Governance | Leadership | Research
A weekly brief for higher education leaders and researchers examining governance, leadership and research in practice
Weekly newsletter | Published on LinkedIn
29 Invitations, 28 Declines: Is Peer Review Running Out of Goodwill?
A struggle to find reviewers prompted editors and academics across disciplines to share remarkably similar experiences. Their responses suggest that peer review is being squeezed by rising submission volumes, invisible workloads and growing resistance to unpaid academic labour. ...
Could You Explain Open Access to a Taxpayer?
Open access is usually presented as an obvious public good. Research becomes freely available, knowledge travels further, and people without expensive university subscriptions can read the latest work. But how would we explain the financial model to an educated taxpayer so that they are happy ...
Is your university running just to stand still?
Universities can improve their research, reputation, international reach and student outcomes, yet remain in the same ranking position, or even drop. The reason is that their competitors are improving too. The Red Queen Effect helps explain why universities may need to run ever faster simply ...
Three Years to Become a Researcher, Three Days to Become a Leader
Academic leadership is often treated as the natural next step after professorial achievement. Yet the skills that make someone a successful researcher are not necessarily those needed to lead people, manage resources or guide an institution through change. This edition asks whether universities are doing ...
Change Will Never Be This Slow Again. Can Your Organisation Keep Up?
Today's pace of change feels relentless. Yet it may be the slowest we will ever experience. If that is true, the defining leadership challenge is no longer keeping up ourselves, but building organisations that can keep up with us. This edition explores why organisational adaptability, ...
Do we know the final destination for Open Access?
Open Access has transformed scholarly publishing. Today, millions of research articles are freely available that would once have been accessible only through subscriptions. If the goal is universal access to research, what happens to the millions of articles that remain behind paywalls? Perhaps it is ...