Ian Mulvany

May 29, 2025

Where lies the agency in research assessment?

A nice write up of a survey that springer nature conducted asking researchers how they felt about research assessment - https://www.springernature.com/gp/librarians/the-link/research-management-blogpost/research-assessment-insights-6600-researchers/27769018

However where does the agency in research assessment lie? Is it not with researchers themselves? 

What I would like publishers to continue to do it create systems that provided more broad, open, and transparent context about papers - here are your citations, here are who has read your paper and what disciplines they are in, here is where this paper has been cited in policy, here is a bag of vector that you can take from your paper to feed your favourite LLM, here if you wish is a poster, if you wish is a podcast, if you wish is a game. Here are the traces and perhaps amok singles of retractions amongst the web of papers in your reference lists. We should celebrate the ability to create many proxies for whatever the thing is that finders or researcher believe they are seeking and then enable this groups to explore conversations that create value around careers and the literature.  


About Ian Mulvany

Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!