Halloween 2019. A team of seven at CWTS is hectically working on the launch of the institute’s new science blog. Getting the last settings in WordPress right, preparing a quick announcement, entering the first posts (so that things don’t look too empty) – we (the editorial team) were rather excited. 53 blog posts later, it is time to reflect a bit. Admittedly, we started out rather open-mindedly.

Why should you care? How do you evaluate a university? This question does not have an easy answer. However, there is an attribute that is typically considered relevant: the production of scientific papers. However, papers are not created by the university per se , they are created by individuals who are affiliated to a university.

Over the past two decades, the open access movement has made significant progress in promoting the free accessibility and reusability of scholarly publications. About half of the publications from recent years are free to access and reuse. However, are accessibility and reusability sufficient for a well-functioning system of scholarly publishing?

Why is it so difficult to think of new possible worlds? This is a question Marta Hejer and Wytske Versteeg ask in a recent paper for Territory, Politics, Governance . It is a question I ask myself almost every day. Hejer and Versteeg contend that 'use of fossil fuels is deeply embedded in our societal values and everyday routines' and that 'as a consequence, we lack coherent imaginaries of alternative post-fossil futures'.

Barry Bozeman’s new article on ‘Public Value Science’ raises one of the most fundamental questions in science policy: Who benefits from science? His answer is clear: right now the benefits tend to go to the rich while the ­negative impacts, such as unemployment or pollution, differentially affect the poor.

Search has long been revolutionized by knowledge-graph-powered services such as the Amazon Marketplace in e-commerce, or Open Street Maps in the cartography and navigation services domains, to name just two examples. Inspired by such knowledge graph (KG) success stories in the general domain, such technology is now being realized over scholarly knowledge as well.

In recent years, bibliometric databases have substantially improved the consistency and quality of the metadata extracted from publications, particularly the author-affiliations linkages from scientific publications. Furthermore, author-name disambiguation algorithms have been implemented for most large bibliometric databases, such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions.

In most research fields, journals play a dominant role in the scholarly communication system. However, the availability of systematic information on the policies and practices of journals, for instance with respect to peer review and open access publishing, is surprisingly limited and scattered.

Since 2017 we have been developing a new approach to research evaluation, which we call Evaluative Inquiry (EI). In a series of blog posts, we discuss the four principles of EI, based on our experiences in projects with the Protestant Theological University and with the University for Humanistics.

The shift in R&D goals towards the SDGs is driving demand for new S&T indicators… The shift in Science & Technology policy from a focus on research quality (or ‘excellence’) towards societal impact has led to a demand for new Science & Technology indicators that capture the contributions of research to society, in particular those aligned with SDGs.