Background: Russian Academic Excellence Project 5top100 The Russian Academic Excellence Project 5top100 is a Russian excellence initiative in higher education that ran from 2013 to 2020. The aim of the initiative was to place five Russian universities in the top 100 of global university rankings. The goal was not achieved; in political and academic discourses, there are conflicting assessments of the results of the project.

In June 2022, the Council of the European Union gave the green light for a European Agreement on research assessment reforms to go ahead. Plans for this initiative were proposed in a European Commission scoping report in 2021.

Twenty years ago, Fiona Godlee, at that time Editorial Director for Medicine at open access publisher BioMed Central, wrote a sharp critique of the traditional system of closed pre-publication peer review, arguing that the system needs to be opened and drawing attention to the opportunities offered by “preprint servers combined with open commentary” to realize this openness.

In spring 2020, Italy, like other countries in Europe and around the world, was in the midst of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Lockdown measures were in place in the entire country in the attempt to limit the spread of the virus.

This post was previously published on the LSE impact blog. Mental ill-health and well-being are increasingly recognised as being intimately linked to a wide range of environmental and social factors.

Research is increasingly data-driven, and so is the management, communication, and evaluation of research. The area of research intelligence is fuelled by big data analytics and provides new prospects for assisted decision-making on funding opportunities, publishing venues and next generation metrics.

In the global research evaluation community, there is an increasing awareness of the importance of responsible evaluation. The current situation, with an emphasis on quantitative metrics, does not do justice to diversity between scientific fields, to different roles of researchers, or to the societal value of research. Moreover, studies have shown that researchers adjust their activities in anticipation of evaluations.

How can academic research systems enable more diverse profiles and career paths for academics? How can research assessment better recognize quality, content, creativity, and social relevance of research? Can academics be better rewarded for individual and team-based contributions, where appropriate?

Whether in publications, seminar Q&As, or on Twitter, scientists tend to disagree. Although many topics have broad consensus—human-caused climate change and the link between smoking and cancer being but two—even the most settled knowledge was at once the subject of debate. The history of science is littered with such examples.

Since the mid-1990s, excellence initiatives in higher education have become part of the world's political discourse. Many governments have spent billions of euros in an effort to transform national higher education systems and achieve the so-called "world class". The effectiveness of these programs is a subject of scientific and policy debate now.