1. Research Services: A New Approach
It is increasingly clear that a truly integrated approach to research services management is needed to ensure data coherency, enhance visibility and increase compliance. Adi Alter and Eddie Neuwirth, in their post in the Ex Libris Blog, explores the challenges involved in research management and possible solutions.
The blog post says (quote): Due to its integrated approach, a research services platform can make it much easier to keep scholarly profiles updated in institutional research portals and domain-specific hubs. Research outputs and data are linked to the specific researcher, and updates to researcher profiles in the institutional portal are made through the same unified system. Researchers’ domain of activity can be matched to research grants, providing researchers with greater visibility into available funding opportunities and enabling them to secure new grants more easily. This flow of information, as well as the higher visibility of ongoing research and scholarly activities, facilitates comprehensive reporting and better analytics regarding research activities..........(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. Preprints and Citations: Should Non-Peer Reviewed Material Be Included in Article References?
Preprints are early drafts of a paper before it has gone through peer review. David Crotty, in his post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, notes that the non-peer reviewed material should be included in published article reference lists.
The blog post says (quote): The casual reader may continue to skim along, and assume that the concept holds as much weight as any other reference in the paper. One way to resolve this would be to include the descriptor in the reference callout in the text. Other suggestions include putting non-peer reviewed material into a separate reference list. This would create greater editorial overhead though, as one would need to carefully delineate which references go where, and some, such as a book where one doesn’t know the review history, would remain ambiguous. One could also use the different DOI category for a preprint to automatically create some different way of displaying the reference (different colors for different sources?), but again, this may be difficult to standardise (and would entirely go away when someone prints out a copy of the PDF on a black and white printer - yes, people still do this)........(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. Open Educational Resources (OER) Curriculum Development Process - Inside Emerging Solutions
OER's movement into development of core programs is a turning point in the evolution of open resources. But, development of core programs is complex and intensive. Despite the complexities, new technologies have been created to support development. Jay Diskey, in his post in the CCC Blog, discusses the development process and the new solutions that have emerged.
The blog post says (quote): Development processes have evolved considerably in recent years, as many publishers and developers have started to create digital, personalised learning systems. Personalised learning marks a departure from textbooks and monolithic courses toward flexible, customised content that meets the needs, strengths, and skills of individual learners. These systems can include both OER content materials as well as proprietary or licensed materials. The value proposition for publishers expands from simply providing high quality, well scoped and sequenced content (which, arguably, OER developers can provide) to include being able to provide the right material at the right time for a particular student or classroom........(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. One-way, mutually constitutive, or two autonomous spheres: what is the relationship between research and policy?
Academics are increasingly exhorted to ensure their research has policy "impact". But is this ambition predicated on an overly simplistic understanding of the policy process? In their post in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, Christina Boswell and Katherine Smith set out four different approaches to theorising the relationship between knowledge and policy and consider what each of these suggests about approaches to incentivising and measuring research impact.
The blog post says (quote): The second set of theories focuses on how politics and policy shape knowledge production and use. These accounts imply the need to be far more sceptical of the impact agenda: indeed, it is naïve to assume that researchers can speak truth to power. The upshot is that researchers should not be rewarded for their supposed impact, since policy actors employ research for political reasons, rather than to improve the quality or effectiveness of policies. Thus from this perspective, the fundamental idea of promoting research "impact" ought to be resisted, since the take-up of research is contingent on political agendas, rather than the societal utility of the research. This perspective also draws attention to the risk that moves to incentivise impact may lead to the politicisation of research, as researchers may reorient their research in a way that fits existing political agendas........(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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