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First Mock REF exercise to begin soon!

BRIAN, REF Subjects, Research assessment

ref-logo

The first mock exercise in preparation for the next Research Exercise Framework is due to take place soon. This mock REF exercise is open to ALL academic staff and staff will be invited to submit up to FOUR outputs published since 1 January 2014. This first exercise will be a ‘light touch’ review to gauge all eligible outputs and their likely contribution to the unit of assessment(s).

More information and guidance regarding this mock exercise will be provided shortly. Meanwhile, early preparations can be made by ensuring that all outputs and their full texts are deposited into BURO via BRIAN where possible. You can refer to this blog post for a quick guide to uploading your full text.

Also, please see below for your reference, the list of all Unit of Assessment Leader(s).

  • Edwin van Teijlingen : UOA 3 – Allied Health Professions, Dentistry, Nursing and Pharmacy
  • Ben Parris : UOA 4 – Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience
  • Raian Ali; Keith Phalp : UOA 11 – Computer Science and Informatics
  • Zulfiqar Khan : UOA 12 – Aeronautical, Mechanical, Chemical and Manufacturing Engineering
  • Tim Darvill; Ross Hill : UOA 17 – Geography, Environmental Studies and Archaeology
  • Dean Patton : UOA 19 – Business and Management Studies
  • Sascha-Dominik Bachmann : UOA 20 – Law
  • Jonathan Parker : UOA 22/23 – Social Work and Social Policy/ Sociology
  • Holger Schutkowski : UOA 24 – Anthropology and Development Studies
  • Julian McDougall : UOA 25 – Education
  • Stephen Page : UOA 26 – Sport and Exercise Sciences, Leisure and Tourism
  • Bronwen Thomas : UOA 29 – English Language and Literature
  • Neal White : UOA 34 – Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
  • Iain MacRury : UOA 36 – Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management

As mentioned above, more information and guidance will be released shortly so do watch out for it.

Writing Academy Lunchbyte – The importance of writing an abstract: the why and how

Publishing, Training

abstractJoin us in this Writing Academy Lunchbyte session and learn about the importance of writing an abstract: the why and how.

Date : 30th September 2015 (Wednesday)

Time : 12.00 – 13.00 (presentation); 13:00 – 13:30 (lunch)

Venue : TAG03, Talbot

How often to you undertake important research and yet find the last thing you do is to dash off an abstract without reflecting on just how important this element of writing is? The abstract is the ‘shop window’ for your research. The abstract you write could make the difference between being accepted to present at a conference or not. It could mean success or failure in a grant proposal. It could make all the difference in whether your work is read and cited.

This Lunch Byte will examine the difference between a ‘good’ abstract and a ‘bad’ abstract and give some pointers to success. Matt Bentley will use examples from his own abstracts to illustrate how to do it and how not to do it.

Come and join us in this session and afterwards, there will be opportunities to have informal discussions with the presenter while having a bite to eat.

To ensure that we place the right catering order, please get in touch with Staff Development to book your place.

Uploading your full text to BRIAN – 3 easy steps!

BRIAN, Post-award, Publishing, Research assessment, staff profile pages

If you are unsure of how to upload the full text of your publication onto BRIAN to be deposited in BURO, these are the three easy steps you can follow!

Step 1 – Ensure publication record already exists in your BRIAN account. If it does not, click on the ‘+’ sign next to it –

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You will see a search box on the following page. Enter the title of your publication in the search box. If the record of your publication already exists within BRIAN, you simply need to scroll to it and ‘claim’ it. Otherwise, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on ‘create manual entry’. You can then populate all relevant information of your publication on the following page. Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom to ‘save’ your record!

Step 2 – Once the publication record exists within BRIAN, click on the the blue arrow up icon, and you will be taken to the deposit page

Screen Shot 2015-09-19 at 21.50.50

Step 3 – Locate the correct version of your full text in accordance with the policy advice from Sherpa romeo; and then click ‘upload’.

