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Social sciences & humanities taking on the EC for funding in Horizon 2020 today

Europe’s social scientists and humanities researchers are combining forces to push for more funding in Horizon 2020 through the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities, which will have its first general assembly today and tomorrow in Brussels. The European Commission has proposed that social science and humanities research would be funded as part of five other funding pots for grand challenges, which include climate change, health and ICT but the alliance members want the establishment of a sixth pot called Understanding Europe for social sciences and humanities research.

I will report on the Assembly when info becomes available.

Research Outcomes System (ROS) – AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC & ESRC

Over the last three months, four Research Councils (AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC and ESRC) have been working to collect research outcomes through the Research Outcomes System (ROS).  This system replaces the ESRC’s data collection system, “manage my grant”.  NERC are continuing with their own system for this year’s data collection but will move over to ROS for 2013.  The aim of this system is to collect outputs from projects as they go along, and provide a central repository for information on the impact and importance of research.

ROS is available all year round for submitting research outcomes, but every January to March RCUK will be conducting an annual exercise to encourage submissions. For this first collection period (Jan – Mar 2012) outcomes should be submitted for grants that are currently in ROS by Monday 30th April and:

  • started more than 12 months ago, or
  • have ended, but a final report has not been submitted, or
  • a final report has been submitted and relevant information has been transferred to ROS by a Research Council on your behalf.

The Research Councils are working to transfer all relevant final report information into ROS. If you have already completed a final report, please wait until that information is in ROS before adding any new or additional outcomes. Individual Research Councils will contact you when this information is ready to review in ROS.

ROS is available at www.rcuk.ac.uk/researchoutcomes and you can log-in using your standard Je-S account details.

A set of frequently asked questions and a number of video tutorials about ROS and how to use it are available on the website here. If you would like any further information or have any questions, please email: researchoutcomes@rcuk.ac.uk

 

EU Funding for Women in Media

The European Institute for Gender Equality invites proposals for a study on area J of the Beijing platform for action, which addresses women and media in the EU.

The tenderer will conduct a study on women’s participation and access to expression and decision-making in media, with an emphasis on women’s presence in the decision-making bodies within media companies, the extent to which media companies have developed codes of conduct and other forms of self-regulation to obviate discrimination on the grounds of sex, as well as the monitoring of women’s and men’s presence in media content, excluding films and commercials.

Funding is worth approximately €400,000 over 11 months and the deadline is April 24th.

‘Popularizing Research’ published with opening Chapter by BU’s Kip Jones on Performative Social Science

Peter Lang Publishing announces the publication of Popularizing Research: Engaging New Genres, Media, and Audiences, edited by Phillip Vannini of Canada’s Royal Roads University.

The book’s opening Chapter, “Short Film as Performative Social Science: The Story Behind “’Princess Margaret’” was written by Dr Kip Jones, Reader in Qualitative Research and Performative Social Science, who shares a joint appointment in HSC and the Media School. The Chapter outlines his fascinating and innovative approach to research and its dissemination via a fusion of the arts and social sciences.

Jones utilizes his chapter to recount an unconventional journey to academic publishing that certainly did not follow the usual route of journal or book publication. The Chapter revisits “The one about Princess Margaret”, one of Jones’ earliest attempts at audio/visual script writing, by recalling his initial motivation and enthusiasm for finding innovative ways to express scholarship and how his thinking about the use of tools from the arts in social science has evolved since those early days. These personal experiences are then offered up as advice in a summation for both social scientists and arts practitioners who may be interested in this new paradigm of Performative Social Science through a discussion about collaboration and pathways to impact.

Popularizing Research offers academics, professional researchers, and students a new methodological book/website hybrid by way of a broad survey of ways to popularize research. As an edited interdisciplinary book accompanied by a website featuring samples of popularized research, it will have the potential of not only telling its readers about new genres, new media, new strategies, and new imperatives for popularizing research, but most importantly it will also be useful in showing how these new processes work in the end, what they sound like, and what they look like.

For more information and to view the video representing Jones’ contribution to the book, see his page on the book’s website under ‘Film’.

Praxis Unico Impact Awards 2012

The Impact Awards, organised by PraxisUnico, recognise and celebrate the success of collaborative working and the process of transferring knowledge and expertise beyond higher education, charities and public sector research establishments for the wider benefit of society and the economy.

