European Union

The European Council on 14 December 2017 adopted conclusions on: security and defence, social dimension, education and culture, climate change, Jerusalem.

President Donald Tusk made some remarks during the press event celebrating the launch of the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO)

The European Council on 14 December 2017 adopted conclusions on: security and defence, social dimension, education and culture, and climate change.

On 14 December, the Estonian presidency and the European Parliament reached an informal agreement on the land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) regulation. This will help reduce overall EU greenhouse gas emissions over the 2021-2030 period.

President Donald Tusk highlighted the main expectations from the European Council meetings on 14 and 15 December 2017

The EU aims to bring down cross-border parcel delivery prices through increased transparency.

Twenty-five EU countries legally formalised their commitment to European defence integration on 11 December. Please find below a link to the press release.
Further information
Press release
Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Hello Theresa May, I’m an avid follower of your Facebook page. On Friday you posted, “We will deliver on the will of the British people..” That’s great news.

Just last year you advised the British people to vote for Remain, which you said would be in the best interests of the country. Couldn’t agree more.

Unfortunately, by a slim whisker, ‘the people’ rejected your sage advice and voted instead for Leave.
Being pragmatic, you decided to change your advice and follow ‘the will of the people’.

If the people want Brexit, you said, that’s what you’d deliver.

I say, well done!

It’s clear that when you first became our new Prime Minister, you weren’t quite sure what Brexit meant (same as the rest of us, Theresa!)

So, you came out with all sorts of impressive phrases such as, ‘Brexit means Brexit!’ And ‘We’re going to make a success of it!’ and ‘Brexit is red, white and blue!’

I understand. It got you by during a difficult time.

It’s not easy to follow ‘the will of the people’ when nobody really knew what that might be (obviously, you didn’t.)

After all, ‘the people’ only had a choice of providing one-word in answer to that difficult question of whether Britain should stay in the EU.

Many weren’t sure which word to choose, ‘Remain’ or ‘Leave’.

Many didn’t vote for either word because they were so unsure.

Others would like to have voted for one word or the other but were denied the chance.

You voted for ‘Remain’. A sensible choice I think. But slightly more people voted for ‘Leave’.

So, Leave won.

But there was no manifesto for Leave.

Nothing in your Tory manifesto – only that your party wanted the UK to stay in the EU and to expand the Single Market.

There was no clear explanation during the referendum as to what the word ‘Leave’ meant.

Boris went on a bus to tell the country that Leave meant the NHS getting an extra £350 million a week.

‘The people’ loved that!

Recently the Vote Leave campaign director said that promise alone clinched the win for them.

Frankly, I’m not surprised. Who wouldn’t want an extra £350 million a week for our cash-starved NHS?

But now we know that promise can’t be delivered.

Leaving the EU is going to cost us an enormous fortune. It’s likely the NHS will get less money.

Many of those voting for that word Leave said it was because we have too many EU migrants here, taking our jobs, making our country poorer, and causing too much pressure on hospitals and schools.

But last week you wrote an open letter to all those EU migrants – over 3 million of them – saying the country would be poorer without them, and you wanted them to stay.

All of them!

During the referendum, prominent Brexiters said we could leave the EU and stay in the Single Market.

Just like Norway, which isn’t an EU member, but enjoys the benefits of EU membership by being in the Single Market.

You now say that can’t happen. Leave means Leave.

But Theresa, we really didn’t know that before. The word Leave was never properly defined or agreed.

We were only given the opportunity to choose Leave or Remain.

We’ve never been given an opportunity to choose what Leave would mean.

But now we do have a much clearer idea about the Brexit you’re going to deliver to the country.

It seems very hard, Theresa.

You’re deciding for us what Brexit means, and it doesn’t look as attractive as the one we were told about last year.

We now know that after Brexit, trade with our most important customers and suppliers on the mainland of our continent will be costlier and more complicated.

Our cost of living will go up.

Many companies are planning to move to another EU country and jobs here will be lost.

Many EU migrants have left already, and many have decided not to come.

Around 10,000 key EU staff working in our NHS have gone, and it won’t be easy to replace them.

Unpicked food is rotting on our fields because farmers can’t attract EU labour here any more.

And Brexit hasn’t even happened yet.

We don’t even know if you’ll get any deal with the EU that’s worth having.

