Legal eagles

[I’m delighted to be able to publish the first guest post on the blog, written by Stephanie Harris, Contracts Manager at City, University of London. Look out for more of Stephanie’s work over the next weeks and months. Where my posts focus mainly on pre-award, Stephanie’s work in post-award brings important insights – once the funding has been won, what happens next? If anyone else is interested in writing guests posts/having their work hosted on my blog, I’d be delighted to hear from you. Unless you’re one of those affiliate/SEO spammers, in which case I won’t be – AG]

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in February 2022 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com

Don’t fear university contracts officers—they’re here to help

Of all the inhabitants of a university research office, the contracts officers are perhaps the least well-known.

As an academic, you know where you are with pre-award support staff: they are there to help you win awards by providing project costings, explaining funder guidelines, and generally burnishing your application to a brilliant shine. Next, once the project has been awarded, the finance team will give you the budget code that allows you to start hiring staff, spending, and generally getting stuck into the research.

Then, like some tedious gate-crasher, the contracts officer suddenly starts waffling on about how she needs to review the terms and conditions and make sure they’re acceptable to the university. And everything grinds to a screeching halt.

So, who are the university contracts officers and what do we want with your project? Is it true that we take a perverse delight in stretching everything out as though we bill by the hour? And are we really just trying to embarrass you/the university in front of your research partners?

Sorry to disappoint, but the answer to those last two questions is “no”. The answer to the first is a bit longer and I’m going to try to answer it here, along with a smattering of information

Contract essentials

There are several reasons why universities enter into contracts for research projects. The main ones are: to comply with legislation; to comply with funder or partner requirements; to comply with the university’s own policies and procedures. Of these three, two are outside universities’ control and the first seems to get more complex each year.

For example, just as we were all getting used to the GDPR, we now have to understand the UK GDPR and what that means for working with partners in the EU and around the world. As contracts officers we will work closely with the data protection team to ensure that the contract is an accurate reflection of any data processing that will be part of the project and also that the university is meeting its legal requirements as set out in data protection legislation.

Universities also enter into research contracts because our funders require them—both with them as funders and with any partner organisations. Back in the day, all an aspiring artist or scientist needed was to find a noble patron and the money would flow. Now, any award comes with a lengthy set of terms and conditions that places obligations both on the university and the individual academics undertaking the project, with potentially serious consequences for breaking them. Even the most straightforward of funders, such as UK Research and Innovation, have several pages of terms and conditions, which then link to multiple policies that we need to read and understand.

Alongside the more esoteric legal terminology such as jurisdiction (actually important!) and warranties (also very important!) contracts contain instructions on how to manage the award, how to deal with any intellectual property that might come out of the project (what we call Arising IP), how to invoice, and publication requirements.

When working with a medical charity, for example, it is not simply a case of taking the money and saying thank-you-very-much, we must follow strict procedures on what we do with the Arising IP, particularly where there is any intention to do further research or to commercialise.

If we think there is a possibility of making money out of that IP, then we may need to go back and enter into a new contract with the charity that will allow some of that revenue to flow back to them. The contracts officer will check through any previous agreements with other organisations to make sure that there won’t be any problems further down the line, just when you want to publish or patent.

What researchers need to know

Even when they are not absolutely mandatory, it is still a good idea to set up a contract rather than simply relying on the warm and fuzzy feelings of academic collegiality. Sure, you may be BFFs with Professor Eminent at the University of Peer Review now, but things change, memories fade, and relationships can break down.

If there is a dispute as to what a partner’s role is in a project and whether they have actually delivered what was promised, the contract is one of the first things that people look at. If we have done our job well, then it’s all there in black and white and the argument becomes much easier to win.

Colleagues can sometimes find it embarrassing when a contracts officer gets involved and starts asking awkward questions about project aims and deliverables. It can seem as though we are trampling all over that careful relationship of trust and mutual understanding that has built up over the preceding weeks or months while the project was developed.

