Peer review for the evaluation of the academic research: the Italian experience

Peer review, that is the evaluation process based on judgments formulated by independent experts, is generally used for different goals: the allocation of research funding, the review of the research results submitted for publication in scientific journals, and the assessment of the quality of research conducted by Universities and university-related Institutes. The paper deals with the latter type of peer review. The aim is to understand how the characteristics of the Italian experience provide useful lessons for improving peer review effectiveness for evaluating the academic research. More specifically, the paper investigates the peer review process developed within the Three-Year Research Assessment Exercise (VTR) in Italy. Our analysis covers four disciplinary sectors: chemistry, biology, humanities and economics. Thus, the choice includes two “hard science” sectors, which have similar type of research output submitted for the three-year evaluation process, and two sectors with different types of output. The results provide evidences, which highlight the important role played by peer review for judging the quality of the academic research in different fields of science, and for comparing different institutions’ performance. Moreover, some basic features of the evaluation process are discussed, in order to understand their usefulness for reinforcing the effectiveness of the peers’ final outcome.Scientific research, Evaluation, Peer review, University, Academic institutions

Training Program at Medical School of Chieti, Italy

We describe the changes in medical training program offered at the G. D’Annunzio University Medical School in Chieti-Pescara, Italy, which took place over the last decade. The new curriculum differs from the previous one in several important aspects, including limited number of students admitted to school depending on the estimated needs for physicians, obligatory class attendance, student attendance in preclinical laboratories, formative credits as a measure of student activity, and elective subjects. Furthermore, all medical graduates are allowed to take the State exam to obtain the license to practice, which was not the case previously. As a result of these major changes, a higher number of students graduates in due time. The changes made in the medical education curriculum in Italy have enabled Italian medical graduates to work in European Community Hospitals, because their medical degree is recognized in other EU countries. The main motif that drives the Medical School in Chieti-Pescara is the achievement of high quality in medical education and biomedical research by creating as strong a relationship between education and research as possible

Training Program at Medical School of Chieti, Italy

We describe the changes in medical training program offered at the G. D’Annunzio University Medical School in Chieti-Pescara, Italy, which took place over the last decade. The new curriculum differs from the previous one in several important aspects, including limited number of students admitted to school depending on the estimated needs for physicians, obligatory class attendance, student attendance in preclinical laboratories, formative credits as a measure of student activity, and elective subjects. Furthermore, all medical graduates are allowed to take the State exam to obtain the license to practice, which was not the case previously. As a result of these major changes, a higher number of students graduates in due time. The changes made in the medical education curriculum in Italy have enabled Italian medical graduates to work in European Community Hospitals, because their medical degree is recognized in other EU countries. The main motif that drives the Medical School in Chieti-Pescara is the achievement of high quality in medical education and biomedical research by creating as strong a relationship between education and research as possible

Peer review for the evaluation of the academic research. The Italian experience (Paper presented at the Platform FTEval International Conference, New Frontiers in Evaluation, Vienna, April 24-25 2006)

WP 15/2006; Peer review, that is the evaluation process based on judgments formulated by independent experts, is generally used for different goals: the allocation of research funding, the review of the research results submitted for publication in scientific journals, and the assessment of the quality of research conducted by Universities and university-related Institutes. The paper deals with the latter type of peer review. The aim is to understand how the characteristics of the Italian experience provide useful lessons for improving peer review effectiveness for evaluating the academic research. More specifically, the paper investigates the peer review process developed within the Three-Year Research Assessment Exercise (VTR) in Italy. Our analysis covers four disciplinary sectors: chemistry, biology, humanities and economics. Thus, the choice includes two 'hard science' sectors, which have similar type of research output submitted for the three-year evaluation process, and two sectors with different types of output. The results provide evidences, which highlight the important role played by peer review for judging the quality of the academic research in different fields of science, and for comparing different institutions’ performance. Moreover, some basic features of the evaluation process are discussed, in order to understand their usefulness for reinforcing the effectiveness of the peers’ final outcome

Integrative taxonomy approach to detect spatial and temporal variability of the Mediterranean benthic communities through artificial substrate units (ASUs)

Monitoring spatial and temporal changes of marine benthic communities using standardized procedures is essential to take necessary steps towards conservation of marine ecosystems. In this study we combined Artificial Substrate Units (ASUs) for sampling of benthic communities, with integrative taxonomy approach that incorporated morphological identification of organisms and COI DNA metabarcoding, to characterize the diversity of communities at three locations across the Central Mediterranean Sea (Livorno and Palinuro, Italy; Rovinj, Croatia) in 2019 and 2020. Significant differences in the communities’ structure were observed both at large spatial scale between sampled locations, and at small spatial scale (less than ten kilometers) between sites. Moreover, significant temporal variability in species richness and structure of benthic assemblages was detected, with higher richness in 2020. Revealed variability can probably be attributed to the peculiar geomorphological, oceanographical, and ecological features of locations, but also to the influence of interplaying local chemical and physical factors and biological processes such as species settlement, competition, and migration that can act at small spatial and temporal scales. The similarity in the species composition and community structure accessed by morphological and metabarcoding approaches was low,with only 16% of the species (out of 133 species identified overall) commonly detected by both approaches. This is mostly both due to a lack of data on COI sequences of numerous benthic invertebrates in the public barcoding databases on the one hand, and difficulties in detecting small and cryptic taxa through morphological analyses on the other. This suggests that combining of two approaches is required to fully describe the biodiversity of benthic assemblages. Finally, comparison of the spatial variability of the benthic communities’ structure with two approaches at different taxonomic levels, indicated that genus and family levels give results that are consistent to those obtained by the species level. This suggests that family level might be satisfactory in monitoring the spatial-temporal variability of Mediterranean hard bottom benthic communities

