Elsevier – one of the largest and most notorious scholarly publishers – are monitoring Open Science in the EU on behalf of the European Commission. Jon Tennant argues that they cannot be trusted. Open Science is all about making science work better so that it can address the world’s challenges. It has been at the…
Are Elsevier corrupting open science in Europe?
T-Lab in Buenos Aires: Bioleft, co-designing open source seeds
The Latin America Hub of Pathways to Sustainabilty project is working on a system to protect biological information and ensure its circulation for research and development.
How do we end the dominance of rich countries over sustainability science?
by Patrick van Zwanenberg, Anabel Marin & Adrian Ely With the new Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the UN last year, SciDev.Net has published a timely report on the global status of sustainability science. Sustainability science (defined as ‘research that supports and drives sustainable development’) is growing significantly as a proportion of world scientific output,…
Opening up science and development in Latin America
STEPS América Latina is the latest regional hub of the Pathways to Sustainability global consortium to be launched. The launch event, which took place on 5-6 November in Buenos Aires, brought together diverse perspectives on how pathways to sustainability can be identified, analysed and nurtured. The first day brought together two highly connected topics: ‘inclusive…
BEAM Exchange Research: Call for proposals
BEAM Exchange is investing in a significant research programme to develop new knowledge that is authoritative and accessible around critical questions about market systems approaches. A call for proposals has been issued for phase two of the research programme. BEAM is seeking research that builds stronger bridges between theory and practice.
Does social science suffer from ‘physics envy’?
Many social scientists and some humanities scholars suffer from a condition that I like to refer to as ‘physics envy’. The term resonates with Freud’s theory of ‘penis envy’, as he applied it to girls and sometimes even to women. The use of the phrase ‘physics envy’ is appropriate whenever scholars presume that the closer…
Multicriteria Mapping meets Operational Research for Development
By Bipashyee Ghosh and Josie Coburn On Thursday (9 July), we facilitated a Multicriteria Mapping workshop as part of a two-day Operational Research for Development workshop, OR: Uplifting Living Conditions, a pre-conference workshop for EURO 2015 at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Bipashyee introduced the background and guiding principles of MCM, followed by the…
STEPS Director Ian Scoones wins ESRC Impact Award
STEPS Director Ian Scoones was a winner of the Outstanding International Impact Award at the ESRC’s 50th anniversary Celebrating Impact Award ceremony, for his work on rural livelihoods in Zimbabwe. ESRC Blog: Building impact over time: experiences from Zimbabwe by Ian Scoones The awards recognise and reward the successes of ESRC-funded researchers who are achieving…
Has the ‘impact agenda’ helped agronomy – or harmed it?
Every agronomist or agricultural research institute with an interest in international development, and who has applied for a research grant in the last 15 years, will have had to develop and justify a theory of change, and identify outcomes, anticipated impacts, measurable indicators and impact pathways. These tasks have become an obligatory part of agricultural…
How to redefine innovation & development: an African perspective
This guest post is by Gillian M. Marcelle, STI policy and management scholar, writing in a personal capacity. Too often public policy debates on global issues get framed and defined in the global North, and the rest of the world is expected to fall in line and follow suit. In July 2014, the African Union…