I understand the thinking: “Why don’t we just sign what was sent to us? A dynamic company would never behave like this. Typical university bureaucracy!” Yet in a decade of negotiating contracts only once has my counterpart reacted with surprise (and yes, indignation) that I had dared to comment on the terms they sent through. I can assure you that the people on the other side do not consider it unprofessional for someone to negotiate a contract, even when part of that negotiation means that we have to say that the university is unable to agree to certain wording results in the university saying they are unable to agree to an element.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the opposite party will simply shrug and have the offending wording taken out. Indeed, they might feel very strongly that a clause must stay in. This is where academics and contracts officers work best when we know that we are on the same team. And suddenly all that question-asking and pedantry makes sense, because it turns out that the contract doesn’t allow the principal investigator the freedom to publish the results of her research and that the company wants a veto right on any publication if they think that the results of the research might make them look bad. And I’m not willing to let that happen.

In the end, we all have the same goal: to encourage research to flourish in the best possible circumstances. A phrase I’ve been hearing lately is that academic research must be allowed to fail. I don’t want you to fail, but just in case, I’ve included a research waiver in the contract to account for it. So don’t fear the contracts officer as your next bid comes to fruition; we’re on your side.

Stephanie Harris is a contracts manager at City, University of London. She is writing in a personal capacity.

Applying for research funding – is it worth it? Part II – Costs and Benefits

A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight on 9th March 2018 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

My previous post posed a question about whether applying for research funding was worth it or not, and concluded with a list of questions to consider to work out the answer. This follow-up is a list of costs and benefits associated with applying for external research funding, whether successful or unsuccessful. Weirdly, my list appears to contain more costs than benefits for success and more benefits than costs for failure, but perhaps that’s just me being contrary…

If you’re successful:

Benefits….

  • You get to do the research you really want to do
  • In career terms, whether for moving institution or internal promotion, there’s a big tick in the box marked ‘external research funding’.
  • Your status in your institution and within your discipline is likely to rise. Bringing in funding via a competitive external process gives you greater external validation, and that changes perceptions – perhaps it marks you out as a leader in your field, perhaps it marks a shift from career young researcher to fulfilling your evident promise.
  • Success tends to begat success in terms of research funding. Deliver this project and any future application will look more credible for it.

Costs…

  • You’ve got to deliver on what you promised. That means all the areas of fudge or doubt or uncertainty about who-does-what need to be sorted out in practice. If you’ve under-costed any element of the project – your time, consumables, travel and subsistence – you’ll have to deal with it, and it might not be much fun.
  • Congratulations, you’ve just signed yourself up for a shedload of admin. Even with the best and most supportive post-award team, you’ll have project management to do. Financial monitoring; recruitment, selection, and line management of one or more research associates. And it doesn’t finish when the research finishes – thanks to the impact agenda, you’ll probably be reporting on your project via Researchfish for years to come.
  • Every time any comparable call comes round in the future, your colleagues will ask you give a presentation about your application/sit on the internal sifting panel/undertake peer review. Once a funding agency has given you money, you can bet they’ll be asking you to peer review other applications. Listed as a cost for workload purposes, but there are also a lot of benefits to getting involved in peer reviewing applications because it’ll improve your own too. Also, the chances are that you benefited from such support/advice from senior colleagues, so pay it forward. But be ready to pay.
  • You’ve just raised the bar for yourself. Don’t be surprised if certain people in research management start talking about your next project before this one is done as if it’s a given or an inevitability.
  • Unless you’re careful, you may not see as much recognition in your workload as you might have expected. Of course, your institution is obliged to make the time promised in the grant application available to you, but unless you’ve secured agreement in advance, you may find that much of this is taken out of your existing research allocation rather than out of teaching and admin. Especially as these days we no longer thing of teaching as a chore to buy ourselves out from. Think very carefully about what elements of your workload you would like to lose if your application is successful.
  • The potential envy and enmity of colleagues who are picking up bits of what was your work.

