The Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), in association with the Australasian Research Management Society (ARMS), will hold a Research Administrators’ Seminar in Canberra on 5 and 6 November 2009.

Day One will be held at the National Convention Centre, 31 Constitution Avenue Canberra.

Day Two will be held at the NHMRC offices, 16 Marcus Clarke Street, Canberra City.

Keynote: Research Visibility: Why and How
Presentation of the Nordbib state-of-the-art report on Nordic research information systems and repositories
Institutional repositories and CRIS systems – infrastructure, concepts and organisation
Why should (or shouldn’t) researchers support OA publication?
The result of the JISC study: Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models – based upon the Australian study by John Houghton
Quality, Transparency and Access in the Scholarly Publishing System
Power presentations of the Nordbib projects
Power presentation of repository tolls
Access to scientific information in the digital age: European Commission initiatives

Is e-publishing affecting science?
Recent research indicates that e-publishing is influencing citation patterns and reader behavior, but disagrees on the effects. Are researchers taking full advantage of the wider choice in reading materials or are they searching so specifically that they are missing the reading they might previously have found along the way?

Women in science – perception and reality
There is anecdotal and research-based evidence to suggest that women scientists are held back by family commitments and implicit gender bias. While recent literature suggests that these obstacles are beginning to disappear, there is still a long way to go before we reach gender balance in science. Research Trends reviews the changing landscape.

THE rankings – a country view
The 2008 Times Higher Education (THE) rankings have just been released, revealing much movement in the rankings of the world’s top 200 universities. We analyze these results at the national level.

Using data to drive performance
As research institutes chase dwindling funding sources and manage international collaborations, they are realizing that they need robust business intelligence data. We speak to research strategy expert Daniel Calto.

…a Nobel Laureate?
Researchers cite particular papers for many reasons; many citations are simply a way of indicating studies that are relevant to current research, but they can also be a means of showing respect. We ask three researchers who have cited a Nobel Laureate about their motivation for the citation.

Report on research issues in Australian universities tabled

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Innovation has completed its inquiry into research training and research workforce issues in Australian universities. The associated report, ‘Building Australia’s Research Capacity,’ was tabled on 1 December 2008 and highlights three key issues:

the importance of primary and secondary education, particularly in the fields of maths and sciences, to prepare potential researchers for further education at the tertiary level;
the need for greater collaboration between universities and research institutes, schools and industry more broadly; and
the inadequacy of current funding for research training and research careers.

The report makes 38 recommendations aimed to address these and related issues.

source: IPRIA

The Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network is a collaborative effort involving more than 1800 scientists and students investigating ecological processes over long temporal and broad spatial scales.

The Network promotes synthesis and comparative research across sites and ecosystems and among other related national and international research programs.

source: IRN

This Go8 Backgrounder outlines the strategies being adopted increasingly across countries to focus their investment in areas of research excellence.

In recent years, most of Australia’s comparator countries have been intensifying their investment in their leading research universities as a means of raising their
competitiveness in the global knowledge economy.

Australia has failed to take the necessary steps, and while the available (lagged) measures of performance indicate that we can punch above our weight, we are not keeping up with the capacity improvements being made elsewhere