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Recently, Jstor, a digital archive of more than 1,000 major academic journals, has piloted an alumni-access programme that allows 19 institutions, including Yale University and the universities of London and Exeter in the UK, to bring the collection to alumni worldwide at a reasonable cost. For our alumni, access to the collection is free. The response has been tremendous. When programmes such as this are combined with collaborations between university libraries and alumni offices, it becomes possible to build a virtual alumni library that can support an entire lifetime of learning.
At the same time, many universities are also vastly expanding public access to their own collections via the web. At Yale, individuals around the world have free online access to images of millions of objects housed in our museums, archives and libraries. But, as we must continue to remind all who will listen, not everything has been put on the web and the physical collections of a university library are still essential, irreplaceable research tools.
So while a university library cannot bring its physical collections to alumni spread across the world, it can open its doors, perhaps just a bit wider, to the community that surrounds it. As universities strive to become more a part of, rather than apart from, the community, they should see their libraries as essential to the local intellectual commons.
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Salaries are always important; however, in our current economy with budget cuts and funding changes, it can be difficult to know whether your school's salaries are staying competitive to help you find the best and most qualified faculty. AACSB International collects information on full-time faculty salaries on an annual basis. Reports showing the average salaries by discipline and faculty rank are released in January each year based on the most recent survey. To really get a better idea of how average salaries may be changing, a controlled set of 480 schools that participated in all years from 2009–10 to 2011–12 was used to consider any ongoing salary fluctuations. The table above provides some background to the data included. In this set of 480 schools, approximately 28,000 total full-time faculty were reported in each year. As can be seen from the average salaries listed, there has been slow but steady growth in salaries overall.
Source: AACSB Datadirect 
New social networks and media are improving the connectivity of researchers, engineers, PhD candidates, post-docs, and students. Today, several offer solutions to problems faced by researchers, but are still often considered time consuming. As an online extension of the work of your team or as a catalyst for new collaborations, each of these networks has its own special features. Do you need to optimize your literature review, share or obtain information, dialogue with an instructor, or even reinforce your network of contacts? Whether researcher or student, MyScienceWork presents an overview of the new scientific social networks dedicated to your needs.
Source: 14 May 2012 | by Laurence Bianchini 
Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily. But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings. The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do. Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web. 
Google announced a new feature to its Scholar service. This was no prank. It was the genuine debut of a new tool called Google Scholar Metrics. The service follows the same principle that has made Google's web search engine so successful - when you are unsure what a user is looking for, give them a list of options ranked by a metric of popularity. In this instance, the users are academics ready to submit their next breakthrough but are uncertain which journal to choose. The solution Scholar Metrics offers is a database summarizing the sway of the distributors of scholarship "to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research".Here's how it works. Google creates a list of all the articles a journal has published in a specified period of time. The citations to each article are counted in order to determine the publication's h-index, which is the largest number "h" such that each of the set of "h" articles were cited "h" or more times. As an example of how the h-index is calculated, consider a publication that has had six total articles having 2, 18, 11, 3, 22, and 9 citations, respectively. This gives the journal an h-index of four. Articles meeting the h-index criterion constitute the h-core. In the example, the core is the articles with 18, 11, 22 and 9 citations. Within the h-core, the median of the citation counts is used to assess the typical influence among the most highly cited set and is reported as the h-median. In the example, the h-median is 14.5. Via Jennifer Davison, LizNeeley 
EURECIA set out to develop a novel methodology for the study of the impact of a) by interrogating the relationship between research funding and the science system rather than with the economy and society at large; and b) by broadening the ‘impact’ question to include not only intended effects as read through the objectives but also other possibilities.
Final conference material: http://www.eurecia-erc.net/events/final-conference/
Final workshop summary: http://www.eurecia-erc.net/wp-content/upLoads/EURECIA-ExecSummary.pdf 
Open Access will not only change the way that science is done, it will also change the way that science is judged. The way that scientific output is measured today centers around citations. Essentially, on an author level this means the number of publications and citations of an author’s articles (author-level metrics). On a journal level, it means the average number of citations that articles published in that journal have received in a given time period (journal-level metrics).