If you’re unsuccessful…

Benefits…

  • The chances are that there’s plenty to be salvaged even from an unsuccessful application. Once you’ve gone through the appropriate stages of grief, there’s a good chance that there’s at least one paper (even if ‘only’ a literature review) in the work that you’ve done. If you and your academic colleagues and your stakeholders are still keen, the chances are that there’s something you can do together, even if it’s not what you ideally wanted to do.
  • Writing an application will force you to develop your research ideas. This is particularly the case for career young researchers, where the pursuit of one of those long-short Fellowships can be worth it if only to get proper support in developing your research agenda.
  • If you’ve submitted a credible, competitive application, you’ve at least shown willing in terms of grant-getting. No-one can say that you haven’t tried. Depending on the pressures/expectations you’re under, having had a credible attempt at it buys you some license to concentrate on your papers for a bit.
  • If it’s your first application, you’ll have learnt a lot from the process, and you’ll be better prepared next time. Depending on your field, you could even add a credible unsuccessful application to a CV, or a job application question about grant-getting experience.
  • If your institution has an internal peer review panel or other selection process, you’ve put you and your research onto the radar of some senior people. You’ll be more visible, and this may well lead to further conversations with colleagues, especially outside your school. In the past I’ve recommended that people put forward internal expressions of interest even if they’re not sure they’re ready for precisely this reason.

Costs…

  • You’ve just wasted your time – and quite a lot of time at that. And not just work time… often evenings and weekends too.
  • It’ll come as a disappointment, which may take some time to get over
  • Even if you’ve kept it quiet, people in your institution will know that you’ve been unsuccessful.

I’ve written two longer pieces on what to do if your research grant application is unsuccessful, which can be found here and here.

The rise of the machines – automation and the future of research development

"I've seen research ideas you people wouldn't believe. Impact plans on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched JeS-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser ResearchGate. All those proposals will be lost in time, like tears...in...rain. Time to revise and resubmit."
“I’ve seen first drafts you people wouldn’t believe. Impact plans on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched JeS beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser ResearchGate. All those research proposals will be lost in time, like tears…in…rain. Time to resubmit.”

In the wake of this week’s Association of Research Managers and Administrator‘s conference in Birmingham, Research Professional has published an interesting article by Richard Bond, head of research administration at the University of the West of England. The article – From ARMA to avatars: expansion today, automation tomorrow? – speculates about the future of the research management/development profession given the likely advances of automation and artificial intelligence. Each successive ARMA conference is hailed as the largest ever, and ARMA’s membership has grown rapidly over recent years, probably reflecting increasing numbers of research support roles, increased professionalism, an increased awareness of ARMA and the attractiveness of what it offers in terms of professional development. But might better, smarter computer systems reduce, and perhaps even eliminate the need for some research development roles?

In many ways, the future is already here. In my darker moments I’ve wondered whether some colleagues might be replicants or cylons. But many universities already have (or are in the progress of getting) some form of cradle-to-grave research management information system which has the potential to automate many research support tasks, both pre and post award. Although I wasn’t in the session where the future of JeS, the online submission grant system used by RCUK UKRI, tweets from the session indicate that JeS 2.0 is being seen as a “grant getting service” and a platform to do more than just process applications, which could well include distribution of funding opportunities. Who knows what else it might be able to do? Presumably it can link much better to costing tools and systems, allowing direct transfer of costing and other informations to and from university systems.

A really good costing tool might be able to do a lot of things automatically. Staff costs are already relatively straightforward to calculate with the right tools  – the complication largely comes from whether funders expect figures to include inflation and cost of living/salary increment pay rises to be included or not. But greater uniformity across funders could help, and setting up templates for individual funders could be done, and in many places is already done. Non-pay costs are harder, but one could imagine a system that linked to travel and bookings websites and calculated the average cost of travel from A to B. Standard costs could be available for computers and for consumables, again, linking to suppliers’ catalogues. This could in principle allow the applicant (rather than a research administrator) to do the budget for the grant application, but I wonder if there’s much appetite for doing that from applicants who don’t do this. I also think there’s a role for the research costing administrator in terms of helping applicants flush out all of the likely costs – not all of which will occur to the PI – as well as dealing with the exceptions that the system doesn’t cover. But even if specialist human involvement is still required, giving people better tools to work smarter and more efficiently – especially if the system is able to populate the costings section application form directly without duplication – would reduce the amount of humans required.

