By Andrea Chiarelli, 16 Nov 2017 In early October, we published a blog post to announce our 2018 research contracts benchmarking exercise, building on the 2013 exercise run by our Director Rob Johnson and seeking to: generate a broader set of comparators, by opening up the exercise to all research-active HEIs; and help institutions respond to ongoing and new challenges in the research …
Learned societies and open access
By Rob Johnson, 18 Oct 2017 Since 2015, the Universities’ UK Open Access Co-ordination Group has commissioned a bi-annual exercise to monitor the UK’s transition to open access, including the financial health of learned societies. As part of this exercise, I have been working with Professor Robert Dingwall to assess how 30 UK learned societies have fared between 2011 and …
Getting to grips with research contracts
By Rob Johnson, 2 Oct 2017 Back in 2013, I ran a benchmarking exercise for 20 research-intensive universities in the UK, looking at how they handled contracts for research and research-related activities. The driver for the exercise was the rapid growth in the volume and complexity of research contracts managed by UK higher education institutions (HEIs). This was leading to …
How can we boost the impact of Social Sciences and Humanities? A report from Cardiff
By Mattia Fosci, 29 Sep 2017 Last week I attended the AESIS conference on Boosting the impact of Social Sciences and Humanities in Cardiff. It was an event-packed two-day conference with over 150 participants from academia, research funders and social scientists coming from the UK, Europe and North America. As a social science researcher routinely working with practice, the underlying assumption …
Towards a competitive & sustainable open access market
21 Mar 2017 Today sees the publication of our new report for the EC’s OpenAIRE project, Towards a Sustainable and Competitive Open Access Market in Europe. The report discusses some of the challenges in developing an effective market for academic journal publications, looks at the progress of open access, and considers the current policy environment in Europe and (briefly) the …
Reflections on the 2017 IDCC conference
By Andrea Chiarelli, 24 Feb 2017 I have just returned from the 12th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC), which took place in Edinburgh between February 20th and February 23rd, 2017. It was a great chance to catch up with some colleagues and we presented a poster on where and how researchers currently share research data – the outcome of a Digital …
Why we should care about text and data mining
By Rob Johnson, 14 Dec 2016 I was in Paris yesterday to present the findings of a new study on the use of text and data mining in public research. Organised by the ADBU – the French association of university library directors – I was joined at the event by speakers from ContentMine and NacTeM in the UK, and ISTEX …
5 tips for a successful researcher survey
By Andrea Chiarelli and Rob Johnson, 28 Nov 2016 (links updated 22/02/2020) Policymakers, university managers and academic publishers all have something in common: they have to work out what researchers want. Sometimes an educated guess is good enough, but in many cases knowing what your stakeholders, staff or authors really think will lead to better decisions. Much of our work …
The University of Nottingham blogs about Research Consulting – and for once, we are the client!
By Dr Mattia Fosci, 8 Aug 2016 Last week we featured in the University of Nottingham blog for an unusual reason. Our offices at Research Consulting are only a stone’s throw from the University’s Jubilee campus, and the University is one of our long-standing clients. But this blogpost tells the story of an instance in which Research Consulting was on …
Shaping Jisc services to support open access
29 Feb 2016 Research Consulting has today launched an on-line survey of UK HEIs as part of a study commissioned by Jisc. The primary objective of the study is to help assess the value of the following Jisc open access services: Monitor Local, Monitor UK and Publications Router. These services are designed to help streamline open access processes within institutions …