1. Innovating science and technology education
Author: Dr. Geer Mohammad Ishaq
Substantial progress in Science and Technology is the key to sustained development of any nation in the twenty first century. Keeping in view the contemporary developments in Science and Technology at the international level, Indian universities too need to enunciate a comprehensive policy framework to synergise science, technology and innovation in order to achieve faster, sustainable and inclusive growth and foster, promote, sustain cultivation of science, scientific temper and scientific research in all spheres with special emphasis on innovation that is the essential driver and sustainer of socio-economic transformation. There is need to enhance science and technology education drastically in universities in order to create favourable conditions and enabling environment for innovations to occur.
The full entry can be read: Here.
2. Campus or platform – What shape will the post-COVID university take?
Author: Jon Treadway and Daniel Hook
Online learning is fragmenting the traditional model of the university as a single site for both education and research. In this blog, Jon Treadway and Daniel W Hook discuss how the digital transition is reshaping universities and how altmetrics might enable higher education institutions to redefine themselves in an increasingly aspatial academic environment. COVID has been an accelerant of recent trends for both research and education. One major shift has been toward online learning. While this has been beneficial in terms of increasing access to education, it may also serve to separate-out teaching from research activities and so lower interest in research careers.
The full entry can be read: Here.
3. Guest post — Citing software in Scholarly Publishing to improve reproducibility, reuse, and credit
Author: Daniel S. Katz and Hollydawn Murray
Software is essential to research, and is regularly an element of the work described in scholarly articles. However, these articles often do not properly cite the software, leading to problems finding and accessing it, which in turns leads to problems with reproducibility, reuse, and proper credit for the software’s developers. While software is increasingly essential to research, is increasingly funded as an independent project, and is often described in research papers that use it, practices for its formal citation have not kept up. Many publishers are already taking steps to ensure that the benefits of software citation are realised.
The full entry can be read: Here.
4. Pivotal year for preprints
Author: Lilah Burke
The year 2020 was a banner year for preprints. Submissions to journals also increased during the pandemic, but as the public grew hungry for new information about the virus, preprints captured public attention like never before. Preprint servers such as medRxiv and bioRxiv have basic guardrails against unethical or dangerous research, but they generally steer clear of evaluating the quality of scholarship. Papers can be thrown-out for not having proper ethical reviews or containing too much patient identification, for instance. MedRxiv also rejects papers that have the potential to cause widespread alarm, such as those claiming a substance is carcinogenic, with the thinking that those papers are disseminated after peer-review.
The full entry can be read: Here.
5. Publishing as embodiment of licensing: A key concept for the 21st century publishing environment
Author: Dave Davis
Publishers receive rights from authors and other creators (such as photographers and graphic artists); they then exercise those rights in a variety of ways that may result in physical books and journals but also in other expressions through which the copyrighted works will generate revenue, buzz and perhaps reputation for the authors, the publishers and anyone else associated with them. Almost all the ways in which those rights are transferred and exercised are licensing and sublicensing transactions, and once the author enters into an agreement with the publisher (which is largely a licensing transaction), most of those other activities are the responsibility of the publisher to manage.
The full entry can be read: Here.
6. When more is more: A DORA Community Discussion on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication
Author: Helen Sitar
The globalisation of research has led to the simultaneous rise of English as the recognised language of scholarship and the decline of national and local languages in scholarly communication. Yet disseminating research in diverse languages allows geographically and culturally relevant research results to be accessible to regional actors, creating impact and fostering interactions between science and society. In recent years, research evaluation systems, often relying on global bibliometric indices, have evolved to favor outputs in the modern lingua franca, English. Having a lingua franca has benefited academia: it has enabled collaboration, knowledge sharing and international debate across cultures. However, the requirement to communicate in English is also viewed as a form of marginalisation, and not fitting to all the purposes of scholarship. In recent years, the global research community has begun to question the robustness of a system that prefers one language over others. This has resulted in numerous calls to action, such as the Helsinki Initiative that draws attention to the importance of multilingualism and ‘bibliodiversity’ in scholarship.
The full entry can be read: Here.
7. To shape policy with evidence, we should celebrate both good practice and good theory
Author: James Georgalakis
As the famous saying attributed to Kurt Lewin goes, ‘there is nothing as practical as a good theory’. In this blog, James Georgalakis makes the case that bridging the gap between theory and practice is not simply a matter of more refined communication, but of creating structures in which policy influencers and academics can productively learn from each other. There is still a gulf between practical, experience-based knowledge of engaging research with policy and the corresponding academic theory-based field. James argues that the choice between being an evidence into policy thinker, or a policy influencing practitioner, is a false dichotomy – it helps to be a bit of both.
The full entry can be read: Here.
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