While I don’t think we’re there yet, it’s not hard to imagine systems which could put the right funding opportunities in front of the right academics at the right time and in the right format. Research Professional has offered a customisable research funding alerts service for many years now, and there’s potential for research management systems to integrate this data, combine it with what’s known about individual researchers and research team’s interests, and put that information in front of them automatically.

I say we’re not there yet, because I don’t think the information is arriving in the right format – in a quick and simple summary that allows researchers to make very quick decisions about whether to read on, or move on to the next of the twelvety-hundred-and-six unread emails. I also wonder whether the means of targeting the right academics are sufficiently nuanced. A ‘keywords’ approach might help if we could combine research interest keyword sets used by funders, research intelligence systems, and academics. But we’d need a really sophisticated set of keywords, coving not just discipline and sub-discipline, but career stage, countries of interest, interdisciplinary grand challenges and problems etc. Another problem is that I don’t think call summaries are – in general – particularly well-written (though they are getting better) by funders, though we could perhaps imagine them being tailored for use in these kinds of systems in the future. A really good research intelligence system could also draw in data about previous bids to the scheme from the institution, data about success rates for previous calls, access to previously successful applications (though their use is not without its drawbacks).

But even with all this in place, I still think there’s a role for human research development staff in getting opportunities out there. If all we’re doing is forwarding Research Professional emails, then we could and should be replaced. But if we’re adding value through our own analysis of the opportunity, and customising the email for the intended audience, we might be allowed to live. A research intelligence system inevitably just churns out emails that might be well targeted or poorly targeted. A human with detailed knowledge of the research interests, plans, and ambitions of individual researchers or groups can not only target much better, but can make a much more detailed, personalised, and context sensitive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of a possible application. I can get excited about a call and tell someone it’s ideal for them, and because of my existing relationship with them, that’ll carry weight … a computer can tell them that it’s got a 94.8% match.

It’s rather harder to see automation replacing training researchers in grant writing skills or undertaking lay review of draft grant applications, not least because often the trick with lay review is spotting what’s not there rather than what is. But I’d be intrigued to learn what linguistic analysis tools might be able to do in terms of assessing the required reading level, perhaps making stylistic observations or recommendations, and perhaps flagging up things like the regularity with which certain terms appear in the application relative to the call etc. All this would need interpreting, of course, and even then may not be any use. But it would be interesting to see how things develop.

Impact is perhaps another area where it’s hard to see humans being replaced. Probably sophisticated models of impact development could and should be turned in tools to help academics identify the key stakeholders, come up with appropriate strategies, and identify potential intermediaries with their own institution. But I think human insight and creativity could still add substantial value here.

Post-award isn’t really my area these days, but I’d imagine that project setup could become much easier and involve fewer pieces of paper and documents flying around. Even better and more intuitive financial tools would help PIs manage their project, but there are still accounting rules and procedures to be interpreted, and again, I think many PIs would prefer someone else to deal with the details.

Overall it’s hard to disagree with Bond’s view that a reduction in overall headcount across research administration and management (along with many other areas of work) is likely, and it’s not hard to imagine that some less research intensive institutions might be happy that the service that automated systems could deliver is good enough for them. At more research intensive institutions, better tools and systems will increase efficiency and will enable human staff to work more effectively. I’d imagine that some of this extra capacity will be filled by people doing more, and some of it may lead to a reduction in headcount.

But overall, I’d say – and you can remind me of this when I’m out of a job and emailing you all begging for scraps of consultancy work, or mindlessly entering call details into a database – that I’m probably excited by the possibilities of automation and better and more powerful tools than I am worried about being replaced by them.

I for one welcome our new research development AI overlords.

The consequences of Open Access: Part 1: Is anyone thinking about the “lay” reader?