A number of article-level metrics services are currently in the start-up phase. A company called Altmetric is a small London-based start-up focused on making article level metrics easy. They do this by watching social media sites, newspapers and magazines for any mentions of scholarly articles. The result is an “altmetric” score which is a quantitative measure of the quality and quantity of attention that a scholarly article has received. The altmetric score is also implemented in UtopiaDocs, a PDF reader which links an article to a wealth of other online resources like Crossref (DOI registration agency), Mendeley (scientist network), Dryad (data repository), Scibite (tools for drug discovery), Sherpa (OA policies and copyright database) and more. A disadvantage of UtopiaDocs may be that it focuses on the PDF format instead of an open format. Also the system seems to be rather slow. PLoS also uses article level metrics to qualify articles by giving comprehensive information about the usage and reach of published articles onto the articles themselves, so that the entire academic community can assess their value. Different from the above, PLoS provides a complete score build on a combination of altmetrics, citation analysis, post-publication peer-review, pageviews, downloads and other criteria. Finally, Total-Impact also makes extensive use of the analysis of social media and other online statistics, to provide a tool to measure total impact of a given collection of scientific articles, datasets and other collections. Their focus on collections represents still another approach to the problem of evaluating scientific output.
Source: Tom Olijhoek, @ccess blog OKF 
A successful boycott of Elsevier demonstrates that populist rebellions have a place within the information-sharing community, started recently. the initiative got a strong follow up, even with a new top journal plan from the Welcome Trust to create a high end academic journal to attract authors in the most prestigious part of the journals. (article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/wellcome-trust-academic-spring).
Although the spring initiative in itself is great and I also believe strongly in open knowledge, personally I think the branding/positioning of the initiative as 'academic spring' makes a possible association with the 'Arabic Spring', where many people have died in the last year trying to free themselves from their dictotors. The two movements are completely different and academics should not use this often tragic humanitarian process as a metaphor for the academic world.
If the movement wants to be successful in my view, it should not brand/position itself als "academic spring", but rather as "an academic career impact initiative", where impact and knowledge spread and communication is the purpose. and which creaties positive energy and creative associations. 
The authors discuss the value of journal metrics for the assessment of scientific-scholarly journals from a general bibliometric perspective, and from
Source: Scientometrics, Online First™, 24 March 2012 Citation-based metrics are appropriate tools in journal assessment provided that they are accurate and used in an informed way Henk F. Moed, Lisa Colledge, Jan Reedijk, Felix Moya-Anegon, Vicente Guerrero-Bote, Andrew Plume and Mayur Amin DOI: 10.1007/s11192-012-0679-8 
The public and society at large have become key actors in the development of the field of This guide comprises eight key points for planning public engagement activities. It contains a set of questions to help policy makers develop a plan from start to finish, as well as practical case studies from countries that have used the guide in their communication activities. The eight points of the planning guide for public engagement and outreach in nanotechnology:
The report also provides a critical review of
Fulltext report: 
In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or "altmetrics," sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science. We find that that different indicators vary greatly in activity. Around 5% of sampled articles are cited in Wikipedia, while close to 80% have been included in at least one Mendeley library. There is, however, an encouraging diversity; a quarter of articles have nonzero data from five or more different sources. Correlation and factor analysis suggest citation and altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone. There are moderate correlations between Mendeley and Web of Science citation, but many altmetric indicators seem to measure impact mostly orthogonal to citation. Articles cluster in ways that suggest five different impact “flavors,” capturing impacts of different types on different audiences; for instance, some articles may be heavily read and saved by scholars but seldom cited. Together, these findings encourage more research into altmetrics as complements to traditional citation measures.
Source: arXiv:1203.4745v1 [cs.DL] 20 Mar 2012 Altmetrics in the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact Jason Priem*, Heather A. Piwowar**, Bradley M. Hemminger* The first two authors contributed equally to this paper. * School of Information and Library Science , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ** National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) 
This report briefly presents the findings and recommendations of the "Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success" project which investigated the extent to which publishing has now become a core activity of North American academic libraries and suggested ways in which further capacity could be built. Library publishing services have become an important part of
The Research in Librarianship – Impact Evaluation Study (RiLIES – pronounced “realise”) refers to two projects supported by the LIS Research Coalition. RiLIES1 was completed between February and July 2011. RiLIES2 runs from February to July 2012. RiLIES1 explored the extent to which funded librarianship research projects influence library practice in the UK. Of particular interest were the factors that increase or hinder the impact of project outcomes on practice. To find out more please see the RiLIES1 project report Enhancing the impact of LIS research projects.
Surviving in science these days is all about high impact. How is this impact being measured? Managers, deans, operators, science editors and grant officers, to mention just a few non-active scientists, know the answer exactly. They judge the scientist by the:number of papers published in refereed journalsnumber of papers in high-impact journalsnumber of citations, and more specifically by the h-index To remind you: if the h-index of a scientist is 20 the scientist has coauthored 20 papers with at least 20 citations.
The majority of scientists that have a AAA-rating according to the above criteria find these criteria good indicators. The majority of scientists that have a poor rating on this scale will find all type of arguments why the above rating says nothing about the quality of a scientist. The criteria only test marginal quality, that is to say scientists that have an exceptionally low rating on all three of the list, are not performing well.
