After 11 years of Excellence in Research for Australia, the time and costs for universities and the value it creates for other sectors (none of which made submissions to a recent review) are unknown.
President Jimmy Carter extended the deadline for ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment in 1978.
Reuters
In the #MeToo era and with more women entering Congress, activists are hopeful another state could ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. But is it too late?
What is the purpose of measuring engagement, impact or quality?
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Engagement is not impact, and simple measures such as non-government research income tell us very little about genuine external engagement between universities and industry.
How useful is ERA for measuring research quality?
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A government report on research funding and policy has recommended introducing a funding incentive to ensure university research benefits society and business.
We need researchers to collaborate with industry if we’re to be an innovation nation.
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An emphasis on innovation is great, but we need genuine reforms to universities and tax incentives if we’re to promote collaboration between research and industry.
Citations, bibliometrics, “publish or perish”: why must we constantly assess research?
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Governments and taxpayers deserve to know that their money is being spent on something worthwhile to society. Individuals and groups who are making the greatest contribution to science and to the community…
UNSW Vice-Chancellor Fred Hilmer at the National Press Club in Canberra.
AAP/Alan Porritt
Universities must adopt the campaign tactics of the mining industry if they are to have any chance against oppressive government regulation and fee structures, says the University of New South Wales Vice-Chancellor…
Australia’s boom investment conditions will begin tailing off by 2014, according to a Deloitte Access Economics report - so what does this mean for current labour shortages?
Much public discussion around the current mining boom focuses on the lack of qualified staff to fill an expanding employment market. But yesterday’s report by Deloitte Access Economics warning that the…
How best to quantify the performance of Australian researchers?
Storyvillegirl
The Excellence in Research for Australia Initiative (ERA) is the federal government’s latest attempt to quantify the “excellence” (or otherwise) of Australian researchers. And just a few short weeks ago…
Do we need new vocabulary for measuring the “engagement”, “use”, “relevance” and “appropriateness” of research?
spettacolopuro
What has been the impact of the invention of the telescope? What has been the impact of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, or the splitting of the atom? Yes, that’s right: the idea of measuring the…
Bureaucracy is stymieing academic engagement.
StripeyAnne
The idea that universities should return to their “core business” of teaching and research has become a favourite mantra of vice chancellors. It is reinforced by increasing evaluations imposed by Canberra…
Do Australian universities suffer from an overload of auditing and metrics-based assessment? Are vision and flexibility being stifled? Flickr/Harald Groven.
Visiting British expert David Sweeney could have star appeal for academics frustrated by the bureaucratic inflexibility of Australia’s research auditing system and metrics-based assessments blind to the…
Universities already stockpile academic papers so they can report their output to the government. But stockpiling the wrong version of the paper can restrict their right to make the paper available on open access.
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Providing equitable access to the findings of scholarly research is an expensive and vexed business, as many recent stories here on The Conversation have highlighted. Open access offers a way to freely…
Frustration with copyright restrictions placed on scholarly work in many journals has helped fuel the Creative Commons and Open Access movements.
Flickr/TilarX
Back in 1991, in the very earliest days of the internet, a group of high energy physicists began sharing their findings on a Los Alamos-based online archive called Arxiv. Their early experiments in the…
A growing number of academic institutions are building free online databases of their scholarly output. But publication in a big name academic journal still holds cachet for most academics.
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As the cost of accessing academic journal articles increases, a growing number of academic institutions are building publicly accessible databases of scholarly work. But how much of a threat to the traditional…
How does the high cost of academic journal subscriptions impact the developing world?
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Universities libraries in the developed world are struggling to pay academic journal subscription costs – so how can universities in developing countries hope to pay? In this Q+A, Professor Adam Habib…
Publishing practices in the biomedical and social sciences commonly fails to conform to Australian codes of practice.
AAP
In February, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Kim Carr said Australian taxpayers could be confident the research activities they fund meet the “highest ethical and moral standards…
ANU’s new Digital Collections database aims to make scholarly work freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
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As the cost of accessing academic journals soars, the Australian National University has launched a new free online database that allows anyone with an internet connection to read the latest scholarly…