Following #UKRI travel policy (https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-travel-subsistence-and-expenses-policy/ukri-business-expense-claims-business-travel-and-subsistence-policy/), I just booked my trains to #Lübeck. but I choose a safe route I tried previously so I will break the journey at #Frankfurt. Wish me luck. #CrossBorderRail #climate
#Ukri
#AcademicJob | #PhDStudentship
Funded PhD in Ecological Ethnomusicology
📍 University of Birmingham (or distance learning)
📅 Start: Jan 2026
Work with Prof. Alexander M. Cannon on the UKRI-funded SoundDecisions project exploring music, ecology, and development in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Fieldwork with Khmer Krom and Vietnamese communities.
📅 Deadline: 26/08/2025
#Musicology #Ethnomusicology #EnvironmentalHumanities #PhD #Anthropology #ERC #UKRI
THIS WEEK's #CPCCGWebinar ⤵️
👩💻 Anna Tarrant will discuss findings from the #UKRI -funded Following Young Fathers Further study on how young #fathers navigate their romantic and #intergenerational #relationships over time in the context of early #parenthood.
Register: http://www.cpc.ac.uk/activities/full_events_calendar/919/CPC_CG_Webinar__Anna_Tarrant
#youngparents #youngfathers #demography #sociology #partnerships #fatherhood #socialscience #family #familydynamics #masculinities #caring #familypolicy
New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics
The club sandwich: Gapless phases and phase transitions with non-invertible symmetries
Lakshya Bhardwaj, Lea E. Bottini, Daniel Pajer, Sakura Schäfer-Nameki
SciPost Phys. 18, 156 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.18.5.156
Exciting event with Imperial Global USA #AI4Health Centre Director Professor A. Aldo Faisal chaired a panel with experts from Stanford Health Care, UCSF, and Sanofi, exploring how global ecosystems are shaping the future of healthcare.
Great to see how the AI4Health innovations bridging Imperial, London and the Bay Area!
#Imperial Global USA, #FaisalLab, Center for Digital Health Innovation at UCSF, #Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging (AIMI), #UKRI
ResearchFish Again
One of the things I definitely don’t miss about working in the UK university system is the dreaded Researchfish. If you’ve never heard of this bit of software, it’s intended to collect data relating to the outputs of research grants funded by the various Research Councils. That’s not an unreasonable thing to want to do, of course, but the interface is – or at least was when I last used it several years ago – extremely clunky and user-unfriendly. That meant that, once a year, along with other academics with research grants (in my case from STFC) I had to waste hours uploading bibliometric and other data by hand. A sensible system would have harvested this automatically as it is mostly available online at various locations or allowed users simply to upload their own publication list as a file; most of us keep an up-to-date list of publications for various reasons (including vanity!) anyway. Institutions also keep track of all this stuff independently. All this duplication seemed utterly pointless.
I always wondered what happened to the information I uploaded every year, which seemed to disappear without trace into the bowels of RCUK. I assume it was used for something, but mere researchers were never told to what purpose. I guess it was used to assess the performance of researchers in some way.
When I left the UK in 2018 to work full-time in Ireland, I took great pleasure in ignoring the multiple emails demanding that I do yet another Researchfish upload. The automated reminders turned into individual emails threatening that I would never again be eligible for funding if I didn’t do it, to which I eventually replied that I wouldn’t be applying for UK research grants anymore anyway. So there. Eventually the emails stopped.
Then, about three years ago, ResearchFish went from being merely pointless to downright sinister as a scandal erupted about the company that operates it (called Infotech), involving the abuse of data and the bullying of academics. I wrote about this here. It then transpired that UKRI, the umbrella organization governing the UK’s research council had been actively conniving with Infotech to target critics. An inquiry was promised but I don’t know what became of that.
Anyway, all that was a while ago and I neither longer live nor work in the UK so why mention ResearchFish again, now?
The reason is something that shocked me when I found out about it a few days ago. Researchfish is now operated by commercial publishing house Elsevier.
Words fail. I can’t be the only person to see a gigantic conflict of interest. How can a government agency allow the assessment of its research outputs to be outsourced to a company that profits hugely by the publication of those outputs? There’s a phrase in British English which I think is in fairly common usage: marking your own homework. This relates to individuals or organizations who have been given the responsibility for regulating their own products. Is very apt here.
The acquisition of Researchfish isn’t the only example of Elsevier getting its talons stuck into academia life. Elsevier also “runs” the bibliometric service Scopus which it markets as a sort of quality indicator for academic articles. I put “runs” in inverted commas because Scopus is hopelessly inaccurate and unreliable. I can certainly speak from experience on that. Nevertheless, Elsevier has managed to dupe research managers – clearly not the brightest people in the world – into thinking that Scopus is a quality product. I suppose the more you pay for something the less inclined you are to doubt its worth, because if you do find you have paid worthless junk you look like an idiot.
A few days ago I posted a piece that include this excerpt from an article in Wired:
Every industry has certain problems universally acknowledged as broken: insurance in health care, licensing in music, standardized testing in education, tipping in the restaurant business. In academia, it’s publishing. Academic publishing is dominated by for-profit giants like Elsevier and Springer. Calling their practice a form of thuggery isn’t so much an insult as an economic observation.
With the steady encroachment of the likes of Elsevier into research assessment, it is clear that as well as raking in huge profits, the thugs are now also assuming the role of the police. The academic publishing industry is a monstrous juggernaut that is doing untold damage to research and is set to do more. It has to stop.
