About Cash for Questions

The blog is somewhere to think out loud and share ideas about research funding research policy, research development, research ethics, higher education, university administration and management.  Comments are very welcome indeed, either on individual entries, or via email.  Obvious but necessary disclaimer:  Any views expressed are my own, and are not necessarily those of the University of Nottingham.

When I started this blog in around 2011, I worked at Nottingham University Business School, so most of the emphasis is on social science research. In the lst few years I’ve moved away from the social sciences to a more central role, looking after research charities.

I don’t own any of the images I’ve used to illustrate my blog posts – they’re all found via Google image search.  I try to use images which are in the public domain, but please contact me if you own any of the images I’ve used and want an acknowledgement or for the image to be removed. I was probably less than careful in the early days of my blog.

I’ll be posting details of new blog postings on my Twitter account.  Alternatively, there’s a Entries RSS feed on the right hand menu (or that link).

I also welcome guest posts and guest contributions, and in time I can foresee the blog developing towards a multi-author platform.  Please contact me if you have an idea for a post that you’d like to write about.  I should say that I get a fair few unsolicited and slightly bizarre offers of content from people who I think are just trying to get links to their web page.  What these have in common is that they they never explain who they are or what organisation they work for, and on the occasions I have replied, they don’t engage with anything I’ve said and just seem to send form emails.  So now I just ignore them.  So if you do contact me (and you’re very welcome to) please send enough detail to convince me that you’re not one of these time-wasters.

I welcome comments on and debate about blog posts.  I don’t intend to censor or moderate comments, but I hope it goes without saying that everyone should be polite and civil even if they disagree.  If you post a comment which doesn’t appear within a few hours, please let me know. The blog is under constant attack from comment spam, virtually all of which is caught by the spam filter but there’s so much of it that I don’t have time to check through it for genuine comments from new contributors.

It’s occurred to me that not everyone will understand the title of the blog, especially the increasing number of readers from outside the UK.  As well as a quite neat description of what the blog is about, ‘cash for questions’ is also the name of an infamous UK political scandal of the 1990s.

2 thoughts on “About Cash for Questions”

  1. Really useful article on responses to peer review comments. I’ll be sharing this with colleagues here (University of Salford).

    1. Thanks Germaine – that’s very kind of you. I managed to miss your comment, but thanks for the positive feedback.

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