The Netherlands' Elsevier: Research Evaluation, Real-World Impact – publishingperspectives.com

In Feature Articles by Porter AndersonDecember 14, 2023Leave a Comment
Near year’s end, Amsterdam’s Elsevier releases two reports looking at research and its impact beyond campuses and research hubs.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
In the 30-page report “Back to Earth: Landing Real-World Impact in Research Evaluation,” the program carried out a survey of 400 academic leaders, funders, and researchers in seven countries about real-world impact as part of academic evaluation. Key findings include:
Image: Elsevier
In this report, it’s interesting to note some of the differences, culture-to-culture in the question of how important it is for research “to aim for real-world impact.” Particularly in the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, there could hardly have been a time when it was so obvious, the need that the world-at-large has for the most sophisticated, committed, and efficient research.
Nevertheless, this graphic indicates that surveyed personnel on this point came in on the affirmative side (yes, research should aim for real-world impact) at rates up to 93 percent in the United Kingdom and a low of 64 percent in the Elsevier report’s home, the Netherlands.
Another very interesting point in this report compares the view of funders and those of researchers.
While funders surveyed seem to agree with researchers that more holistic approaches are important, the funders did say that they were more in agreement with the researchers that the current system creates vested interests.
And it’s the researchers who said they were more passionate than the funders about having “real-world impact as researchers and academic leaders.”
Topping the list of barriers offered by respondents overall (researchers and funders) to a more holistic form of research assessment was lack of resources at 56 percent, and 48 percent citing a lack of consensus on what actually constitutes impact.
Image: Elsevier
Also running heavily were the lack of a common framework or methodology in holistic method of assessing research’s impact, at 45 percent. But a tie came in next, with 40 percent saying that two more barriers are “achieving sufficient alignment between different actors” and “complexity.”
And in the 20-page report “The Future of Evaluation: Emerging Consensus on a More Holistic System,” a series of round-table discussions with the heads of funding bodies from 18 countries and 40 academic leaders explored three key questions:
Among highlights of the outcomes covered here:
And around issues involving artificial intelligence, several observations from the research will sound familiar to trade publishing professionals, as academic leaders told Elsevier about opportunities they could see to use it:
Judy Verses
Clearly, the effort to assess research and its impact on society, an undercurrent in both reports, has been heightened among the world’s biggest publishers in the field.
In her introduction to the Back to Earth study, Judy Verses, president for academic and government affairs at Elsevier, writes, “Research with an impact on society has always been important. But with increasingly stretched budgets, it’s now equally important to assess, audit and communicate this impact. Funders know this and researchers know this.
“Indeed, academics are already being increasingly called on to show the economic and societal impact of their work, and funders have systems in place to evaluate this.”
Needless to say, there are stark parallels here with some of the issues seen in the international trade publishing industry’s efforts to develop better practices and results in comparative evaluation, as well.
From left, Owena Reinke, Christoph Bläsi, and Miha Kovač in ‘Data and Reading and Publishing Research,’ a panel moderated by Publishing Perspectives on October 18 at the Guest of Honor Slovenia Pavilion, during the 2023 Frankfurter Buchmesse. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
For example, there’s been a fine pilot exercise performed by AldusUp that looks at the different ways European book markets evaluate themselves. The apples-to-pears challenges of market-to-market publishing statistics can be dizzying.
In this, we’re indebted to the researcher Owena Reinke of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, who pointed out in our preparation for a Frankfurter Buchmesse panel at the Guest of Honor Slovenia pavilion that that after 18 months of “digging through ’50 Shades of Fruit Salat’ to find out whether some research had even a hope of being harmonized, she could confirm that there still is “surprisingly little systematic surveying done to determine basic figures about the reading habits in different European countries on a national level. And the data we have,” she continued, “is still remarkably hard to compare.”
Two of the most cogent points Reinke made after those 18 months of research she’d performed—relative to “Data and Reading and Publishing Research” with Christoph Blasi and Miha Kovač—were that in the trade data comparison she was examining, (1) the entity paying for data could heavily influence the results, leading to “quite heterogeneous ideas of which data is relevant,” and (2) the “general social conditions in each country could have a strong impact on what types of texts and media are considered beneficial.”
What’s more, Reinke noted, many nation’s research is published only in its own language, creating additional friction because of translation requirements and lack of clarity about the efficacy of side-by-side comparisons’ accuracy in parameters.
At the worldwide level beyond Aldus’ purview in Europe, Karine Pansa president of the International Publishers Association (IPA), has made data, its collection and coherence from market to market, a major center of her attention during her term in office.
More on academic publishing is here, more on Elsevier is here, more on industry statistics is here, more on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here, more on the Guest of Honor Slovenia program at Frankfurt this year is here, and more on questions of data, it’s use and place in many parts of publishing, is here.
Publishing Perspectives is the world media partner of the International Publishers Association.
Porter Anderson is a non-resident fellow of Trends Research & Advisory, and he has been named International Trade Press Journalist of the Year in London Book Fair’s International Excellence Awards. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives. He formerly was Associate Editor for The FutureBook at London’s The Bookseller. Anderson was for more than a decade a senior producer and anchor with CNN.com, CNN International, and CNN USA. As an arts critic (Fellow, National Critics Institute), he was with The Village Voice, the Dallas Times Herald, and the Tampa Tribune, now the Tampa Bay Times. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman.
Tags: Academic Publishing, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Data, Elsevier, Industry Statistics, Journals, Publishing Research, Research, Scholarly Publishing, The Netherlands, Year End
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