2012 Award Categories
Business Impact – Achieved
This award recognises projects that have made an outstanding business impact through successful knowledge transfer, where the impact can be quantified and measured.
Business Impact – Aspiring
This award recognises projects that promise to make an outstanding business impact through successful knowledge transfer, but where the impact may be currently latent or unquantifiable.
Collaborative Impact
This award recognises collaborative projects that leverage the intellectual assets of the research base. Types of projects might include research collaborations or consultancy with business or the public sector and/or knowledge transfer projects involving more than one higher education or research institute.
KT Achiever of the Year
This award recognises an individual, who has not more than five years’ experience in a technology/knowledge transfer role.

Deadline – 30 March 2012

For further information visit the Impact Awards website.

If you’re interested in submitting to the Awards, let me know and we will support you with your application.

ESF social inequalities conference grants up for grabs

The European Science Foundation invites applications for grants to attend the ESF-ZIF-Bielefeld University research conference on tracing social inequalities in environmentally induced migration.
The conference, to be held from 9 to 13 December 2012 in Bielefeld, Germany, will concentrate on the social inequalities between world regions, countries, geographical regions, organisations, groups and categories of people involved in environmental- and climate-induced migration. Grants are available to cover the conference fee or assist with travel costs for students and early stage researchers. View the full details for this call on the ESF website and the deadline is July 1st.

BU is world number one for fish biology research

Research emerging from the Centre for Conservation Ecology and Environmental Sciences at Bournemouth University (BU) is rated the best in the world for the study of fish biology.

Head of the Centre, ProfessorRudy Gozlan, said: “Fish are carried by a vascular network of rivers and are the blood of millions of people that rely on healthy inland fisheries for food, business and sport fishing. We are delighted that our research contributes to that knowledge and comes in support of human communities all around the world.”

The statistic is from the bibliographic database ‘Scopus’, which calculates institutional strengths, based on article clusters. 

Institutions are ranked according to three measures:

  • Publication leadership, calculated through the proportion of articles from BU in the fish biology cluster
  • Reference leadership, calculated through the proportion of citations in the fish biology cluster that cite BU articles
  • State-of-the-art leadership, outlining how recent BU’s fish biology references are.

The accolade comes as BU researchers enter discussions with the Environment Agency regarding the testing of wild fish populations for the deadly parasite Sphaerothecum destruens.

More commonly known as the Rosette Agent, the parasite killed 90% of UK salmon in lab tests and has been blamed for the rapid demise of Leucaspius delineatus, or the sunbleak species, in parts of Europe.

Professor Gozlan said: “Since the first discovery of the Rosette Agent in wild populations five years ago we have carried out a set of tests and all species were highly susceptible to infection. We have carried out further tests in semi-natural conditions and found the same results. We looked at one wild fish population and found the disease present. In California our colleagues did the same in a population of returning salmon and found the parasite in around 40% of the fish. The Environment Agency will not determine the impact of the Rosette Agent unless they start specific health checks.”

More information on the Centre for Conservation Ecology and Environmental Sciences can be found on the centre’s webpages.

Congratulations to BU’s newly appointed AHRC reviewers!

Congratulations to Neal White and Dr Bronwen Thomas in the Media School who have both been appointed as reviewers to the AHRC. This is fantastic news!

Their membership of the AHRC peer review college will run from April 2012 until December 2015.

College members are invited to submit peer reviews which are used by moderating panels as the basis to make decisions on whether applications are of a fundable standard. Assessments are made using a pre-defined grading scale. Typically three reviews are required for each funding proposal.

Dr Richard Berger is already a member of the AHRC peer review college – you can read his previous blog post on the life of a reviewer here – http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2011/11/23/life-as-an-ahrc-panel-reviewer/

This is great news for Neal and Bronwen, and also for the Media School and the University. Congratulations!

Good luck & Congratulations!

Awarded & submitted bids

Congratulations to Richard Berger and the CEMP team (MS) for securing a number of CPD contracts with various individuals / organisations, Keith Brown (HSC) for securing four contracts with county councils, Clive Andrewes (HSC) for winning two contracts with Dorset Healthcare University NHS Foundation Trust, Peter Thomas (HSC) for winning funds from the NIHR for the PREVIEW project (in collaboration with Keele), John Tarrant (HSC) for organising an event on patient care in anaesthesia, Carol Bond and Louise Worswick (HSC) for securing funding from Dorset PCT, and to Jo Tyler (MS) for winning a contract with Best Rate Deals Ltd.

