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Jo Johnson thinks that the market in Higher Education is unfair. There are currently stringent procedures in place for any institution that wants to award degrees and call itself a University. One facet of this is the requirement that any new provider must initially have its degrees validated by an established University; The University of Suffolk , which gained University title this month, provides an example of how this can work, but many of those seeking to enter the market are unhappy with current arrangements.  Roxanne Stockwell, Principal of Pearson College , complained : “ Until an institution has its own degree-awarding powers, it cannot offer degrees without being validated by an existing university. Under the current system, a new partner has to find a willing validating partner, and it is locked out if it cannot .” Jo Johnson, in his role as Minister for Universities and Science last year, criticised this arrangement . He memorably said: “I know some validation relation...

©CartoonStock.com The government’s new Higher Education and Research Bill gets its second reading this week. One complaint is that it has been rushed in without adequate scrutiny of some key components. I was interested, therefore, to discover, that a Detailed Impact Assessment was published in June, specifically to look at the costs and benefits of the various components of the Bill. What I found was quite shocking: we were being told that the financial benefits of the new Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) vastly outweighed its costs – yet look in detail and this is all smoke and mirrors. In particular, the report shows that while the costs of TEF to the higher education sector (confusingly described as ‘business’) are estimated at £20 million, the direct benefits will come to £1,146 million, giving a net benefit of £1,126 million (Table 1). How could the introduction of a new bureaucratic evaluation exercise be so remarkably beneficial? I read on with bated breath. Well, sad to ...

Thanks to some live tweeting by Anna Sharman (@sharmanedit), I've become aware that the 13th Conference of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) is taking place in Strasbourg this weekend. The topic is "Scientific integrity: editors on the front line", and the programme acknowledges Elsevier, who presumably have contributed funding for the conference. It therefore seems timely to give a brief update of developments following three blogposts I wrote during February-March 2015, documenting some peculiar editorial behaviour at four journals: Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders (RASD: Elsevier), Research in Developmental Disabilities (RIDD: Elsevier), Developmental Neurorehabilitation (DN: Informa Healthcare) and Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities (JDPD: Springer). To do the story full justice, you need to read these blogposts, but in brief, blogpost 1 described how Johnny Matson, the then editor of both RASD and RIDD had published numerous art...

The Thatcher Illusion (see below) I'm a great fan of pre-registration of studies. It is, to my mind, the most effective safeguard against p-hacking and publication bias , the twin scourges that have led to the literature being awash with false positive findings. When combined with a more formal process, as in Registered Reports , it also allows researchers to benefit from reviewer expertise before they do the study, and to take control of the publication timeline . But one salient objection to pre-registration comes up time and time again: if we pre-register our studies it will destroy the creative side of doing science , and turn it instead into a dull, robotic, cheerless process. We will have to anticipate what we might find, and close our eyes to what the data tell us. Now this is both silly and untrue. For a start, there's nobody stopping anyone from doing fairly unstructured exploration, which may be the only sensible approach when entering a completely new area. The m...

I'll say this for the White Paper on Higher Education " Success as a Knowledge Economy ": it's not as bad as the Green Paper that preceded it. The Green Paper had me abandoning my Christmas shopping for furious tirades against the errors and illogicality that were scattered among the exhausted clichés and management speak (see here , here , here , here and here ). So appalled was I at the shoddy standards evident in the Green Paper that I actually went through all the sources quoted in the first section of the White Paper to contact the authors to ask if they were happy with how their work had been reported. I'm pleased to say that out of 12 responses I got, ten were entirely satisfied, and one had just a minor quibble. But what about the twelfth, you ask. What indeed? When justifying the need for a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) last November, Jo Johnson used some extremely dodgy statistical analysis of the National Student Survey to support his case that t...