guest Post: Emory's Gary Miller, "The Literature of Science"
Posted by Emory's Gary Miller, in his guest post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, this post offers a long term view of the scholarly literature and offers thoughts on the important values worth preserving in the shift from print to digital. Gary is a Professor and Associate Dean for Research, Rollins School of Public Health, and Professor of Neurology and Pharmacology at Emory University.
The blog post says (quote): Embrace technology, provide access to raw data, take advantage of new search algorithms, utilise data management systems, but do not forget that the goal is to make a contribution to the scientific literature. To do so the author must not merely generate the data, but also question its veracity, challenge one’s own assumptions and biases, consolidate information, and provide the appropriate context. As you sift through your own results and those found in the scientific literature, do not mistake the debris for knowledge. Ask yourself, in 30 or 40 years will 18-year-old college students embarking on their scientific careers look at that paper and comment on the beauty of the work?.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. Ask The Chefs: What Is The Future Of Peer Review?
After its successful debut last year, Peer Review Week is back. Ann Michael, in her post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, discusses Chef’s views about the future of peer review.
The blog post says (quote): Peer review varies dramatically across disciplines and content formats, so I'm going to focus my response primarily on long-form content in the humanities and social sciences. While Kathleen Fitzpatrick argued for a system of open, direct peer review on public texts in Planned Obsolescence some ten years ago (and practiced it with that book), few have followed her lead. Changing peer review requires a significant cultural shift for the humanities where authorship is still very much a lone activity - the open dialog that Fitzpatrick and others recommend requires a radical shift. And of course, the other challenge is whether new models would be taken seriously by the institutions that rely upon peer review for accreditation.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
5. Major Science Journals Eliminate Impact Factor
In science, the overwhelming obsession to classify is what pushed Carl Linnaeus to become the father of modern taxonomy and prompted Dmitri Mendeleev to decipher the patterns that led to the current periodic table. The scientific community carries on these legacies to this day, but not always in constructive ways. Perhaps the most problematic classification system is that of the impact factor, which attempts to rank the scientific journals by their relative importance, notes Alex Berezow, in his post in the ACSH Blog.
The blog post says (quote): A new ranking of academic journals could do something similar. Instead of simply taking an arithmetic average of citations, a weighted average could be employed such that citations from the most prominent journals (such as Nature and Science) count more than citations from lesser known journals. Additionally, professors could vote on which journals they find most authoritative in their fields. Second, there is utility in a ranking system. Students, journalists, and lay readers, who may be unfamiliar with scientific journals, can get a decent idea of which ones are most likely to contain authoritative, high-quality information. Crucially, a ranking system can also help identify pay-to-play journals, which are perhaps most likely to contain wrong or even fraudulent information.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
6. Understanding the who, what and how of online learning
Learning in a digital environment is potentially a great leveller, enabling people from all backgrounds to access learning and valuable knowledge; technically, all you need to learn online is an internet connection and curiosity about a particular subject or topic area, notes Sarah Knight and Heather Price, in their post in the Jisc Blog.
The blog post says (quote): The next step in our understanding comes from looking at those people who are engaging in online learning. If we use the broad definition, any and all learners can be online learners. It matters when, where, why and how much of their learning time they are in an online setting; and, of course, it matters in what way that online setting is designed for learning; but the differences between online learners are almost certainly more significant to understanding their experiences than the common features of the online setting. For some learners, at least some of the time, online is the strongly-preferred or only available space of learning. This is true of learners who want to fit learning around work or other commitments, who have accessibility problems with place-based learning, or who are geographically or culturally isolated.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
7. Are Your Rights in Order? 7 risks and 7 ways of avoiding them
What is the cost of getting rights wrong? Suzanne Kavanagh, in her post in the ALPSP Blog, discusses the session chaired by Sarah Faulder that offered advice on developing the correct rights acquisition strategy.
The blog post says (quote): Should publishers invest in rights management? Absolutely. Often rights are low down on the scale of things to invest in. You can caution or scare with big numbers of what it might cost. But even for smaller publishers you can do a lot with very little. Have a centralised filing place and a very good naming convention. It is preferable to do it digitally, but you can still do this with filing cabinets! Have someone in the organisation who has responsibility for it. And regularly check and remind this need to do. Conduct regular audits on your systems and that systems are being adhered to.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
8. Altmetric and Policy: Discovering how your research impacted real-world practises
One of the greatest challenges facing our customers is the greater understanding of how research impacts policy guidelines authored by the world's leading advisory and Non Governmental Organisations and similar institutions, and, in a second step, the understanding of how such guidelines, once implemented, can be tied to real-world effects much further down the line. In his post in the Altmetric Blog, Josh Clark gives an example of how the difficult connection between your research and practical implications of implementing guidelines can be easily discovered in Altmetric.
The blog post says (quote): Once the research has been published, references in policy documents first need to be discovered. This first step is quite hard on its own, as these references occur inside PDFs which can't be simply googled with ease. Discovering what research is used within hard-to-search policy PDFs is essentially impossible without using complex and sophisticated data mining techniques to ingest full PDF documents and pick out the citations in a centralised and systemic manner. Citations are often buried at the end or within footnotes of reports which can reach hundreds of pages in length. It is simply too difficult and unreliable to try and track where your research is used within policy papers manually.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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