The University of Melbourne was founded in 1885 with five professors teaching 15 students. In 1952, at the start of the post-war tertiary boom, there were around 3,000 Australian academics teaching 30…
Universities are centres of research… but what kind of research?
flickr/pcgn
Fundamentally, there are two big motives for research.
On the on hand there is intellectual ambition: the desire to know and understand the word, to appreciate the best that has been said and thought…
Local history has an important place in Australia. The academic world should get involved.
Flickr/Kate's Photo Diary
Local history is one of the most popular forms of history in Australia. Yet there is a yawning gap between the enthusiastic amateur and the academic historian.
While some academic historians engage with…
They way we research Asia has been misguided.
Flickr/-AroFarMeR-
Australia desperately needs to invest more on research into Asia if we’re to better understand a part of the world so vital for our future economic prosperity. But not only do we need more research, we…
The University of Western Sydney has a proud history. Now it must compete on the market.
Colt Group
Can anyone recall why Monday 12 December 1983 was such a crucial date in Australian history?
It was – of course – the day everything changed for the Australian economy. On that December morning the Australian…
Maori academics in New Zealand should be wary of talking to the non-Maori media.
Flickr/geoftheref
Maybe it’s the lot of academics to be misrepresented, but when a single incident can nearly get you sacked it makes you reconsider whether to deal with the media at all.
Last year, comments of mine about…
Universities already stockpile academic papers so they can report their output to the government. But stockpiling the wrong version of the paper can restrict their right to make the paper available on open access.
Flickr/Gideon Burton
Providing equitable access to the findings of scholarly research is an expensive and vexed business, as many recent stories here on The Conversation have highlighted.
Open access offers a way to freely…
Breaking free of the stranglehold of academic publishers holds appeal -- but what are the dangers?
Flickr
There are three tensions in the field of academic publishing (1) who pays to publish research? (2) who decides what gets published? and (3) who takes any profits?
In the traditional model, based on publishing…
Frustration with copyright restrictions placed on scholarly work in many journals has helped fuel the Creative Commons and Open Access movements.
Flickr/TilarX
By Tom Cochrane, Queensland University of Technology
Back in 1991, in the very earliest days of the internet, a group of high energy physicists began sharing their findings on a Los Alamos-based online archive called Arxiv.
Their early experiments in the…
A growing number of academic institutions are building free online databases of their scholarly output. But publication in a big name academic journal still holds cachet for most academics.
Flickr/mandiberg
As the cost of accessing academic journal articles increases, a growing number of academic institutions are building publicly accessible databases of scholarly work.
But how much of a threat to the traditional…
International education might not be as healthy as it seems Tim Ellis/Flickr
International education has become a vital industry for the Australian economy, in recent years rivalling coal and iron ore as one of our largest export industries. But the way we’re calculating international…
How does the high cost of academic journal subscriptions impact the developing world?
Flickr/Book Aid International
Universities libraries in the developed world are struggling to pay academic journal subscription costs — so how can universities in developing countries hope to pay?
In this Q+A, Professor Adam Habib…
Does the cost of academic journals stymie learning?
Flickr/the.Firebottle
The phrase ‘publish or perish’ is familiar to all academics, who face enormous pressure to have their work featured in the top academic journals. Career progression, job security and pay rises can depend…
Academics should talk more openly about their research and help influence public policy AAP
Raymond Da Silva Rosa’s article, also published on The Conversation, kindly refers to my recent piece in the Australian Literary Review, which examined why generally academics exert so little impact on…
Are these the sorts of speakers you go to a university to hear? AAP
The most important issue raised by Lord Monckton’s controversial appearance on two Western Australian campuses is not the limit of free speech or Monckton’s scientific competence. Rather it is whether…
When is comes to research, it seems quantity has become much more important than quality.
Flickr/Iscan
Imagine the following conversation between a finance academic and his or her supervisor during an annual performance review:
Academic: So, do you think I am ready for a promotion?
Supervisor: Well, I…
Shot down: Innovation Minister Kim Carr has scrapped ERA journal rankings.
AAP
So here is the problem: research quality is a nebulous concept and it takes many years to work out whether someone’s output has actually high quality or not.
This is especially hard for non-insiders…
Why is writing grant proposals the bane of scientists' lives?
Fotolia
Getting research money, especially the no-strings-attached kind that government agencies give out, is difficult. Researchers spend months on each proposal with only a small chance of getting funded.
Winning…