The thorny issue of “open access” – which I take to mean the question of how to make the fruits of publicly-funded research freely and openly available to the public – is one that’s way above my pay grade and therefore not one I’ll be resolving in this blog post.  Sorry about that.  I’ve been following the debates with some interest, though not, I confess, an interest which I’d call “keen” or “close”.  No doubt some of the nuances and arguments have escaped me, and so I’ll be going to an internal event in a week or so to catch up.  I expect it’ll be similar to this one helpfully written up by Phil Ward over at Fundermentals.  Probably the best single overview of the history and arguments about open access is an article in this week’s Times Higher article by Paul Jump – well worth a read.

I’ve been wondering about some of the consequences of open access that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere yet.  This first post is about the needs of research users, and I’ll be following it up with a post about what some consequences of open access for academics that may require more thought.

I wonder if enough consideration is being given to the needs and interests of potential readers and users of all this research which is to be liberated from paywalls and other restrictions.  It seems to me that if Joe Public and Joanna Interested-Professional are going to be able to get their mitts on all this research, then this has very serious implications for academic research and academic writing.  I’d go as far as to say it’s potentially revolutionary, and may require radical and permanent changes to the culture and practice of academic writing for publication in a number of research fields.  I’m writing this to try to find out what thought has been given to this, amidst all the sound and fury about green and gold.

If I were reading an academic paper in a field that I was unfamiliar with, I think there are two things I’d struggle with.  One would be properly and fully understanding the article in itself, and the second would be understanding the article in the context of the broader literature and the state of knowledge in that area.  By way of example, a few years back I was looking into buying a rebounder – a kind of indoor mini-trampoline.  Many vendors made much of a study attributed to NASA which they interpreted as making dramatic claims about the efficacy of rebounder exercising compared to other kinds of exercise.  Being of a sceptical nature and armed with campus access to academic papers that weren’t open access, I went and had a look myself.  At the time, I concluded that these claims weren’t borne out by the study, which was really aimed at looking at helping astronauts recover from spending time in weightlessness.  I don’t have access to the article as I’m writing this, so I can’t re-check, but here’s the abstract.  I see that this paper is over 30 years old, and that eight people is a very small sample size…. so… perhaps superseded and not very highly powered.  I think the final line of the abstract may back up my recollection (“… a finding that might help identify acceleration parameters needed for the design of remedial procedures to avert deconditioning in persons exposed to weightlessness”).

For the avoidance of doubt, I infer no dishonesty nor nefarious intent on the part of rebounder vendors and advocates – I may be wrong in my interpretation, and even if I’m not, I expect this is more likely to be a case of misunderstanding a fairly opaque paper rather than deliberate distortion.   In any case, my own experience with rebounders has been very positive, though I still don’t think they’re a miracle or magic bullet exercise.

How would open access help me here?  Well, obviously it would give me access to the paper.  But it won’t help me understand it, won’t help me draw inferences from it, won’t help me place it in the context of the broader literature.  Those numbers in that abstract look great, but I don’t have the first clue what they mean.  Now granted, with full open access I can carry out my own literature search if I have the time, knowledge and inclination.  But it’ll still be difficult for me to compare and contrast and form my own conclusions.  And I imagine that it’ll be harder still for others without a university education and a degree of familiarity with academic papers, or who haven’t read Ben Goldacre’s excellent Bad Science.

I worry that open access will only make it easier for people with an agenda (to sell products, or to push a certain political agenda) to cherry-pick evidence and put together a new ill-deserved veneer of respectability by linking to academic papers and presenting (or feigning to present) a summary of their contents and arguments.  The intellectually dishonest are already doing this, and open access might make it easier.

I don’t present this as an argument against open access, and I don’t agree with a paternalist elitist view that holds that only those with sufficient letters after their name can be trusted to look at the precious research.  Open access will make it easier to debunk the charlatans and the quacks, and that’s a good thing.  But perhaps we need to think about how academics write papers from now on – they’re not writing just for each other and for their students, but for ordinary members of the public and/or research users of various kinds who might find (or be referred to) their paper online.  Do we need to start thinking about a “lay summary” for each paper to go alongside the abstract, setting out what the conclusions are in clear terms, what it means, and what it doesn’t mean?