Of course there are a number of possible comments to make on the criteria, like neglect of age of scientist, neglect of number of coauthors, difference in social status of scientist (director of a hierarchically organized institute), difference in culture of scientific fields. The purpose of this post is however, we have better get the numbers right, before we discuss their relevance.
Continue reading on the survival blog
Source: survival blog for scientists Ad lagendijk 
Here is another way how business schools reach out to business; by creating a blog on research and innovation. This INSEAD forum offers an opportunity to join in the conversation about leadership and management practice. A chance to engage with INSEAD faculty, alumni, and distinguished friends of the school as they share their ideas and experience.
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Digital Influence is one of the hottest trends in social media, yet is largely misunderstood. "The Rise of Digital Influence," the new report by Altimeter Group Principal Analyst Brian Solis, is a ’how-to’ guide for businesses to spark desirable effects and outcomes through social media influence. The report helps companies understand how influence spreads, and includes case studies in which brands partnered with vendors to recruit connected consumers for digital influence campaigns. Brian evaluates the offerings of 14 Influence vendors, organizing them by Reach, Resonance, and Relevance: the Three Pillars that make up the foundation for Digital Influence as defined in the report. Also included are an Influence Framework and an Influence Action Plan to help brands identify connected consumers and to define and measure strategic digital influence initiatives.
Source: The Rise of Digital Influence by Altimeter Group Network on SlideShare on Mar 20, 2012 http://www.slideshare.net/Altimeter/the-rise-of-digital-influence 
The literature on leadership in higher education is predominantly concerned with the role of formally designated senior managers such as heads of department and deans of faculty. By contrast, relatively little attention has focused on those performing informal and distributed forms of leadership, such as (full) university professors. This article draws on the results of an online questionnaire and interviews to explore the leadership role of professors, primarily in a UK context. Professors feel that there is a mismatch between their priorities and those of their employing institutions and that their expertise is under‐utilised. A number of qualities are identified which may be associated with the role of a professor as an intellectual leader: role model, mentor, advocate, guardian, acquisitor and ambassador. It is argued that new managerialism and performative expectations are reshaping the role of the professoriate, and that institutions need to do more to develop their leadership capacity.
Bruce Macfarlanea (2011). Professors as intellectual leaders: formation, identity and role. Studies in Higher Education: Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 57-73. DOI:10.1080/03075070903443734 
Research produces new knowledge, products, or processes. Research publications reflect contributions to knowledge, patents indicate useful inventions, and citations on patents to the scientific and technical literature indicate linkages between
Collaborative research is becoming the norm, and collaboration across national boundaries is generally increasing, as reflected in international coauthorship on research articles. In 1988, only 8% of the world’s S&E articles had international
As a result of the large volume of both U.S. and EU article outputs, along with EU policies that encourage intra-Union collaboration, U.S.-based authors appeared on 43%, and EU-based authors on 67%, of the world’s internationally
nsf.gov - Science and Engineering Indicators 2012 - US National Science Foundation (NSF) Fulltext is here: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/pdf/overview.pdf 
Almost every technological and medical innovation in the world has its roots in a scientific paper. Science drives much of the world’s innovation. The faster science moves, the faster the world moves.
Utopia Documents brings a fresh new perspective to reading the scientific literature, combining the the convenience and reliability of the PDF with the flexibility and power of the web.
The scientific article has been described as a Story That Persuades With Data, but all too often the link between data and narrative is lost somewhere in the modern publishing process. Utopia Documents helps to rebuild these connections, linking articles to underlying datasets, and making it easy to access online resources relating to an article's content. 
Plum Analytics was founded to help advance science by making scholarly research more assessable and accessible. Researchers and their associated labs, departments, and institutions will be able to track real-time impact, better promote their research, compare with peers, and connect with new research. Plum Analytics is building browsable and searchable directories of researchers organized both by topic and by the hierarchy at each institution. Underlying these directories will be a centralized scholarly reputation graph capturing the affiliations of researchers, the articles they publish, and their online impact. An institution or its departments can provide centralized access to research performed on its own campus. Researchers will be able to effortlessly highlight their research, make it openly available and discoverable online, and create new linkages to other similar research. Plum Analytics will offer custom, metrics-based reports to support a wide variety of explorations, including quantifying how departments or labs measure up to their peers; discovering “rising stars” in different research areas for recruiting or co-research purposes; monitoring research marketing efforts; and providing quantifiable research outcomes in pursuit of grant funding.
Plum Analytics is a start-up metrics resource for measuring scholarly communication. Based in Philadelphia, PA and Seattle, WA. Plum Analytics was founded by Andrea Michalek (@amichalek) and Mike Buschman (@mikebuschman). 
