Congress UPV Proceedings of the 21ST International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators

This is the book of proceedings of the 21st Science and Technology Indicators Conference that took place in València (Spain) from 14th to 16th of September 2016. The conference theme for this year, ‘Peripheries, frontiers and beyond’ aimed to study the development and use of Science, Technology and Innovation indicators in spaces that have not been the focus of current indicator development, for example, in the Global South, or the Social Sciences and Humanities. The exploration to the margins and beyond proposed by the theme has brought to the STI Conference an interesting array of new contributors from a variety of fields and geographies. This year’s conference had a record 382 registered participants from 40 different countries, including 23 European, 9 American, 4 Asia-Pacific, 4 Africa and Near East. About 26% of participants came from outside of Europe. There were also many participants (17%) from organisations outside academia including governments (8%), businesses (5%), foundations (2%) and international organisations (2%). This is particularly important in a field that is practice-oriented. The chapters of the proceedings attest to the breadth of issues discussed. Infrastructure, benchmarking and use of innovation indicators, societal impact and mission oriented-research, mobility and careers, social sciences and the humanities, participation and culture, gender, and altmetrics, among others. We hope that the diversity of this Conference has fostered productive dialogues and synergistic ideas and made a contribution, small as it may be, to the development and use of indicators that, being more inclusive, will foster a more inclusive and fair world

Study on open science: The general state of the play in Open Science principles and practices at European life sciences institutes

Nowadays, open science is a hot topic on all levels and also is one of the priorities of the European Research Area. Components that are commonly associated with open science are open access, open data, open methodology, open source, open peer review, open science policies and citizen science. Open science may a great potential to connect and influence the practices of researchers, funding institutions and the public. In this paper, we evaluate the level of openness based on public surveys at four European life sciences institute

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 1: Change, Voices, Open

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 1 includes papers from Change, Voices and Open tracks of the conference

Multivariate scaling methods and the reconstruction of social spaces: Papers in honor of Jörg Blasius

This edited volume assembles contributions of leading scholars in the fields of statistical methods and applications in the social sciences. Multivariate scaling methods for categorical data, in particular correspondence analysis, are used to extract the most important dimensions from complex data tables and to visualize relationships in the data. The volume treats recent statistical developments, methodological considerations, and empirical applications. A special emphasis is placed on multiple aspects of space and their sociological significance: the reconstruction of "social spaces" with statistical methods, illustrations of spatial relations involving proximity, distance and inequality, and concrete interactions in urban neighbourhoods

North-South Knowledge Networks

Since the 1990s, internationalisation has become key for institutions wishing to secure funding for higher education and research. For the academic community, this strategic shift has had many consequences. Priorities have changed and been influenced by new ways of thinking about universities, and of measuring their impact in relation to each other and to their social goals. Debates are ongoing and hotly contested. In this collection, a mix of renowned academics and newer voices reflect on some of the realities of international research partnerships. They both question and highlight the agency of academics, donors and research institutions in the geopolitics of knowledge and power. The contributors offer fresh insights on institutional transformation, the setting of research agendas, and access to research funding, while highlighting the dilemmas researchers face when their institutions are vulnerable to state and donor influence. Offering a range of perspectives on why academics should collaborate and what for, this book will be useful to anyone interested in how scholars are adapting to the realities of international networking and how research institutions are finding innovative ways to make North–South partnerships and collaborations increasingly fair, sustainable and mutually beneficial

External collaborations in multinational pharmaceutical companies

Traditionally, the internal research and development (R&D) departments of multinational companies (MNCs) have served as a main driver of MNCs innovative capacity. Today’s high pace of change and competitive landscape have forced MNCs however to look beyond their organizational boundaries and to involve external organizations in their R&D for technological advancement and innovation. In particular, MNCs are using R&D collaborations as a means to create and access new knowledge. Collaborations are particularly relevant in science-based sectors such as the pharmaceutical industry where R&D mainly relies on complex and basic scientific knowledge. In this sector, the sources of expertise are widely dispersed and drug discovery and development requires coordination between different actors. The globalization trend has facilitated collaborations across long distances and companies have adopted a combination of long and short distance collaborations in their innovation process. The role of geographic proximity in collaboration continues to puzzle researchers. In fact, it may be more complex than previously addressed in the literature, most of which has considered external collaborations in a MNC as a homogenous entity in terms of knowledge. A MNC consists of different R&D units that specialize in different research areas and are active at different stages of the innovation process. Furthermore, a MNC collaborates with a large variety of external organizations and individuals. Thus, R&D collaborations in a MNC can be considered heterogeneous in terms of the knowledge and actors involved. The various types of knowledge and actors well differ in how important the role of geographic proximity is for successful collaborations. This thesis studies the role of geographic proximity in the R&D collaborations of MNCs when creating, accessing and embedding different types of knowledge. In particular, I examine these aspects by differentiating between (1) the nature of knowledge (basic science vs clinical science, core vs explorative knowledge), and (2) the actors involved on the organization level (university, hospital, research institute and company) as well as on the individual level (star scientists). The different levels of analysis describe different aspects of the R&D collaboration and how these affect the internal knowledge of MNCs. I used co-publications and patents as a proxy for R&D collaborations and analysed the role of geographic proximity using descriptive, social network and econometric analysis. The results show an increasing openness of pharmaceutical MNCs to collaborate over the past 20 years in terms of the organizations and countries involved in drug discovery and development. While the main patents behind innovative drugs are still mainly owned by companies themselves, external organizations increasingly contribute indirectly to knowledge creation, as visible from an increasing proportion of cited patents and publications from external organizations. This substitutes for biotech and pharmaceutical companies decreasing investments in R&D. Furthermore, considering the nature of knowledge, the results show that collaborations in basic science and core knowledge areas are more positively affected by geographic proximity than collaborations within clinical science and knowledge exploration of the MNCs. I also find that different types of actors embed different natures of knowledge. The knowledge accessed by MNCs from universities is more positively affected by geographic proximity during the collaborative process, compared to hospitals or companies. However, highly skilled individual scientists who work at MNCs (star scientists), can help to maintain local collaborations. Based on these findings I conclude that the role of geographic proximity in R&D collaborations of MNCs varies between the types of collaboration and must be more precisely assessed distinguishing between each R&D collaboration between a MNC and another organization or actor. This thesis underlines the crucial role of R&D collaborations for MNCs and emphasizes the importance of geography for the R&D management of MNCs to create and access knowledge effectively in collaborations. From a policy perspective, the importance of different knowledge types in R&D collaborations should be kept in mind when facilitating the development of R&D collaborations, particularly when local actors are trying to attract foreign MNCs