NEWS
Joint venture to provide better service for UK higher education
Three UK higher education agencies have announced plans to explore increased collaboration and cost sharing through a partnership to be known as the M5 Group. The three agencies, HESA (the Higher Education Statistics Agency), Jisc and QAA (the Quality Assurance Agency), have a long history of collaborating on projects, in particular with HESA and Jisc delivering a national business intelligence service. The agencies intend to work even more closely together to develop better solutions to some of the long-term issues that are being faced by the UK higher education sector.
The tri-partite approach is aimed at providing a greater pool of resources.
Paul Feldman, chief executive of Jisc, said: ‘Talks between the parties have been progressing for some months. The time is now right to take this forward in a more meaningful way. Not only are we geographically close – all based around the M5 in the south west – we also serve many of the same institutions.’ Paul Clark, chief executive of HESA, said: ‘The whole of the education sector is facing up to severe financial pressures so it is vitally important that we do what we can to help improve efficiency and value for money.’ Douglas Blackstock, QAA chief executive added: ‘HESA, Jisc and QAA all have very distinct and different strengths and institutional offers. We will be working together for the benefit of institutions across the UK whilst continuing to operate independently.
International collaboration ‘crucial’ for universities
Universities need to expand international engagement to remain competitive, according to a report by Digital Science. The London-based company, along with the UK Higher Education International Unit, has produced a report focusing both on international academic collaboration across the UK research base, and on the implications of EU and global collaboration for universities, research assessment and the economy.
The report highlights the rapid growth of EU and global collaboration, from less than 10 per cent to more than half of all academic research. Today, the majority of the UK’s international collaborative partners in research are in other EU member states, and this is the fastest growing part of the research base. Collaborative research also has a far greater impact than other research activity. The main findings of the report highlight how:
l Knowledge capacity is compromised by a failure to be active internationally. The emergence of international knowledge networks (a ‘Fourth Age’ of research) means that UK universities need to develop strategies to expand international engagement to remain competitive in accessing resources;
l Research rankings will be unable to provide proper comparisons. International collaboration is now so common, and covers so much of the most highly-cited output, that no analysis or profile can be exclusively attributable to any single country or university; and
l Owning knowledge assets is less important than having the right skills to use them. If research is shared, then its content and IP is
shared.The agility to exploit knowledge ahead of competitors is critically important.
A flourishing university research base provides an ideal environment for developing knowledge-competent people with the skills that our European competitive economies require.
Jonathan Adams, chief scientist at Digital Science, said of the report: ‘Universities must recognise the implications of the ‘Fourth Age’ of research – where knowledge is generated by international teams, and international collaboration is the only way to be part of this. ‘Research funders also have to recognise the fact that knowledge is shared so agility in use of this knowledge – not ownership of it – is the route to exploiting assets; this is a key priority for higher education.
‘Governments need to acknowledge that they can no longer get simple numbers on their research ‘performance’, when this performance is truly international.’
Readers urged to take survey
Readers of Research Information are being encouraged to take part in a market survey being carried out by digital publishing solutions company Semantico. The company says the aim of this survey is: to provide a baseline for measuring change in the publishing landscape; to enable decision makers in the publishing industry to gain a reliable overview of what peers and partners are thinking about access and entitlement management; to
32 Research Information APRIL/MAY 2016
give an overview of how the wider industry is being affected by these rapid technological developments; and to start to identify the way publishers envision the future for access and entitlement management. Tasha Mellins-Cohen, director of product and marketing at Semantico, said: ‘The way the world engages with content has been developing dramatically over the last few years, and continues to do so at a rapid pace. We are all
consumers both in and out of the office, across multiple devices and channels on a near- constant basis – at any time, in any location.
‘This sea change in personal information consumption impacts on publishers across the board. For the most part, that change would appear to be being embraced, but the routes to that change and the pace that route is being travelled varies wildly between organisations.’ Visit
www.semantico.com
@researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
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