Related papers: Rethinking Resource Allocation in Science
In the era of big science, many national governments are helping to build well-funded teams of scientists to serve nationalistic ambitions, providing financial incentives for certain outcomes for purposes other than advancing science. That…
Peer review is the main mechanism by which the software engineering community assesses the quality of scientific results. However, the rapid growth of paper submissions in software engineering venues has outpaced the availability of…
National research assessment exercises are becoming regular events in ever more countries. The present work contrasts the peer-review and bibliometrics approaches in the conduct of these exercises. The comparison is conducted in terms of…
Scientific research needs a system that better values rigorous, reusable contributions. Although open knowledge and FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) principles, along with coalitions and infrastructures, are…
The shift from individual effort to collaborative output has benefited science, with scientific work pursued collaboratively having increasingly led to more highly impactful research than that pursued individually. However, understanding of…
The procedure that is currently employed to allocate time on telescopes is horribly onerous on those unfortunate astronomers who serve on the committees that administer the process, and is in danger of complete collapse as the number of…
Combining different data sets with information on grant and fellowship applications submitted to two renowned funding agencies, we are able to compare their funding decisions (award and rejection) with scientometric performance indicators…
Peer assessment has established itself as a critical pedagogical tool in academic settings, offering students timely, high-quality feedback to enhance learning outcomes. However, the efficacy of this approach depends on two factors: (1) the…
After almost four decades of participating in competitive research funding -- as applicant, coordinator, evaluator, and panel member -- I have come to see a structural paradox: many participants recognize that the current system is…
Scientific research changed profoundly over the last 30 years, in all its aspects. Scientific publishing has changed as well, mainly because of the strong increased number of submitted papers and because of the appearance of Open Access…
In many countries and at European level, research policy increasingly focuses on 'excellent' researchers. The concept of excellence however is complex and multidimensional. For individual scholars it involves talents for innovative…
Academic data sharing is a way for researchers to collaborate and thereby meet the needs of an increasingly complex research landscape. It enables researchers to verify results and to pursuit new research questions with "old" data. It is…
Based on the Science Citation IndexExpanded webversion, the USA is still by far the strongest nation in terms of scientific performance. Its relative decline in percentage share of publications is largely due to the emergence of China and…
Space Science enjoys broad public support in the US. People say they follow developments with interest, and that the programs are worth their cost. This attitude seems to arise in part because of the intrinsic accessibility and appeal of…
This article offers a personal perspective on the current state of academic publishing, and posits that the scientific community is beset with journals that contribute little valuable knowledge, overload the community's capacity for…
Peer reviewed publications are considered the gold standard in certifying and disseminating ideas that a research community considers valuable. However, we identify two major drawbacks of the current system: (1) the overwhelming demand for…
This paper discusses how public research organizations consume funding for research, applying a new approach based on economic metabolism of research labs, in a broad analogy with biology. This approach is applied to a case study in Europe…
The use of outcome control modes of research evaluation exercises is ever more frequent. They are conceived as tools to stimulate increased levels of research productivity, and to guide choices in allocating components of government…
Science is increasingly global, with international collaboration playing a crucial role in advancing scientific development and knowledge exchange across borders. However, the processes that regulate how scientific labor is distributed…
Funding agencies rely on peer review and expert panels to select the research deserving funding. Peer review has limitations, including bias against risky proposals or interdisciplinary research. The inter-rater reliability between…