The adoption of open science practices has become a prominent topic of study for the science studies community. However, the research practices of the community itself are still quite traditional.

Research assessment has a long history continuously introducing new methods, tools, and agendas, for example, peer review of publications dating back to 17 ^th century and catalogues from the 19 ^th century that facilitated publication counting. This blog post discusses Responsible Research Assessment (RRA), an agenda gaining attention today.

Since its very beginnings, Wikipedia has been the target of criticism. The first (and negative) comparisons of its contents with those of other encyclopaedias are long gone, although the perception from academia was more optimistic. However, in education, the terrain in which this platform is most valuable, the controversy is greater. Its established use among students collides completely with the sceptical perception of part of the teachers.

The year is almost over. 2022 was not just another year for the Leiden Madtrics blog, but came with quite a variety of blog posts. We (the blog team) had a lot of fun editing all of them and are proud of our authors. They did an amazing job.  At the same time, this year diversified our social media presence: Leiden Madtrics, along with CWTS, can now be found on Mastodon as well, while the institute also launched its own Mastodon instance.

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, there has been a steady stream of Twitter users looking for alternatives, such as Mastodon. This alternative is part of a larger federation of social media services called the fediverse, which includes not only a Twitter-like platform such as Mastodon, but also Instagram-like photo sharing and TikTok-like video sharing platforms for example.

In June of this year, the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) published an open letter to the wider academic community with a call towards improving research output tracking. Funding acknowledgments were a particular focal point. In the previous blog post in this series, we already addressed several issues at play in funding acknowledgment data sets.

Researchers collaborate across borders and continents. Students go on exchange and go study abroad. Nothing new so far. Yet formalised international strategic partnerships between universities are more recent. These agreements include both research and education and cover a range of departments. And they are expected to contribute to strategic goals and have great impact.

Created in 1992, the UNITWIN/UNESCO Chair programme is intended to support developing expertise in areas related to UNESCO’s mandate, such as education, culture, communication and the natural and social sciences. This network of over 850 institutions in 117 countries mobilises knowledge to address pressing societal challenges and contribute to development.

The idea for this blog post emerged in the context of a special issue with the online journal Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics . We, a group of researchers that can broadly be associated with science & technology studies and meta-research, were invited by Frontiers to guest edit what they call a ‘Research Topic’, suggesting it could focus on innovations in peer review practices.

Why is it important that abstracts are made openly available? In a blog post that we published two years ago together with our colleague Aaron Tay, we discussed numerous ways in which open abstracts can be of great value. This includes scientific literature search, both using traditional query-based search tools and using more advanced text mining and visualization tools.