The Times Higher Education World University Rankings has named the University of Melbourne Australia’s best university, but higher education experts have warned that such rankings tables are easily misinterpreted…
Australian universities have welcomed the release of a long-awaited review of international student visa rules, saying that immigration reforms and the removal of tough financial requirements could give…
Every adult generation in history has worried about the young people following in their wake. Youth have almost always been found wanting, seemingly lacking the attributes and qualities necessary for lifelong…
Nearly 40% of academics under 30 and one-third of staff aged 30-39 years plan to leave the Australian higher education sector within 10 years, according to a new report, raising the prospect of severe…
Implementing the vision of a government report that called for more university funding could boost Australia’s national productivity levels by 5.6% by 2040, according to a study commissioned by a university…
Many university students use scholarly databases like they would Google, revealing an astonishingly poor understanding of how to refine searches for better research results, a US study has found. The Ethnographic…
The University of Melbourne has pushed out the Australian National University (ANU) to claim the number one spot in a table ranking the best universities in Australia, and has been listed among the top…
Steven Schwartz, vice-chancellor of Macquarie University, recently claimed that universities should break from being treated as businesses and recapture their moral purpose. He used the example of Jonas…
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…
The “future” is something which manifests nowhere more potently than in our cities. Yet a substantial transformation over the past twenty years in the way cities are being made – both in terms of their…
There are three tensions in the field of academic publishing (1) who pays to publish research? (2) who decides what gets published? and (3) who takes any profits? In the traditional model, based on publishing…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The phrase ‘publish or perish’ is familiar to all academics, who face enormous pressure to have their work featured in the top academic journals. Career progression, job security and pay rises can depend…
More than 18,000 journal articles have been posted on an illegal file-sharing website to protest the arrest of an online activist accused of stealing more than four million documents from a Massachusetts…
The time has come to abolish university examinations. Just because something has been around a long time there’s no reason to assume it’s outdated. But in the case of exams that assumption would be right…
Failure to reverse a downturn in international student enrolments could cost billions to Australia’s GDP and over 45,000 jobs by the end of the decade, a report has found. International student enrolments…
Imagine the following conversation between a finance academic and his or her supervisor during an annual performance review: Academic: So, do you think I am ready for a promotion? Supervisor: Well, I see…
Director of Centre for Postgraduate Studies, Rhodes University & Visiting Research Professor in Center for International Higher Education, Boston College, Rhodes University