Congratulations are also due to Steve Calver and the MRG team in ST for securing a number of contracts, Charlie Wilkinson (BS) for securing a significant number of CPD contracts with Guernsey Training Agency, Bronwen Russell and the Bournemouth Archaeology team (ApSci) for a contract with Swanage Town Council to undertake some 3D scanning, Mark Dover (ApSci) for a couple of contracts with Dataloft, Mark Maltby (ApSci) for winning a couple of small contracts with English Heritage. David Osselton (ApSci) for securing a consultancy contract with the Home Office, Dave Parham (ApSci) for securing funds from English Heritage to continue the SWASH project, Roger Herbert (ApSci) for organising the Marine Taxonomy and Habitat Survey in May 2012, Jian Jun Zhang (MS) for organising the Computer Graphics International conference in June 2012, and to Liam Toms (MS) for a contract with KidZone Direct.

Good luck to Anthea Innes (HSC) for submitting a large bid to the EC FP7 Health programme in collaboration with 2 UK institutions and 5 institutions in the EU, Alessandro Inversinii (ST) for a bid to the EC, Kip Jones (HSC) for a bid to the AHRC to continue impact work from the Rufus Stone film, Zulfiqar Khan and Mark Hadfield (DEC) for submitting a bid to Interreg on the Green Energy Channel Cluster, Tania Humphries-Smith (DEC) and David Kilburn (ST) who both submitted bids to the HEA’s Teaching Development Grant scheme, Fabian Homberg, David Secchi, Dinusha Mendis and Martin Kretschmer (BS) for a collaborative bid to the Intellectual Property Office, Howard Davis and Melanie Klinkner (BS) for a bid to the Nuffield Foundation, Keith Brown (HSC) for a bid to the States of Jersey Community and Social Services, Adam Blake (ST) for a bid to Matrix Evidence Ltd, David Kilburn (ST) for a bid to Philips Lighting Ltd, Ann Hemingway (HSC) for a couple of bids to NHS Bournemouth and Poole, Clive Andrewes (HCS) for a number of bids for PDU accreditations and re-accreditations, Daniel Franklin (ApSci) for a bid to Marine Management Organisation, Bronwen Russell and the Bournemouth Arch team for a bid to the British Museum, and to Jacqui Hewitt-Taylor, Carol Bond and Melanie Ledwith (HSC) for a bid to the Sir Halley Stewart Trust.

Good luck to the academics in the School of Tourism who have submitted a collaborative bid to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Adam Blake, John Fletcher, Alan Fyall, Stephen Page, John Brackstone, Neelu Seetaram, Phil Alford, Steve Richards, Steve Calver).

BU submitted a number of applications to the HEA’s Doctoral Programme – good luck to Adele Ladkin and Lorraine Brown (ST), Mike Molesworth (MS), Richard Berger (MS), David John (DEC), and Jenny Moon (MS). Good luck to you all!

Matthew

Thinking of applying for Eco-Innovation in FP7? Then you must attend this!

Registration has opened for the European Info Day for the 2012 Eco-Innovation call, which will take place in Brussels on Tuesday 8 May 2012. The event will also be webstreamed, and a series of national Info Days on the call will be advertised soon on the Eco-Innovation website.The 2012 call is expected to open in May 2012 and close in September 2012

The European Info Day is aimed at people interested in submitting an Eco-Innovation proposal and who would like to know more about the application procedure. A large number of participants are expected to attend the event, including from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), SME associations, larger companies, European and national trade associations, chambers of commerce and the EU institutions.

The Info Day features presentations on the call and the opportunity to arrange one-to-one discussions with staff of the Executive Agency for Competitiveness and Innovation (EACI, which runs the Eco-Innovation initiative) and is a key opportunity to network and meet potential partners.

Part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (CIP), the Eco-Innovation initiative is designed for organisations which have developed an environmental product, service, management practice or process which has a proven track record, yet is not fully marketed due to residual risks.

‘World Leading Academic to attend Media School Symposium’

Research themes

Professor Robert Picard, of Harvard and Oxford universities has confirmed his attendance at the forthcoming symposium on New Economic Models in the Digital Economy.
The event is being hosted by the Advances in Media Management (AiMM) research group and Dr John Oliver and Dr Sukhpreet Singh say that they are delighted to have Professor Picard, the world’s foremost authority on media economics, in attendance. The event will involve a brainstorming session with academics from Brunel and Westminster universities aswell as senior executives from Virgin Media, The Telegraph, the CC Group and the British Film Institute.

