By international standards, British universities have extraordinarily high levels of autonomy. They control all of their assets, they employ their own staff, renew their own leadership and governors and…
Research is a public good in itself, not only for the benefit of creating jobs and economic prosperity.
Flickr/International Institute of Tropical Agriculture
Forcing research and innovation to fit corporate needs exclusively sounds like a pretty blunt way to govern how public funds are awarded and used in universities. Granted, in a political environment touting…
Perhaps the best way to measure research impact is a judicious mix-and-match approach.
eepingtime_ca/Flickr
Outside professional sport, few industries measure the performance of their workforces more intensively than academia. There’s particular scrutiny on how much difference academic research has made to the…
“Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value.” If this statement came from a politician, the profound lack of understanding of the socioeconomic role of scientific research might…
The public needs to be convinced its money is being spent wisely.
TEDxBrainport
Plato said true philosophers are “those who love to see the truth” – a desire to seek and expose fundamental knowledge. For most scientists, the search for truth, otherwise known as fundamental or basic…
Measuring the impact of research in the real world sounds a bit impossible, but Australia is going to do it anyway.
Research image from www.shutterstock.com
So you’re just recovering from the last ERA (Excellence for Research Australia) assessment? Dust yourself off, Excellence in Innovation for Australia (EIA) is heading our way. This is the new paradigm…
Scientists are using Twitter to charge up their impact.
nicolasjon
Social media is no longer a new thing. But to scientists it still might be. There are few who are starting to take advantage of social media for professional reasons. What can other scientists learn from…
A new report shows that medical research in Australia is world-leading.
Medical research image from www.shutterstock.com
Australia’s medical and health sciences are leading the country in research quality, according to the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) report. The report, conducted by the Australian Research…
Calculating the economic impact of research has proved a challenging task for universities.
Leo Reynolds
The impact of university research can and should be measured, says Australian Technology Network executive director Vicki Thomson, but more work needs to be done before impact can be linked to funding…
The social, economic and environmental impact of academic research can continue for decades.
Flickr/Sanofi Pasteur
Academics from a dozen universities will be required to explain to industry experts the economic and social value of hundreds of research projects from the past 20 years, under guidelines for a trial designed…
The University of Melbourne will oversee a new effort to measure the returns on science investments.
Flickr/Geoff Penaluna
The University of Melbourne and Australian National University will perform a “stocktake” of all scientific research projects at the two institutions from the electronic era in an effort to map their social…
Do we need new vocabulary for measuring the “engagement”, “use”, “relevance” and “appropriateness” of research?
spettacolopuro
Will J Grant, Australian National University and Paul Harris, Australian National University
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…
The old system led to institutions urging their academics to write for the top-ranked academic journals only.
Håkan Dahlström, Flickr
The Australian government has dropped the contentious system of ranking academic journals and assessing academics based on their ability to publish in the top-ranked publications. Previously, journals…
The university funding system discourages research on volunteers like these men who are risking their lives to help their community.
Flickr/Rob Down Under
In Australian universities at the moment research is everything. They obsess over the rankings in the new ERA system which measures research performance. For academics publishing in the top journals isn’t…
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