Upfront HIPEC and bevacizumab-containing adjuvant chemotherapy in advanced epithelial ovarian cancer

Introduction: In advanced epithelial ovarian cancer patients, the standard of care is primary debulking surgery, followed by first-line chemotherapy often with bevacizumab addiction. In this context, some experiences have shown that a comprehensive treatment approach to surgery combined with hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) could improve the prognosis. Objective: This is a study aimed to explore the feasibility of primary debulking surgery and HIPEC upfront followed by first-line therapy with bevacizumab. Study Design: Phase II monocentric, open label, non-randomised and single-arm study. Forty patients affected by advanced ovarian cancer submitted to primary debulking surgery with HIPEC were enrolled in the study. After surgery, all patients underwent systemic chemotherapy with bevacizumab addiction. Results: Complete cytoreduction (RT = 0) was achieved in all cases. Treatment-related early complications were observed in 23 patients and in 15 cases were G1–G2. Major complications were reported in 8 patients. No postoperative death was recorded. Subsequent chemotherapy was administered in all cases. Median time between surgery and first cycle of chemotherapy was 42 days (range 30–76). Concomitant bevacizumab was administered in 34 patients (85%). Maintenance with bevacizumab was feasible in 33 patients (82.5%) and its withdrawal was necessary for 1 patient (2.5%) due to G3 hypertension. Conclusion: Our data suggest that HIPEC can be safely introduced in the upfront therapy of advanced ovarian cancer

Integrative taxonomy approach to detect spatial and temporal variability of the Mediterranean benthic communities through artificial substrate units (ASUs)

Monitoring spatial and temporal changes of marine benthic communities using standardized procedures is essential to take necessary steps towards conservation of marine ecosystems. In this study we combined Artificial Substrate Units (ASUs) for sampling of benthic communities, with integrative taxonomy approach that incorporated morphological identification of organisms and COI DNA metabarcoding, to characterize the diversity of communities at three locations across the Central Mediterranean Sea (Livorno and Palinuro, Italy; Rovinj, Croatia) in 2019 and 2020. Significant differences in the communities’ structure were observed both at large spatial scale between sampled locations, and at small spatial scale (less than ten kilometers) between sites. Moreover, significant temporal variability in species richness and structure of benthic assemblages was detected, with higher richness in 2020. Revealed variability can probably be attributed to the peculiar geomorphological, oceanographical, and ecological features of locations, but also to the influence of interplaying local chemical and physical factors and biological processes such as species settlement, competition, and migration that can act at small spatial and temporal scales. The similarity in the species composition and community structure accessed by morphological and metabarcoding approaches was low, with only 16% of the species (out of 133 species identified overall) commonly detected by both approaches. This is mostly both due to a lack of data on COI sequences of numerous benthic invertebrates in the public barcoding databases on the one hand, and difficulties in detecting small and cryptic taxa through morphological analyses on the other. This suggests that combining of two approaches is required to fully describe the biodiversity of benthic assemblages. Finally, comparison of the spatial variability of the benthic communities’ structure with two approaches at different taxonomic levels, indicated that genus and family levels give results that are consistent to those obtained by the species level. This suggests that family level might be satisfactory in monitoring the spatial-temporal variability of Mediterranean hard bottom benthic communities

A Cloud-Edge Orchestration Platform for the Innovative Industrial Scenarios of the IoTwins Project

The concept of digital twins has growing more and more interest not only in the academic field but also among industrial environments thanks to the fact that the Internet of Things has enabled its cost-effective implementation. Digital twins (or digital models) refer to a virtual representation of a physical product or process that integrate data from various sources such as data APIs, historical data, embedded sensors and open data, giving to the manufacturers an unprecedented view into how their products are performing. The EU-funded IoTwins project plans to build testbeds for digital twins in order to run real-time computation as close to the data origin as possible (e.g., IoT Gateway or Edge nodes), and whilst batch-wise tasks such as Big Data analytics and Machine Learning model training are advised to run on the Cloud, where computing resources are abundant. In this paper, the basic concepts of the IoTwins project, its reference architecture, functionalities and components have been presented and discussed

NAMBER: A biotic index for assessing the ecological quality of mesophotic biogenic reefs in the northern Adriatic Sea

1. The aim of the present study was to propose a biotic index (North Adriatic Mesophotic BiogEnic Reefs, NAMBER) suitable for assessing the ecological quality of the mesophotic biogenic reefs of the northern Adriatic continental shelf based on photographic sampling. 2. At each of the 20 study sites, the degree of bioconstruction (expressed as percentage cover of crustose coralline algae), the α-diversity (expressed as the mean number of taxa), and the degree of sensitivity to human disturbance and climate change (based on literature data and expert judgement) of the benthic assemblages were selected as descriptors and combined in the NAMBER index, using the best values that the three metrics can currently achieve in the studied region as a reference. 3. The study highlighted that there was large spatial heterogeneity among reefs and high variability in the ecological quality values obtained by NAMBER, ranging from bad to high. The index indicates that reefs lying furthest from the coast, under substantially lower anthropogenic pressure, have a generally higher status of environmental quality. However, a clear geographical pattern did not emerge, as reefs close together often had different ecological qualities. 4. The NAMBER index, which combines three ecological descriptors, in accordance with the requirements of the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive, represents a specific adaptation to the northern Adriatic Sea of a multimetric index previously developed for the north-western Mediterranean Sea, capitalizing on previous knowledge and research efforts. 5. This multimetric biotic index provides an effective standardized tool for monitoring programmes and environmental impact assessments in the northern Adriatic mesophotic biogenic reefs and lays the foundation for ecosystem-based management and conservation in this basin