A government report on research funding and policy has recommended introducing a funding incentive to ensure university research benefits society and business.
Too many academic careers are shaped around writing journal articles nobody reads and planning twice-weekly lectures to a diminishing class of students.
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Prime Minister Turnbull has signalled a desire to move away from a ‘publish or perish’ academic culture toward one that prioritises public impact and engagement. It’s a challenge scholars should embrace.
The iPhone is a good example of an entire industry built on the back of publicly funded research outcomes. The ‘iPhone fish’ is designed to teach people healthy eating through portion size control.
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Publicly-funded research should contribute to society in some way. But we need to think carefully about how we create a system that allows us to measure the impact of research.
Academics are under enormous pressure to publish prolifically because this generates subsidies for their universities.
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There can be little doubt that the research environment in universities is changing: it is now less a collegiate community of scholars than a competitive game of winners and losers. This transformation…
When McDonald’s came under sustained criticism from campaigners in the 1980s, the company responded by constructing a carefully crafted image of corporate social responsibility. It insisted that it cared…
It’s now ok to step out of line.
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Academics love games. We can’t resist playing them – but the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is our favourite. As the results of the UK’s 2014 assessment of university research are digested, academics…
Not a full picture.
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Research assessment is only partly reliable as an indicator of the real quality of the work going on in higher education. It has a dual character. On one hand it is rooted in material facts and objective…
UCL has moved ahead of Cambridge in some analysis of the REF 2014 results.
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The dominance of a “golden triangle” of universities in the latest research assessment exercise has renewed concerns that other universities may get less government research funding in future. The results…
For the first time, the “impact” of academic research on the wider world has been included in a large-scale assessment of the quality of university research, which has just been published. One-fifth of…
Lining up for the REF results.
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Think of a researcher measuring the trajectory of a laser beam in a university physics lab or a history professor digging through a church’s long-lost archives and their work can often feel far removed…
President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Director of the Asia-Pacific Program for Social Investment and Philanthropy in the Centre for Social Impact, Swinburne University of Technology