From an economics standpoint, self-citation is the easiest method to boost one’s citations. Every author knows this and cites his own articles, however peripheral their relationship is to the topic at hand. Editors know this as well, and some have been caught coercing authors into self-citing the journal. Other editors have published editorial “reviews” of the articles published in their own journal, focusing entirely on papers that have been published in the previous two years — the window from which the impact factor is generated. There is a price to pay for this behavior, especially when it is done to excess. Thomson Reuters, publishers of the annual Journal Citation Report (JCR), routinely puts journals in “time-out” when their self-citation rates are excessively high, such that they greatly shift the journal’s positional rank among other related titles. 
Connecting universities with policy and practice is increasingly important. Knowledge mobilisation (KMb) is not a new activity. Some university researchers have always worked with non-academic partners. In 2007, Jonathan Lomas (formerly of the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation) traced examples of university engagement with non-academic partners to the German dye industry in the late 1800s. The US land grant universities (those that concentrated on more practical subject teaching) have well-established extension programmes that date back to the turn of the 20th century. However, in Canada, collaborating with non-academic partners has been an individual activity that occurs despite institutional barriers such as tenure and promotion (T&P) where faculty members are rewarded for traditional academic scholarship as well as teaching and service. Although a conversation about rewarding community engaged scholarship in T&P review is under way, in Canada traditional scholarship remains the foundation of an academic career and reinforces the perception of the university as a traditional, self-perpetuating and monolithic organisation disconnected from society.
David Phipps is director of research services and knowledge exchange at York University, Toronto, Canada. For more on knowledge mobilisation at York University, and from David, see the Research Impact blog and follow @researchimpact on Twitter. 
This paper examines the evolution of the entrepreneurship education initiative of a single research-intensive institution—the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom—and the ways in which that initiative has or has not contributed to the broader entrepreneurial and commercial engagement objectives of the university. The Manchester case suggests that research-intensive universities wishing to bring entrepreneurship education and knowledge commercialisation and commodification into effective and beneficial alignment—that is, in a broader model of the “entrepreneurial university” than characterizes conventional thinking today—face significant challenges that require determined strategies to overcome. Source: Edward Feser. 2012. "Entrepreneurship education in the research-intensive entrepreneurial university" Working paper Fulltext: http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=edwardfeser 
STAR METRICS is a federal and research institution collaboration to create a repository of data and tools that will be useful to assess the impact of federal R&D investments. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), under the auspices of Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), are leading this project. This project has been developed after a successful pilot project was conducted with several research institutions in the Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP).
The STAR METRICS project consists of two implementation levels:
Level I: Developing uniform, auditable and standardized measures of the impact of science spending (ARRA and non-ARRA) on job creation, using data from research institutions’ existing database records. No personally identifiable information (PII) is collected in Level I.
Level II: Developing measures of the impact of federal science investment on scientific knowledge (using metrics such as publications and citations), social outcomes (e.g. health outcomes measures and environmental impact factors), workforce outcomes (e.g. student mobility and employment), and economic growth (e.g. tracing patents, new company start-ups and other measures). Data elements that will be collected in Level II will be collectively determined in consultation with Institutions that have joined Level I. 
HEFCE has published a consultation report that sets out the lessons learned from collaborations, alliances and mergers (CAM) in higher education, and proposes guidance for universities and colleges that may be contemplating such arrangements for the future. By consulting on this report, HEFCE hopes to: enrich its content with further evidence from the sector; stimulate challenge to the conclusions it draws; and identify areas where further guidance would be helpful.
Collaborations, alliances and mergers among universities and colleges have been an important feature of the higher education sector throughout its history, but relatively little information has been published on this activity. We have therefore published this study to help the sector learn from the experiences of others and improve the likelihood of success considering or implementing change. The information has been drawn from case studies in England and overseas, interviews, existing literature and other published information.
Although the 2014 REF is very impact focused, this report does not show obvious indications that the CAM cases are more impactfull in the new combined situation. This might be something to consider for the Hefce to take into account.
The consultation report is here: 
The UK’s investment in research is a vital long-term investment in its future growth and prosperity. To maximise the impact of UK research, Research Councils UK (RCUK) actively supports and promotes activities to realise the greatest potential for new discoveries and new ideas to result in economic growth, cultural enrichment and societal
• fostering global economic growth, and specifically the economic competitiveness of the United Kingdom;
This is the first RCUK Impact Repor t in the current
This report details the various activities through which the Research Councils are working together to achieve greater impact. This includes collaboration with partners in key commercial sectors, the Technology Strategy Board and governmental departments. It also highlights the impact of the six major cross-Council themes and how the Research Councils will develop the impact agenda through the current spending review period. The report concludes by setting out aims of the RCUK Impact Strategy.
A copy of the report is available to download: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/Documents/publications/RCUK%20Impact%20report%202011.pdf |
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