What do we do with papers that present evidence for a conclusion that further research demonstrates to be false?  In cases of research misconduct, these can be formally withdrawn, but we wouldn’t want to do that in cases of papers that have just been superseded, not least because they might turn out to be correct after all, and are still a valid and important part of the debate.  Of course, where the current scientific consensus on any particular issue may not be clear, and it’s less clear still how the state of the debate can be impartially communicated to research users.

I’d argue that we need to think about a format or template for an “information for non-academic readers” or something similar.  This would set out a lay summary of the research, its limitations, links to key previous studies, details of the publishing journal and evidence of its bona fides.  Of course, it’s possible that what would be more useful would be regularly written and re-written evidence briefings on particular topics designed for research users.  One source of lay reviews I particularly like is the NHS Behind the Headlines which comments on the accuracy (or otherwise) of media coverage of health research news.  It’s nicely written, easily accessible, and isn’t afraid to criticise or praise media coverage when warranted.  But even so, as the journals are the original source, some kind of standard boiler plate information section might be in order.

Has there been any discussion of these issues that I’ve missed?  This all seems important to me, and I wouldn’t want us to be in a position of finally agreeing what colour our open access ought to be, only to find that next to no thought has been given to potential readers.  I’ve talked mainly about health/exercise examples in this entry, but all this could apply  just as well to pretty much any other field of research where non-academics might take an interest.

Resourse list for academics new to social media

(This didn't happen)
"You will make sure that your research methodology links with your research questions, you snivelling little maggot!"

This week I was asked to be involved in a Research Grant application ‘bootcamp’ to talk in particular about the use of social media in pathways to impact plans, and academic blogging in general.  I was quick to disclaim expertise in this area – I’ve been blogging for a while now, but I’m not an academic and I’m certainly not an expert on social media.  I’m also not sure about this use of the word ‘bootcamp’.  We already have ‘workshop’ and ‘surgery’ as workplace-based metaphors for types of activity, and I’m not sure we’re ready for ‘bootcamp’.  So unless the event turns out to involve buzzcuts, a ten mile run, and an assault course, I’ll be asking for my money back.

But I thought I’d try to put together a list of resources and examples that I was already aware of in time for the session, and I then I wondered about ‘crowdsourcing’ (i.e. lazily ask my readers/twitter followers) some others that I might have missed.  Hopefully we’ll then end up with a general list of resources that everyone can use.  I’ve pasted some links below, along with a few observations of my own.  Please do chip in with your thoughts, experiences, tips, and recommendations for resources.

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Things I have learnt about using social media

Blogging

  • You must have a clear idea about your intended audience and what you hope to achieve.  Blogging for the sake of it or because it’s flavour of the month or because you think it is expected is unlikely to be sustainable or to achieve the desired results.
  • A good way to start is to search for people doing a similar thing and contact them asking if you can link to their blog.  Everyone likes being linked to, and this is a good way to start conversations.  Once established, support others in the same way.
  • You have to build something of a track record of posts and tweets to be credible as a consistent source of quality content – you’ve got to earn a following, and this takes time, work, and patience.  And even then, might not work.  Consider a ‘soft launch’ to build your track record, and then a second wave of more intensive effort to get noticed.
  • Posting quality comments on other people’s blogs, either in their comments section, or in a post on your blog, can be a good way to attract attention.
  • Illustrate blog posts with a picture (perhaps found through google images) – a lot of successful bloggers seem to do this.
  • Multi-author blogs and/or guest posts are a good way to share the load.
  • And consequently, offering guest posts or content to established blogs is a way to get noticed.
  • The underlying technology is now very straightforward.  Anyone who is reasonably computer literate will have little trouble learning the technical skills.  The editing frame where I’m writing this in looks a lot like Word, and I’ve used precisely no programming/HTML stuff – that can all be automated now.

