University rankings wield immense influence over Higher Ed and society at large – with positive and perverse effects.

In a time of growing demand for and on higher education, 

university rankings have transformed university strategy.  

Ellen Hazelkorn finds their crude simplicity is what makes rankings so infectious. Yet, quality is a complex concept. Most of the indicators used are effectively measures of socio-economic advantage, and privilege the most resource-intensive institutions and-or countries. In response and reaction to the limited nature of rankings, alternative methodologies and new formats have emerged.

After a decade, it’s clear that rankings have, controversially, fired a shot across the bow of higher education and their host governments. They may have started out being about informing student choice but, in today’s highly globalised and competitive world, they have become much more about geo-political factors for nations and higher education institutions.

From: LSE The Impact Blog, April 11th 2014

How Articles Get Noticed and Advance the Scientific Conversation

Gozde Ozakinci, a lecturer at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, offers an exemplary use of Twitter in a research workflow.

I dip in and out during the day and each time I have a nugget of information that I find useful. I feel that with Twitter, my academic world expanded to include many colleagues I wouldn’t otherwise meet. … The information shared on Twitter is so much more current than you would find on journals or conferences.

The good news is you’ve published your manuscript! The bad news? With two million other new research articles likely to be published this year, you face steep competition for readers, downloads, citations and media attention — even if only 10% of those two million papers are in your discipline.

So, how can you get your paper noticed and advance the scientific conversation? 
One word: Tweet.

From: Victoria Costello, March 30 2015, on PLOS Blogs,              blogs.plos.org/plos

Five things we mean when we say digital humanities

Libraries as Problem Shapers: some thoughts sparked by Brian Croxall (five things that we mean when we say digital humanities)

Brian Mathews (Virginia Tech.) comments: It was great to learn about Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship but the real reason Brian Croxall was on campus was to talk about digital humanities. We hosted him in the library and his talk was insightful and entertaining.

The main takeaway for me was his five things that we mean when we say digital humanities:

1. Humanistic examination of digital objects
2. Digital scholarly communication
3. Digital pedagogy
4. Creation of digital archives and primary source materials
5. Digital examination of Humanistic objects

 From: The Ubiquitous Librarian, 24th November 2014

Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme Report

Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme Report

The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP), 

together with African Minds 

and SARUA, (Southern African Regional Universities Association)

 has just produced an important report

 (authors: Henry Trotter, Catherine Kell, Michelle Willmers, Eve Gray & Thomas King)

entitled  

"SEEKING IMPACT AND VISIBILITY : Scholarly Communication in Southern Africa"

From the executive summary:

African scholarly research is relatively invisible for three primary reasons:
1. While research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is
falling in comparative terms (especially as other Southern countries such as China
ramp up research production), reducing its relative visibility.
2. Traditional metrics of visibility (especially the ISI/WoS Impact Factor) which
measure only formal scholar-to-scholar outputs (journal articles and books) fail to
make legible a vast amount of African scholarly production, thus underestimating
the amount of research activity on the continent.
3. Many African universities do not take a strategic approach to scholarly
communication, nor utilise appropriate information and communications
technologies (ICTs) and Web 2.0 technologies to broaden the reach of their
scholars’ work or curate it for future generations, thus inadvertently minimising
the impact and visibility of African research.

Recommendations: 

To university administrations
•Offer a reduction in teaching time to scholars who demonstrate ambitious research activity.
•Establish digital platforms for sharing publication success by university scholars.
•Develop policies mandating that all publicly funded research be made open access
•Put all university-affiliated journals online and make them open access
•Induce academic staff to create personal profiles on their departmental web pages
•Establish or identify support service providers who can translate scholars’ research for government- and community-based audiences.
•Develop a network of communication officers/content managers so that disparate dissemination activity can be pursued in a more cohesive and strategic manner.
•Encourage scholars to share their research insights on Wikipedia.
•Invest in training for library staff so that they can operate effectively in the new scholarly communication landscape.
•Train and incentivise scholars to use Web 2.0 platforms

 To university scholars
• Share responsibility with the administration for research visibility. Communicate research findings to the audiences that could best leverage them for developmental purposes.