176 research outputs found
Measuring the Stakes: The Dutch Planning Bureaus
The planning bureaus are knowledge institutes that provide the Dutch gov-ernment with knowledge about the present and future state of the country and how it is affected by the governmentās policies. The name is somewhat mis-leading, as planning may invoke associations with the faltering centralisation policies of the darker days in really existing socialism. These institutes are not involved in planning the economy or the provision of services through state-controlled resource allocation, but in the provision of policy relevant know-ledge. For these reasons, they prefer to use terms like policy assessment insti-tutes in their English names, although their Dutch names are anchored in law and have become commonplace in Dutch political parlance ā and hence I pre-fer to use planning bureau in English too. Currently, there are four planning bureaus in the Netherlands: one provid-ing advice for economic policy, one providing advice for environmental and nature conservation policy, one for social policy, and one for urban and re-gional planning policy.1 They are government institutes with agency status
If agency is the answer, kindly repeat the question. Essay review of Harbers et al., Inside the Politics of Technology
Review of: Inside the Politics of Technology: Agency and Normativity in the Co-Production of Knowledge and Society / edited by Hans Barbers. - Amsterdam University Press, 2005. - ISBN 90-5356-756-
Regulatory Futures in Retrospect
In our 1998 volume āThe Politics of Chemical Risk: Scenarios for a regulatory Futureā we envisioned four ideal typical scenarios for the future of European chemicals policies. The scenarios focused on the nature of expertise (seen either as a universal or a localised phenomenon) and the organisation of the boundary between science and policy (as either diverging or converging). The four scenarios were titled International Experts, European Risk Consultation, European Coordination of Assessment, and Europe as a Translator. For all four scenarios, we hypothesized internal dynamics and articulated dilemmas related to the development of the sciences contributing to chemical assessment, the relation between the EU and member states and the role of the public. In this contribution, we look back on our four scenarios fifteen years later, to see which ones have materialized and to explore whether the dilemmas we saw have indeed surfaced. We conclude that the International Experts scenario by and large has materialized and explore some of the underlying tensions and dynamics in this development
The Chinese scientific publication system: Specific features, specific challenges
By introducing new policy initiatives, China is trying to change the evaluation of scientific research, shifting the focus from counting publication output to stressing high-quality research, with the objective of achieving excellent science. Against this background, the scientific publication system itself is important for safeguarding high-quality publications and high-quality journals. However, the Chinese scientific publication system has some specificities and unique features, which also create particular challenges. This article describes the scientific publication system in China. It covers the Chinese ex-ante journal licensing examination, the triple ownership management structure and provides an overview of the editorial process of Chinese scientific journals. It analyses how difficulties in the Chinese scientific publication system relate to concerns over research quality and integrity. We conclude with an agenda of the crucial issues facing the current Chinese attempts to pro
Scientific advice and public policy: expert advisersā and policymakersā discourses on boundary work
This article reports on considerable variety and diversity among discourses on their own jobs of boundary workers of several major Dutch institutes for science-based policy advice. Except for enlightenment, all types of boundary arrangements/work in the Wittrock-typology (Social knowledge and public policy: eight models of interaction. In: Wagner P (ed) Social sciences and modern states: national experiences and theoretical crossroads. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991) do occur. āDivergersā experience a gap between science and politics/policymaking; and it is their self-evident task to act as a bridge. They spread over four discourses: ārational facilitatorsā, āknowledge brokersā, āmegapolicy strategistsā, and āpolicy analystsā. Others aspire to āconvergenceā; they believe science and politics ought to be natural allies in preparing collective decisions. But āpolicy advisorsā excepted, āpostnormalistsā and ādeliberative proceduralistsā find this very hard to achieve
Sociological and Communication-Theoretical Perspectives on the Commercialization of the Sciences
Both self-organization and organization are important for the further
development of the sciences: the two dynamics condition and enable each other.
Commercial and public considerations can interact and "interpenetrate" in
historical organization; different codes of communication are then
"recombined." However, self-organization in the symbolically generalized codes
of communication can be expected to operate at the global level. The Triple
Helix model allows for both a neo-institutional appreciation in terms of
historical networks of university-industry-government relations and a
neo-evolutionary interpretation in terms of three functions: (i) novelty
production, (i) wealth generation, and (iii) political control. Using this
model, one can appreciate both subdynamics. The mutual information in three
dimensions enables us to measure the trade-off between organization and
self-organization as a possible synergy. The question of optimization between
commercial and public interests in the different sciences can thus be made
empirical.Comment: Science & Education (forthcoming
A comment to the paper by Waltman et al., Scientometrics, 87, 467ā481, 2011
In reaction to a previous critique (Opthof and Leydesdorff, J Informetr 4(3):423ā430, 2010), the Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) in Leiden proposed to change their old ācrownā indicator in citation analysis into a new one. Waltman (Scientometrics 87:467ā481, 2011a) argue that this change does not affect rankings at various aggregated levels. However, CWTS data is not publicly available for testing and criticism. Therefore, we comment by using previously published data of Van Raan (Scientometrics 67(3):491ā502, 2006) to address the pivotal issue of how the results of citation analysis correlate with the results of peer review. A quality parameter based on peer review was neither significantly correlated with the two parameters developed by the CWTS in the past citations per paper/mean journal citation score (CPP/JCSm) or CPP/FCSm (citations per paper/mean field citation score) nor with the more recently proposed h-index (Hirsch, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 102(46):16569ā16572, 2005). Given the high correlations between the old and new ācrownā indicators, one can expect that the lack of correlation with the peer-review based quality indicator applies equally to the newly developed ones
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