RT. A Journal on Research Policy and Evaluation
Not a member yet
27 research outputs found
Sort by
La valutazione d’impatto socio-economico e culturale della ricerca nelle scienze umane e sociali: uno studio di caso in una Università del Regno Unito
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is to describe the impact of research on society, economy and culture in the Humanities and Social sciences. In the first part of the paper, we describe the principal characteristics of the evaluation of research impact in the United Kingdom (UK), with a special focus on the new national exercise of research evaluation: the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF2014). In the second part of the paper we present a case study in a British university campus where good practices of impact evaluation have been recently introduced. The main results of this study show that impact evaluation of Social sciences and Humanities research is a today’s key challenge for the academia, especially due to the difficulty in identifying the appropriate indicators for research impact measurement. Finally, we present the main themes of the current debate about the evaluation of the impacts in different fields of research.The aim of this paper is to describe the impact of research on society, economy and culture in the Humanities and Social sciences. In the first part of the paper, we describe the principal characteristics of the evaluation of research impact in the United Kingdom (UK), with a special focus on the new national exercise of research evaluation: the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF2014). In the second part of the paper we present a case study in a British university campus where good practices of impact evaluation have been recently introduced. The main results of this study show that impact evaluation of Social sciences and Humanities research is a today’s key challenge for the academia, especially due to the difficulty in identifying the appropriate indicators for research impact measurement. Finally, we present the main themes of the current debate about the evaluation of the impacts in different fields of researc
Selecting applications for funding: why random choice is better than peer review
Get PDFA widely-used method of research funding is through competitive grants, where the selection of which of the applications to fund is made using anonymous peer review. The aim of the present paper is to argue that the system would work more efficiently if the selection were made by random choice rather than peer review. The peer review system has defects which have been revealed by recent criticisms, and the paper gives one such criticism due to the Nobel prize winner Sir James Black. It is then shown, in support of Sir James\u27 position, that the use of anonymous peer review leads to a systemic bias in favour of mainstream research programmes and against minority research programmes. This in turn leads to the stifling of new ideas and of innovation. This thesis is illustrated by the example of the recent discovery of the cause of cervical cancer – a discovery which has generated substantial profits for pharmaceutical companies. It is then shown that selection by random choice eliminates this systemic bias, and consequently would encourage new ideas and innovatio
Blue skies, impacts, and peer review
Get PDFoai:ojs.riviste.unimi.it:article/2914This paper describes the results of a survey regarding the incorporation of societal impacts considerations into the peer review of grant proposals submitted to public science funding bodies. The survey investigated perceptions regarding the use of scientific peers to judge not only the intrinsic scientific value of proposed research, but also its instrumental value to society. Members of the scientific community have expressed – some more stridently than others – resistance to the use of such societal impact considerations. We sought to understand why. Results of the survey suggest that such resistance may be due to a lack of desire rather than a lack of confidence where judging impacts is concerned. In other words, it may be less that scientists feel unable to judge broader societal impacts and more that they are unwilling to do so
Metajournals. A federalist proposal for scholarly communication and data aggregation
Get PDFAbstract While the EU is building an open access infrastructure of archives (e.g., Openaire) and it is trying to implement it in the Horizon 2020 program, the gap between the tools and the human beings – researchers, citizen scientists, students, ordinary people – is still wide. The necessity to dictate open access publishing as a mandate for the EU funded research – ten years after the BOAI - is an obvious symptom of it: there is a chasm between the net and the public use of reason. To escalate the advancement and the reuse of research, we should federate the multitude of already existing open access journals in federal open overlay journals that receive their contents from the member journals and boost it with their aggregation power and their semantic web tools.The article contains both the theoretical basis and the guidelines for a project whose goals are:making open access journals visible, highly cited and powerful, by federating them into wide disciplinary overlay journals; avoiding the traps of the “authors pay” open access business model, by exploiting one of the virtue of federalism: the federate journals can remain little and affordable, if they gain visibility from the power of the federal overlay journal aggregating them;enriching the overlay journals both through semantic annotation tools and by means of open platforms dedicated to host ex post peer review and experts comments;making the selection and evaluation processes and their resulting data as much as possible public and open, to avoid the pitfalls (e.g., the serials price crisis) experienced by the closed access publishing model.It is about time to free academic publishing from its expensive walled gardens and to put to test the tools that can help us to transform it in one open forest, with one hundred flowers – and one hundred trailblazers
Reporting—the final phase of scientific research—can and should be supported. A case for integrating language professionals into the research setting
Get PDFWriting for peer-reviewed research journals is difficult and requires specialized skills and knowledge—in language, logical argumentation, data presentation, publication ethics and more. The task is especially challenging for researchers who use English as an additional language. In this discussion paper, I illustrate how research writing in non-anglophone settings can usefully be supported by three types of language professional: teachers of academic writing, authors’ editors, and academic translators. Reviewing the situation in Italy, I observe that Italian researchers have limited access to the best forms of writing support, in part due to misconceptions and complex hiring rules. Finally, and based on the higher educational trends in northern Europe, I envisage a future scenario for Italy where university-wide academic writing centers will be established, language professionals with disciplinary knowledge will become part of research institutes’ staff, and researchers will have facilitated access to the services of authors’ editors and academic translators on a per-manuscript basis. As research writing support becomes integrated into the university setting, Italian researchers’ productivity will increase and the profile of Italian reporting in the international literature will be raised