In June of this year, the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) published an open letter to the wider academic community with a call towards improving research output tracking. Funding acknowledgments were a particular focal point. In the previous blog post in this series, we already addressed several issues at play in funding acknowledgment data sets.

Researchers collaborate across borders and continents. Students go on exchange and go study abroad. Nothing new so far. Yet formalised international strategic partnerships between universities are more recent. These agreements include both research and education and cover a range of departments. And they are expected to contribute to strategic goals and have great impact.

Created in 1992, the UNITWIN/UNESCO Chair programme is intended to support developing expertise in areas related to UNESCO’s mandate, such as education, culture, communication and the natural and social sciences. This network of over 850 institutions in 117 countries mobilises knowledge to address pressing societal challenges and contribute to development.

The idea for this blog post emerged in the context of a special issue with the online journal Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics . We, a group of researchers that can broadly be associated with science & technology studies and meta-research, were invited by Frontiers to guest edit what they call a ‘Research Topic’, suggesting it could focus on innovations in peer review practices.

Why is it important that abstracts are made openly available? In a blog post that we published two years ago together with our colleague Aaron Tay, we discussed numerous ways in which open abstracts can be of great value. This includes scientific literature search, both using traditional query-based search tools and using more advanced text mining and visualization tools.

The learnings have been presented and published in different shapes and forms, book chapters, working papers, reports, many deliverables, publications, and presentations. Here we present the breadth and depth of the work by linking it to the SUPER MoRRI blogpost series and turning them into an overarching story in two episodes.

At CWTS we are currently working on the development of our new knowledge agenda, a strategic plan for our center for the next six years. As part of this process, we are having lots of discussions, both internally within our center and with external colleagues and experts. While it will still take a few more months before we can share the outcomes of this process, we can already provide some impressions of the types of ideas we are discussing.

The EXPLORE methodology was developed in the context of the two territorial RRI projects CHERRIES and RIPEET (H2020) that CWTS is participating in since 2020. It can assist territories in developing more innovative, inclusive, and self-sustaining R&I ecosystems by ensuring bottom-up involvement of all kinds of local stakeholders and citizens.

I’ for invention Academic researchers and inventors are explorers – boldly going where no one has gone before. Most people agree on this. However, the relevance of their discoveries or breakthroughs is perceived very differently by different groups, at least when it comes down to technology transfer of that invention from universities to companies.

Looking back At the STI conference 2018 in Leiden, two strands of work at CWTS, the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) work in the MoRRi project, and the regional knowledge patterns for innovation, got together.