#bibliometrics #Elsevier #Infotech #ResearchAssessment #Researchfish #SCOPUS #UKRI
New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics
SymTFT for (3+1)d gapless SPTs and obstructions to confinement
Andrea Antinucci, Christian Copetti, Sakura Schäfer-Nameki
SciPost Phys. 18, 114 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.18.3.114
"Data2Action exists to make emerging technology work harder for humanity, enabling us to co-create a healthier, fairer and more sustainable world for all. [...]
We’re recruiting *13 funded doctoral fellows from Europe and beyond* to work collaboratively across a range of interconnected cutting-edge research and development projects."
#HorizonEurope #UKResearchAndInnovation #UKRI #MarieCurie #MSCA #DoctoralNetwork #PhD #DataScience #Data2Action #SocialInnovation #SocialImpact #LivingLabs #CoCreation #Collaboration #Transdisciplinary #Dissemination #Communication #NetworkBuilding #CommonGood #AI #CuttingEdge
#Technology #Humanity #Health #Fairness #Sustainability #SustainableWorld #PublicGood #SocialPioneers #ArtificalIntelligence
#SectoralExperts #Society #RealWorldSolutions #ClimateChange #SocialJustice #Democracy #Aging #People #Planet
It is Researchfish submission season!
It is time to tell Elsevier about all our unpublished research results in our detailed reports to our UK funders!
#lifeofpi
I am doing my #Researchfish (#UKRI annual grant reporting system) and I am happy to report two more useful engagments on #Mastodon since 2024 March. I did mention I have a mirror/bridge on #bluesky. I also made an mistake to check out who are the fellow #drosophila researchers on there 😂😔... basically everyone
Excited to announce that we are recruiting a Research Associate for this #UKRI-funded #metascience research grant investigating the roll-out of Electronic Research Notebooks (ERNs)
For full details of the role, and information on how to apply, please visit https://www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetail?JobId=31714
This is a great opportunity to enhance research practice, support #OpenResearch and #FAIR data, and have a positive impact on researchers in #Manchester and across the UK
The ongoing recruitment at research funder UKRI of a "Chief People Officer" is interesting in light of this:
"Complaints made over the conduct of several HR staff at UK Research and Innovation have been upheld ... [complainants] witnessed or experienced behaviours including sexist comments, ridiculing, verbal abuse, deliberate undermining, belittling, isolation and exclusion."
https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-research-councils-2025-2-ukri-hr-staff-investigated-in-lengthy-bullying-probe/
#HumanResources #Bullying #UKRI #ResearchFunding #WorkplaceCulture #ResearchCulture
New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics
Bootstrapping frustrated magnets: the fate of the chiral O(N) × O(2) universality class
Marten Reehorst, Slava Rychkov, Benoit Sirois, Balt C. van Rees
SciPost Phys. 18, 060 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.18.2.060
#CNRS #ÉcolePolytechnique #KCL #CPHT #IPParis #IHÉS #PSL @sorbonne_univ_ #ENS #ParisCité #LPENS
#UKRI
🚨 We're Hiring! 🚨
Join the National Gallery as a Project Specialist for the Reynolds Digital Research Resource! Work on an exciting project to centralize heritage science data on Sir Joshua Reynolds, contributing to digital resource design, data organization, and user engagement.
📍 18-month role, London (hybrid)
📅 Closing date: 2025-02-23
Help shape the future of heritage science research! 🌟 #HeritageScience #ConservationJobs #DigitalResources #RICHeS #UKRI #AHRC
🚨 We’re Hiring! 🚨
Join the National Gallery as a Data Specialist for the Heritage Science Data Service (HSDS) project. Help shape innovative digital systems that support heritage science research and empower GLAM institutions across the UK.
📍 3-year role, London (hybrid)
📅 Closing date: 2025-02-23
Be part of transforming the future of heritage science! 🌟 #HeritageScience #DataJobs #DigitalHeritage #RICHeS #UKRI #AHRC
🚨 We’re Hiring! 🚨
Join the National Gallery as a Content and Engagement Specialist for the HSDS project, shaping the future of heritage science data across the UK.
📍 3-year role, London (hybrid)
📅 Closing date: 2025-02-23
Drive collaboration, innovation, and accessibility in heritage science! 🌟 #HeritageScience #DigitalCollaboration #GLAMJobs #RICHeS #UKRI #AHRC
"UKRI budgets are now 30% higher than in 2018, including more than 50% increase in the Innovate UK budget across the current spending review period alone."
"R&D budgets have increased across government, with UKRI now delivering a wide range of programmes with and for government departments, worth more than £2bn across the current spending review period."
Does anyone know if this is corrected for inflation, or not? Have these numbers been cooked somehow? They are hard to believe at face value, particularly with the massive high double-digit inflation in 2022-2023. As read in an email from UKRI today.
New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics
Gapped phases with non-invertible symmetries: (1+1)d
Lakshya Bhardwaj, Lea E. Bottini, Daniel Pajer, Sakura Schäfer-Nameki
SciPost Phys. 18, 032 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.18.1.032
What is it that people don't get about #DataPrivacy? Don't ask for a date of birth when all you actually need is a rough age for EDI analysis. People will give you that information and now you have something which can be stolen, which would hurt yourself as an organisation and the person who gave you the information in good faith.
We must stop using date of birth when we mean year of birth. Everywhere and immediately.
> New pan-UKRI research data policy framework will maximise the value of data arising from UKRI funding and support an open research and innovation culture.
https://www.ukri.org/news/ukri-developing-new-research-data-policy-framework/
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Server: https://mastodon.social
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