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When the upload is complete, you will be notified on the screen that your full text is under review by the BURO team. Once approved by the BURO team of its legality, the link to the full text in BURO will be created and the link will also appear on your Staff Profile Page. If at any point you are unsure of this process, please send an email either to BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk or BURO@bournemouth.ac.uk for assistance and advice.

 

 

Photo Of The Week: The Life-Story Of A Fish

The Life-Story of a Fish? Answers on a Scale, Please!

In our next ‘Photo of the week’, we are exploring research investigating what information a fish scale can provide and how that can be utilised within ecological monitoring. The research is being led by BU’s Georgina Busst.

This scale is from a grayling, which belongs to the salmon family of fishes. There are many rings running around it – similar to that of a tree and just like trees fish grow seasonally. The seasonal growth is visible on their scales as rings are laid down closer together in winter, as fish grow much more slowly and are more spread apart in summer, as fish grow at a faster rate. You can see this pattern in this photo. The fish that this scale belongs to is 1 year old, approaching 2. You can tell this as the rings are closer together near the scale edge, indicating slower growth and therefore winter.

Scales are extremely valuable tools for fisheries ecologists as you can remove a few without harming the fish and you can collect lots of different information from them. Scales can be used not only to age fish, but to monitor their growth rates and relate this back to changes in the environment; reveal how many times a fish has spawned; how many years it has spent at sea; for DNA and genetic analysis and stable isotope analysis, which can reveal what the fish has eaten and what position it is in a food web. All that from a simple scale.

For more information about the project, email Georgina for further details.

This was an entry to BU’s first research photography competition and the entries for the next competition will be open shortly. For more details abouth the competition, please email research@bournemouth.ac.uk

“Styles of Good Sense” Ethics, Filmmaking and Scholarship

PG research

Crew shooting early scene for the short, research-based film, RUFUS STONE

Crew shooting early scene for the short, research-based film, RUFUS STONE

Kip Jones’ draft Chapter for The Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History was deposited today on BRIAN and Academia.edu. The book’s section on Ethics is edited by Ivor Goodson, with assistance from Ari Antikainen, Molly Andrews and Pat Sikes. Jones’ Chapter entitled, “Styles of Good Sense—Ethics, Filmmaking and Scholarship” is based upon his experience as researcher, author and producer of the award winning short film, RUFUS STONE.

Jones proposes that aesthetics and ethics need to be considered in concert and that they are at the very heart of arts-based research. Ethics and Aesthetics become intertwined and support one another. Jones states:

‘Ethics, much like aesthetics, is often misunderstood as something effusive, illusive and somehow, decision-making by the few on a rarefied echelon, involving pronouncements of grand moral impact and/or sophisticated discrimination. For these kinds of reasons and to avoid potential headaches, it is often assumed that checklists and committees will be far better at making such decisions than mere individuals.’

Jones believes that ethics and aesthetics need to remain the prerogative of the researcher/filmmaker and her/his participants and audiences. By developing a trust in instinct and intuition and the naturally expressive and moral potential of our personal resources, research involving people’s stories can become richer and more human, if we only are willing to jettison some of the baggage of the old academic rigor and dry procedural ethics.

Jones’ involvement in the section of the book on Ethics will include co-contributors Arthur Frank, Norm Denzin, Laurel Richardson and Carolyn Ellis, and will be published in the New Year.

 

 

Leadership development for principal investigators (PIs)

Post-award, Training

Leadership Development
Not too long ago HEFCE funded a project to provide online resources to help principal investigators develop their skills, these excellent resources are hosted by Vitae. This collaborative project involved colleagues at a number of universities across the UK, RCUK, Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, ARMA and Universities UK.

The resources can be found here and include some fantastic sections on:

 

 

BUDI at Alzheimer Europe in Ljubljana, Slovenia

Sophie Bushell, Dr Fiona Kelly and I represented Bournemouth University Dementia Institute (BUDI) at the 25th Annual Conference of Alzheimer Europe which took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia from 2-4 September 2015.