Twitter

  • The technology of @s and # is fairly straightforward to pick up – find some relevant/interesting people to follow and you’ll soon pick it up, or read one of the guides below.
  • A good way to reach people is to get “retweets” – essentially when someone else with a bigger following forwards your message.  You do this by addressing posts to them using the @ symbol
  • Generally the pattern of retweets seems to be when people find something interesting and it suits their message.  So… the ESRC retweeted my blog post linking to their regional visit presentation when my blog post said nice things about the visit and linked to their presentation
  • Weird mix of personal and professional.  Some twitter accounts are uniquely professional, others uniquely personal, but many seem a mixture.  Some of the usual barriers seem not to apply, or apply only loosely.  Care needs to be taken here.

General

  • Social media is potentially a huge time sink – keep in mind costs in time versus benefits gained
  • It can be a struggle if you’re naturally shy and attention seeking doesn’t come easily to you

Resources and further reading:

Examples of individual UoN blogs:

Patter – Pat Thomson, School of Education http://patthomson.wordpress.com/
Political Apparitions – Steven Fielding, School of Politics http://stevenfielding.com/
Registrarism – Paul Greatrix, University Registrar  http://registrarism.wordpress.com/
Cash for Questions, Adam Golberg, NUBS  https://socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk/

UoN Group/institutional/project blogs:

Bullets and Ballots – UoN School of Politics: http://nottspolitics.org/
China Policy Institute http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chinapolicyinstitute/
Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility
http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/betterbusiness/

UoN blogs home http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/

Guides:

Twitter Guide – LSE Impact in Social Sciences
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/29/twitter-guide/

6 tips on blogging about research (Sarah Stewart (EdD Student, Otago University, NZ)
http://sarah-stewart.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/my-top-6-tips-for-how-to-blog-about.html

Blogging about your research – first steps  (University of Warwick)
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/researchexchange/topics/gd0007/

Is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? (Melissa Terras, UCL)
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/04/19/blog-tweeting-papers-worth-it/

A gentle introduction to twitter for the apprehensive academic, (Dorothy Bishop, University of Oxford)
http://deevybee.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/gentle-introduction-to-twitter-for.html

Twitter accounts:

List of official University of Nottingham Twitter accounts
https://twitter.com/#!/UniofNottingham/uontwitteraccounts

Lists of academic twitter accounts (Curator: LSE Impact project team)
https://twitter.com/#!/LSEImpactBlog/soc-sci-academic-tweeters

https://twitter.com/#!/LSEImpactBlog/business-tweeters

https://twitter.com/#!/LSEImpactBlog/arts-academic-tweeters

https://twitter.com/#!/LSEImpactBlog/think-tanks

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Some of the links and choices of examples, are more than a little University of Nottingham-centric, but then this was an internal event.  I’ve not checked with the authors of the various resources I’ve linked to, and taken the liberty of assuming that they won’t mind the link and recognition.  But happy to remove any on request.

Any resources I’ve missed?  Any more thoughts and suggestions?  Please comment below….

How can we help researchers get responses for web questionnaires?

A picture of an energy saving lightbulb
*Insert your own hilarious and inaccurate joke about how long energy saving lightbulbs take to warm up here*

I’ve had an idea, and I’d like you, the internet, to tell me if it’s a good one or not.  Or how it might be made into a good one.

Would it be useful to set up a central list/blog/twitter account for ongoing research projects (including student projects) which need responses to an internet questionnaire from the general public?  Would researchers use it?  Would it add value?  Would people participate?

Every so often, I receive an email or tweet asking for people to complete a research questionnaire on a particular topic.  I usually do (if it’s not too long, and the topic isn’t one I consider intrusive), partly because some of them are quite interesting, partly because I feel a general duty to assist with research when asked, and partly because I probably need to get out more.  The latest one was one which a friend and former colleague shared on Facebook.  It was a PhD project from a student in her department about sun tanning knowledge and behaviour, and it’s here if you feel like taking part.  Now this is not a subject that I feel passionately about, but perhaps that’s why it might be useful for the likes of me to respond.