The aim of the symposium is to develop collaborative project ideas to submit to the EPSRC’s forthcoming call on New Economic Models.

 

International partnering event for research and innovation in health and agrofood

An international partnering event for research projects in the FP7 Health and Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, and Biotechnologies (FAFB, also known as Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy or KBBE) themes will take place in Basel, Switzerland, on 26 and 27 June 2012. The partnering event offers an opportunity for UK researchers to meet potential European partners in order to set up projects and build consortia for the final FP7 Health and KBBE calls (which are expected to be published in around mid-July 2012).

Participants can register on the event website and submit a profile describing an offer or request, then all the participants’ profiles will be assessed and published on the site. The online catalogue can then be consulted and meetings booked with other participants. Prior to the event, each participant will receive an individual meeting schedule.

The programme includes company visits, a networking dinner plenary session on research and innovation issues in the life sciences, parallel pitch presentation of companies in health and agro-food and pre-arranged partnering meetings. The event is organised by the Euresearch organisation in Switzerland, along with the Fit for Health and BIO-Net networks and the Enterprise Europe Network.

Got Latin American contacts? Then this funding could be for you!

ENLACE Call Funds Networking and Proposal Writing Activities between EU and Latin American Researchers:The third Call for proposals under the ENLACE (Enhancing Scientific Co-operation between the European Union and Central America) travel grant scheme is now open. The Call will close on 10 May 2012. The aim of ENLACE is to promote exchange between Central American and European researchers as well as to encourage contacts between research institutions for joint participation in FP7.  An ENLACE grant enables a group of European and Latin American researchers to organise networking activities or joint proposal writing, which includes proposal preparation for the upcoming FP7 calls. The scheme allows researchers to stay in Central America or the EU for up to 30 days in order to prepare a project proposal together. In addition to networking and proposal writing activities, the grantees are expected to visit, during their stay, additional research institutions of their thematic interest (but within one of the thematic FP7 areas).

BU submits an EOI to the AHRC’s Block Grant Partnership call!

Awarded & submitted bids

The AHRC called for expressions of interest in the Block Grant Partnership (BGP) awards for PhD studentships. Because I had managed to get one studentship in the previous phase 1 of the BGP I was encouraged to have a go. The level of scheming and alliance building for these very large pots of money was something to behold! Universities had to decide which of two awards to express an interest in, route A or route B, and the Centre for Broadcasting History opted for Route B, which meant finding some consortium partners. Because of limits imposed on who can bid for what there followed some impressive deal making in which universities, including Bournemouth, positioned themselves to get in the right team. I won’t reveal who our consortium partners are but all I can say is that I won’t miss the rushed mobile phone conversations in Pizza Express and on trains or the conversations including ‘what do you mean you haven’t got a Pro VC for research?’ All was well in the end and I like to think we put in a serious and well constructed EOI for the not unimpressive sum of £3 million.

LIFE+ Call for Proposals 2012

The European Commission has launched calls for proposals for the LIFE+ call for proposals 2012. The following themes are covered by this announcement:

  • LIFE+ Nature and Biodiversity
  • LIFE+ Environment Policy and Governance
  • LIFE+ Information and Communication

Why not have a look at the LIFE+ webpages and see if you can fit into one of these?

Strategies for use of news websites in journalism education

Fusion

Funding Source: Association for Journalism Education
Chief Investigators: Dr Einar Thorsen and Sue Wallace, The Media School, Bournemouth University
Research Assistant: Dr Caitlin Patrick, The Media School, Bournemouth University

 

Project brief

Journalism is among the most rapidly changing industries, affected by both technological advances and shifting consumer habits. This makes it paramount for journalism education to keep pace with trends such as changing journalism practices and the migration of audiences to online journalism. One possible outcome of this imperative is for online news or magazine websites to be developed to a) showcase student reporting, b) serve as an educational tool in professional journalism practices, and c) facilitate research into news and journalism innovation. Journalism courses are increasingly making use of their own websites in one or more of these ways, but development, as in the news industry itself, has tended to be haphazard and quite often on a trial and error basis.

This project seeks to address this problematic by conducting a survey of news and magazine websites used in journalism courses, their history, evolution and integration into education practice. The aim is not to produce a standard model to be applied in every case. Rather, the intention is to collect and share experiences to inform education and curriculum development. The sharing of best practice can also help to maintain high standards in journalism education.