Sophie presented a poster showcasing her PhD research ‘Researching the wellbeing of people with dementia living in long term care: Ways forward’. Fiona discussed the findings from the Dementia Pathway Redesign project in her paper ‘Informing to improve: Exploring the views of people affected by dementia to develop better care pathways’. I presented a poster on the Dorset Dementia Friendly Community project evaluation and a paper on ‘Fire risks and safety strategies in the home of people with dementia’.

Sophie

This years conference theme was ‘Dementia: putting strategies and research into practice’, aiming to identify how research results and research findings can be translated into concrete actions to improve the lives of people with dementia and their carers. The conference also provided an opportunity to celebrate Alzheimer Europe’s 25th anniversary and to look back on the many achievements of the organisation.

Dr Michelle Heward

 

 

Concordat on Open Research Data

Post-award, Publishing, Research Ethics, Research Integritiy

open dataAs mentioned by Emily in her August HE Policy post, a draft concordat has been published which seeks to make research data in the UK more openly accessible for use.

The concordat has been drafted under the auspices of the UK Open Research Data Forum [Note 1] by a multi-stakeholder working group, which includes HEFCE, Research Councils UK (RCUK), Jisc, the Wellcome Trust and Universities UK.  It aims to help ensure that the research data gathered and generated by members of the UK research community is made openly available for use by others wherever possible, in a manner consistent with relevant legal, ethical and regulatory frameworks and norms.

The concordat aims to establish a set of expectations of good practice, with the intention of making open research data the standard for publicly funded research over the long term.  It recognises the different responsibilities of researchers, their employers and the funders of research, although the intention is not to mandate, codify or require specific activities.

The full draft concordat can be found here – http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/opendata/

Key principals are outlined below:

Definition of Research Data used:

“Research Data are quantitative information or qualitative statements collected by researchers in the course of their work by experimentation, observation, interview or other methods. Data may be raw or primary (e.g. direct from measurement or collection) or derived from primary data for subsequent analysis or interpretation (e.g. cleaned up or as an extract from a larger data set). The purpose of open research data is to provide the information necessary to support or validate a research project’s observations, findings or outputs. Data may include, for example, statistics, collections of digital images, sound recordings, transcripts of interviews, survey data and fieldwork observations with appropriate annotations.”

Principle #1

Open access to research data is an enabler of high quality research, a facilitator of innovation and safeguards good research practice.

Principle #2

Good data management is fundamental to all stages of the research process and should be established at the outset.

Principle #3

Data must be curated so that they are accessible, discoverable and useable.

Principle #4

Open access to research data carries a significant cost, which should be respected by all parties.

Principle #5

There are sound reasons why the openness of research data may need to be restricted but any restrictions must be justified and justifiable.

Principle #6

The right of the creators of research data to reasonable first use is recognised.

Principle #7

Use of others’ data should always conform to legal, ethical and regulatory frameworks including appropriate acknowledgement.

Principle #8

Data supporting publications should be accessible by the publication date and should be in a citeable form.

Principle #9

Support for the development of appropriate data skills is recognised as a responsibility for all stakeholders.

Principle #10

Regular reviews of progress towards open access to research data should be undertaken.

BUDI Carers’ Forum 2015

On 9 September, we held our fourth annual Carers’ Forum. Our Carers’ Forum provides an opportunity to hear from local people who are caring for people with dementia on what matters most to them. We were also delighted to welcome Vivien Zarucki, Independent Financial Advisor, as our guest speaker who discussed the financial aspects of caring for someone living with dementia. Alison Adams, Information Worker from the Alzheimer’s Society, was also on hand to provide attendees with details about local support for people affected by dementia.

Carers' forum 2015v2

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a parallel session, people with dementia participated in a range of activities (including using technology such as IPads), and talked to the team about what it’s like living with dementia locally.

Feedback following the event suggests that attendees welcomed the opportunity to share their views and experiences:

  • “Thank you so much for the whole experience. Once again we are very blessed with the care and encouragement we receive”.
  • “Many thanks to all that helped arrange the day, the person we care for enjoy meeting others who are in the same situation as themselves”.
  • “It was good to exchange ideas. People always know something you don’t”.

These views and experiences will enable us to focus our research, education and consultancy services around the issues that matter most to people who are affected by dementia.