Digital Science and the UK Higher Education International Unit have released a report on UK Universities, International Collaboration and Research Assessment, focusing on international academic collaboration across the UK research base and on the implications of EU and global collaboration for universities, research assessment and the economy.
The report highlights the rapid growth of EU and global collaboration, from less than 10% to more than half of all academic research. Currently, majority of international collaborative partners in research are in other EU member states and this is the fastest growing part of the research base. Collaborative research also has a far greater impact than other research activity.
The main findings of the report highlight how knowledge capacity is compromised by a failure to be active internationally. The emergence of international knowledge networks (a 'Fourth Age' of research) means that UK universities need to develop strategies to expand international engagement to remain competitive in accessing resources.
According to the report, research rankings will be unable to provide proper comparisons. International collaboration is now so common, and covers so much of the most highly-cited output, that no analysis or profile can be exclusively attributable to any single country or university.
Further, the report states that owning knowledge assets is less important than having the right skills to use them. If research is shared then its content and IP is shared. The agility to exploit knowledge ahead of competitors is critically important. A flourishing university research base provides an ideal environment for developing knowledge-competent people with the skills that our European competitive economies require.
The report is available for download via Figshare here: https://figshare.com/s/304f27e62157e5dcee03.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of abstraction, indexing, entity extraction and knowledge organisation models (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies).