 

International survey

Phase One of the project launched in March 2012 and involves an international survey into the use of news and magazine websites in journalism education.

We would be most grateful if anyone involved in journalism education could assist by completing our survey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/websites-in-journalism-education

We are interested in the views of both staff and students, so please circulate as widely as possible.

The survey is completed anonymously. For staff it takes no more than 10-15 minutes to complete, with the student section possible to complete in 5 minutes. All staff and students on undergraduate and postgraduate journalism courses are encouraged to partake and we welcome your participation.

 

Case studies

Phase Two of the project will take place in the second half of 2012 and involve up to five site visits to observe how websites are used in live news days simulating real-life news operations. During these visits we propose to conduct follow-up interviews in conjunction with examination of websites, to scrutinise in finer detail the patterns of application and usage.

 

Project outcomes

This project will investigate both technological and editorial issues associated with use of websites in journalism education.

Findings from this research project will be made available online and as contributions to relevant scholarly journals, including the AJE journal Journalism Education, outlining experiences, advice, and different models of application. The findings may also be of use to accreditation bodies and industry panels.

If you would like further information on the project, you can view the original project brief.

21 Issues for the 21st century- UNEP asserts that Skills and Education are Critical

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) recently completed their Foresight Process,

led by 22 distinguished members of the scientific community and involving more than

400 leading scientists and experts from around the world with the aim of  identifying and ranking the most pressing emerging environmental issues

for the 21st Century. The highest ranking priority was to overhaul global environmental governance to meet 21st Century challenges.

The Second was:

Transforming Human Capabilities for the 21 Century – upskilling the global workforce for a Green Economy.

Good news for those working in the area of SD and Green Economy .

Number 4  ‘social tipping points’  poses the question that for me is fundamental – how do we catalyse human behaviour change?

 

the report is available at

http://www.unep.org/publications/ebooks/foresightreport/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

st

 

 

 

 

 

Century: Meeting Global Environmental Challenges and

 

Moving Towards a Green Economy

 

re-tooling

the global work force for a Green Economy

 

 

 

– and this from a list of over 90 issues.

As Bill Scott said in his blog

 

 

1

:

 

 

“…good news for social scientists everywhere that governance, human

 

capability, the green economy, etc, feature so prominently.”

 

Find the Foresight Report at:

 

 

http://www.unep.org/publications/ebooks/foresightreport

 

 

You reap what you sow? The importance of seed-corn funding

Guidance

Obtaining ‘seed-corn’ funding to get a new research idea off the ground can be crucial in developing your work, especially for early-career researchers. Whilst the initial ‘seed’ may be a relatively small amount of money, if spent wisely then watch it grow! This is particularly relevant at the moment due to the internal funding opportunities currently open for BU academics.

To show how seed-corn money could work for you, here’s an example of where it helped me. Back in 2009, the then School ofConservation Sciences (CS) ran an internal research funding scheme where the maximum amount awarded per project was £3000 and priority was given to applications with match funding. So I firstly had to formulate my research question and obtain some match-funding. After much reading and thinking I finally settled on my question (in a relatively new area for me but related to my other research) and successfully approached the Environment Agency for a modest amount of match-funding. The subsequent application to the CS scheme was successful.

Given the limited amount of money available, it had to be spent very carefully. A part-time researcher was used to complete the data collection and as the work progressed, further seed-corn funds were secured from external sources. These enabled us to expand the work and resulted in the subsequent publication of several journal articles. These were important in underpinning further funding applications as we could now show the work was relevant and we were competent in doing it! Inevitably, a number of these funding applications failed but through perseverance and refining the ideas (reading, discussions with colleagues etc), we have recently been awarded two separate PhD studentships by external funders. This includes a NERC CASE studentship, where the industrial partner is the same Environment Agency collaborator I first approached in 2009. Looking ahead, as these PhDs deliver their research then this should enable the development of more ambitious projects ideas that enable larger grant applications to be submitted.

So – hopefully- this example of showing how seed-corn funds can quite literally grow has motivated you to take advantage of those open internal funding schemes. Remember, the process of then turning seed-corn funds into something more substantial and long-term may not be easy: I have not mentioned the long hours spent putting together the funding applications that were turned down. But as a collaborator put it when I recently asked him how he managed to increase his NERC standard grant application success rate from 0 to 40 %:

‘…….the more I practised, the luckier I got’.