Claudia Oliveira, MC substitute for Portugal, has started a new position as Horizon 2020 National Contact Point and EU Adviser for Social Sciences, Humanities and Culture at ABAE – Agence Bruxelloise pour l’Accompagnement de l’Entreprise (Brussels Agency for Business Support). Claudia will be focusing on advising all Brussels-based entities (public & private, universities included) on how to get funding for a research project, and will serve as the intermediary between her community and the European Commission in what R&D&I is concerned for SSH thematic.
Michael Ochsner was invited for a presentation and panel discussion at a workshop at the University of Graz entitled „And how do you want to be evaluated? A discussion on the evaluation of research performance in the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies“. He presented the work of ENRESSH and especially the Work Group 1 to a public of Austrian SSH scholars, deans, vice-rectors and a representative of the Ministry of Education, Science and Research.
More information (in German) can be found here: https://gewi.uni-graz.at/de/neuigkeiten/detail/article/und-wie-moechten-sie-bewertet-werden-diskussion-zur-bewertung-von-leistungen-in-den-geistes-sozi/
CALL FOR PAPERS: Scholarly Books and Their Evaluation Context in the Social Sciences and Humanities
(ASLIB Journal of Information Management).
Work goes on apace and you can now read all about what is happening in our latest newsletter. The November issue contains updates about work group activities, introduces new member Christophe Köller and has a message to the action from Professor Rūta Petrauskaitė of the Lithuanian Research Council along with other featured articles.
What does research quality mean? This question becomes important when research is evaluated, but remains largely unanswered, especially regarding the social sciences and humanities (SSH). This report gives an overview on empirical projects that explicitly investigates the notions of research quality of SSH scholars. Such projects are scarce and often not much known, yet are of great importance as only with knowledge on what is to be measured, we can find adequate indicators for research quality.
See the report on the ENRESSH deliverables page: WG1 Report on Projects on SSH Scholars’ Notions of Research Quality in Participating Countries
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION IN TRAINING FOR TRAINING SCHOOL ON SOCIETAL RESEARCH IMPACT IN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES
In February 2018, the European Network for Research Evaluation in Social Sciences and Humanities (ENRESSH) holds a training school in Zagreb, Croatia, on the theme of the societal impact of research in social sciences and humanities (www.enresshcost.eu)
ENRESSH is a 4 year research network (2016-19) funded by the European Co-Operation In Science and Technology (COST) mechanism exploring research evaluation in social sciences and humanities, and in particular the conceptual, practical and policy responses necessary to deal with the fact that SSH research is in many ways very different to science & technology disciplines that all too often form the basis for research and science policy (COST Action CA15137).
ENRESSH has a Working Group that is studying appropriate approaches to evaluating the wider social impact and public value of research in the social sciences and humanities. In the first year we have undertaken a taxonomy of SSH societal research impacts as well as organising a policy roundtable on policy approaches for SSH impact measurement. This year we are currently exploring how policy frameworks stimulate, motivate and drive researchers towards making their research more or less societally valuable.
As part of this, we are organising a Training School in Croatia in February 2018 to do two things; firstly to disseminate the lessons from the network’s activities to date, but also to mobilise a community of interested researchers who are interested in the network’s activities in the remainder of the project’s life. We therefore do not envisage a clear transmit/ receive split between trainers and participants but a higher-level think tank activity for slightly more experienced staff to create a dialogue between peers under the guidance of mentors.
The training school lasts for four days. The first three days are a mix of findings from the ENRESSH network, high-level keynote lectures, teamwork on problem solving and discussion groups, covering theories of SSH impact (Day 1), practices of SSH impact creation (Day 2), and policies for stimulating SSH Impact (Day 3). The final day involves a world café to bring the key discussion points from the first three days together to create a common knowledge base and closing statement. Each day will be led by a separate expert in these three areas, and each group activities will take place under the mentorship of an experienced SSH Impact research from the ENRESSH project.
We are currently inviting applications to attend from interested researchers, practitioners or policy-makers to participate in this dialogue. Application involves sending a short statement of motivation and an example of SSH research impact with which they are familiar. This research impact case will be used along with those of the other participants to ensure that the discussions remain grounded and help produce a shared understanding of participants in SSH research impact evaluation.
This training school is funded by COST, and each successful applicant will be awarded a travel bursary of €700 to cover their attendance (max 25 participants).
The closing date for the call for applications is 30th November 2017.
More information is available at the call for applications to attend here:
https://enresshcost.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/CFP_ENRESSH_TS_impact.pdf
If you have any questions or comments then please do not hesitate to get into contact with the ENRESSH WG leader Paul Benneworth (paul.benneworth@utwente.nl).
On August the 22th 2017 a meeting of 34 rectors of Latin American and Spanish Universities took place in the framework of the International University Book Fair, in the UNAM Convention and Exhibition Centre, Mexico City. The meeting addressed issues such as the evaluation, indexation and rank of university publishing and its future.
This is the first time that an International Book Fair brings together the heads of university management with publishers and researchers on scholarly publishing. At the meeting, the Rectors’ Manifesto in support of University Publishing was announced after discussing and generating proposals oriented towards an increase of the visibility, positioning and reach of university presses.
The academic event was chaired by the Rector of UNAM (Mexico), Enrique Graue Wiechers and the Rector of University of Salamanca (Spain), Daniel Hernández Ruipérez. It was promoted by Joaquín Díez Canedo, General Director of Publications and Publishing Promotion of UNAM and moderated by Jorge Volpi Escalante, Coordinator of Cultural Dissemination of UNAM. The expert panel was composed by Sayri Karp, President of the Association of University Presses of Latin America and the Caribbean (EULAC); Emir Suaiden, researcher at Brasilia University; Imanol Ordorika from the Directorate General of Institutional Evaluation of UNAM and Elea Giménez Toledo researcher at CSIC (Spain) and member of the management committee of the COST action RESSH (Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities). During her intervention she referred to the need for a joint reflection on the scientific policies and the scholarly publishing sector in Spanish in which the strength, consolidation, prestige, professionalization and strategies of large publishing groups leading the publishing sector worldwide are taken into account. Science policy and research evaluation should support the efforts of the publishing sector and the research on the field identifying the best practices in academic publishing. It is also relevant to coordinate the efforts and address the international discussions on the evaluation of scholarly books developed in international actions such as RESSH (Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities).
Short video of the rectors’ meeting (in Spanish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SiIxXJsupQ
EASSH (with other organisations) is trying to launch a campaign to double FP9 budget.
This is being done using a Thunderclap campaign.
If you wish to participate, please click on this link http://thndr.me/zp69ht and become a supporter of the campaign. You will have to give authorisation to Thunderclap to access your followers but you can remove the authorisation after next week if so you wish.
You can read more about the campaign at www.eassh.eu.
The list of languages into which the ENRESSH Guidelines have been translated is growing. After, Croatian, Latvian, Polish and Spanish, we can now add Italian and Serbian. Serbian brings in another alphabet, Cyrillic. It is good to show that Europe is rich in languages and alphabets, and that ENRESSH cares and promotes this diversity!
Look here to see the translations: https://enresshcost.eu/links_and_literature/enressh-deliverables/
We are very happy to announce the call for STSM 2_3. There are four STSMs foreseen this time again. Dead line for applying is the end of October.
All details are on the ENRESSH website