daniel’s theories

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  • PaperDigital Science8 May 2017

    Digital Research Report: The Landscape of Climate Research Funding

    The USA government proposes policy and funding changes around environmental protection and climate research. As is often the case, it will be difficult to assess the impact until years after the policy has been enacted. However, funding data provide us with a more proximate bellwether than the traditional research analytics. In this report, we profile the balance of ‘climate research’ investment and note its impact on a diverse research portfolio that runs from ecology and atmospherics to economics and public health. We explore the use of funding data as an analytical source, track the growth of ‘climate change’ as a topic and differentiate this from ‘global warming’. We also disaggregate funding across fields of research and demonstrate a research shift from global climate to biological impact and adaptation and, now, towards response and mitigation. The data highlight the ratio between a relatively small pool of research funds and its support of a much greater infrastructure for monitoring, regulation and response. The USA is identified as the largest single source of research grants, although European funds are growing rapidly. The USA provides key support and data worldwide, and may have been agile in shifting from background research into adaptation and mitigation. USA policy change could undermine many other efforts. The global research effort is shared because the climate is shared; so should be the responsibility to sustain these commitments.

  • PaperDigital Science14 March 2017

    The Connected Culture of Collaboration Report

    Overleaf, a collaborative writing and publishing platform that makes the process of writing, editing and publishing academic papers quicker and easier, has released this report which takes an in-depth look at active collaborative research patterns. Rather than examining post-published collaboration patterns, “The Connected Culture of Collaboration” explores new, real-time information on collaboration to provide insights on collaboration patterns on national, state and institution-level scales. The report features a number of thought leadership contributions and includes a foreword from Laurel Haak, Executive Director, ORCID. The report focuses on the varying aspects of collaboration: how collaboration is valued in science, the role of university libraries in research communication, and how the growth of open access facilitates collaboration.

* ordered by publication date, which is not the same as when any of it was written.