I guess the key assumptions that I’m making are that there are sufficient numbers of other people like me who would be willing to spend a few minutes every so often completing a web survey to support research, and that nothing like this exists already.  If there is, I’ve not heard about and I’d have thought that I would have done.  But I’d rather be embarrassed now rather than later!  Another assumption is that such a resource might be useful.  I strongly suspect that any such resource would have a deeply atypical demographic – I’d imagine it would be mainly university staff and students.  But I’d imagine that well designed research questionnaires would be asking sufficiently detailed demographic information to be able to factor this in.  For some student projects where the main challenge can be quantity rather than variety, this might not even matter too much.  I guess it depends what questions are being asked as part of the research.

I’ve not really thought this through at all yet.  I would imagine that only projects which could be completed by anyone would be suitable for inclusion, or at least only projects where responses are invited from a broad range of people.  Very specific projects probably wouldn’t work, and would make it harder for participants to find ones which they can do.  Obviously all projects would need to have ethical approval from their institution.  There would be an expectation that beneficiaries are prepared to reciprocate and help others in return.  And clearly there has to be a strategy to tell people about it.

In practical terms, I’m thinking about either a separate blog or a separate page of this one, and probably a separate twitter account.  Researchers could add details in a comment on a monthly blog post, and either tweet the account and ask for a re-tweet, or email me a tweet to send.  Participants could follow the twitter feed and subscribe to the comments and blog.

So… what do you think?  Please comment below (or email me if you prefer).  Would this be useful?  Would you participate?  What have I missed?  If I do set this up, how might I go about telling people about it?

Costs of interview transcription: Take a letter, Miss Jones….

A picture of Michelle from "'Allo 'allo"
"Listen verry carefully.... I will say zis anly wance"

Quick post on something other than the ESRC, for a change…..

Transcription is a major category of expense for social science research projects, and I’ve been wondering for some time whether it’s possible to make cost savings without sacrificing accuracy, consistency, confidentiality, speed of turnaround, and all of the other things we require.

One problem is that there seem to be a wide variety of different pricing models.  Some by hour of tape, some by hour of staff time, some by some other smaller unit of time.  Another is that there are different types of transcription – verbatim (which includes every last hesitation and verbal tic) and then varying degrees of near-verbatim stuff.  Some transcription is of fairly straightforward one-on-one interviews, but sometimes it’s whole focus groups or meetings where individual speakers need identifying.  The quality of the recordings and the clarity of those speaking may be variable.  I’ve also been assured that there are cases where a Research Associate with specialist knowledge (rather than a generalist audio typist)  is required, though that was for a video recording.

I imagine there are plenty of models of sourcing transcription across universities – in house capacity, a list of current/former staff looking for extra work, or a contract with a preferred supplier.  Or some kind of mixture of provision.  One option would be to look at getting better value, but given the difficulty in comparing price and quality, I’m not sure how far this would get us.  I’m also a little unhappy at the thought of trying to reduce what I suspect are already fairly low rates of pay.

I wonder if technology has reached a point where it would be worth looking seriously at voice recognition software for producing a first pass transcript.  At least for non-verbatim requirements, this might produce a document that would just need correcting and tidying up, which might be quicker (and therefore cheaper) than transcribing the whole thing.  However, I can’t help remember an episode when a friend tried voice recognition software which couldn’t cope with his Saarrf Lahndahn accent… which got more pronounced the more frustrated he got with its utter failure to anderstan’ wot ee waz sayin.  But I’m sure technology has moved on.

The ever-reliable Wikipedia reckons that 50% of live TV subtitles were produced via voice recognition as of 2005, though there’s a “citation needed” for this claim.  But even if true, I would imagine that a fair amount of speech on live TV is more scripted and rehearsed – and therefore easier to automatically transcribe – than what someone might say in a research interview.  More RP accents, too, I’d imagine.

Anyone have any experience of using voice recognition software for transcription?  Or is the technology not quite there yet?