But we do know for sure now that the deal you’ll get can’t be anywhere near as good as the one we we’ve got, as an EU member.

So, here’s the thing Theresa.

The country is changing its mind.

You said, ‘Brexit means Brexit’.

But now we know what Brexit means, we don’t want it.

The latest opinion polls are increasingly showing that Brexit is no longer ‘the will of the people’.

According to a new opinion poll by BMG published today, most Britons now back Remain over Leave by ten points.

It’s the biggest lead for Remain since the referendum.

And according to other recent polls, almost twice as many think we’ll be worse off after Brexit than better off.

Similarly, nearly twice as many think Brexit will be bad for jobs as those who think it’ll be good for jobs.

In fact, more and more of us think that the UK’s standard of living is going to drop because of Brexit.

Polling by YouGov since June’s General Election shows that the majority in Britain now thinks the Brexit vote was wrong.

You must be delighted, Theresa. The country has come around to your original advice.

Brexit is not the right decision for Britain. You said so last year, and now the country agrees with you at last.

So, Mrs May, will you now follow and deliver on the new ‘will of the people’?

I know you will. After all, you’ve always promised to follow the ‘will of the people’.

It might be best to put it to a vote, just to make it official.

But you and I already know what the result will be, don’t we?

The country doesn’t want Brexit, just as you said we shouldn’t.

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Grischa Fraumann

At any rate, altmetrics, or alternative metrics, are gaining momentum in higher education (Holmberg, 2016). This post is based on my master’s thesis (Fraumann, 2017) that explores the usage of altmetrics with a focus on research funding. Altmetrics track down and count the mentions of scholarly outputs in social media, news sites, policy papers, and social bookmarking sites. Then altmetrics data providers aggregate the number of mentions. This allows an observation of how many times research has been viewed, discussed, followed, shared, and downloaded.

By following this line of thought, one might relate these mentions to impact or attention in the wider public or the society outside of the scientific community. As such, everyone with an internet connection would be able to engage with scholarly outputs online, even if only a fraction of the overall number of users do so. Nevertheless, it is important to note these mentions do not correlate with the quality of a scholarly output, they mostly visualise a community of attention, that is internet users that engage in some or way or the other with a scholarly output, such as a journal article. Altmetrics is an innovation with potential for further development (Bornmann, 2014; CWTS, 2017; Holmberg, 2016; Liu & Adie, 2013; Piwowar, 2013; Priem, Taraborelli, Groth, & Neylon, 2010; Robinson-García, Torres-Salinas, Zahedi, & Costas, 2014; Thelwall, Haustein, Larivière, Sugimoto, & Bornmann, 2013).

Following this development, altmetrics have reached the highest levels in European policy debates, and have been discussed, for instance, during the Open Science Mutual Learning Exercise (MLE) by the Horizon 2020 Policy Support Facility. MLEs are carried out under the Joint Research Centre Research and Innovation Observatory (RIO), and are aimed at providing the best practice examples from European Union (EU) Member States, and Associated Countries (European Commission, 2017b). Further evidence can be found in EU high-level expert groups that advise the European Commission, among others, on science, research, and innovation. From 2016 until 2017, altmetrics have been discussed in several reports of these high-level advisory bodies (European Commission, 2017a).

 

Key Findings

For this study, representatives of a research funding organisation, and policymakers were first interviewed. Second, reviewers of a research funding organisation and researchers registered with an institutional altmetrics system were invited to take an online survey. Overall, the survey respondents and interviewees were unaware of the usage of altmetrics. The data also suggests a few of respondents are well-aware of the debates on altmetrics. If one closely follows the international debates on the usage of altmetrics, it might come as a surprise that the concept is so widely unused in this sample. It was expected that more respondents would be aware on the usage of altmetrics. In particular, if altmetrics are discussed in high-level policy debates in EU research policy, researchers need to be made aware of it, because this might also affect their academic career to some extent.

 

Recommendations

As discussed before, altmetrics seems to be on the rise in policy papers and further international initiatives, such as at the level of EU policy. In turn, the findings that could be drawn from this sample of stakeholders suggest that altmetrics are not yet widely spread. In fact, they were unknown to the vast majority of the study participants. Furthermore, findings from the interviews also showed that different organisational types, academic disciplines, and further categories have to be treated differently. As proven in several technical studies, altmetrics are not yet ready for routine use in research evaluations, and several challenges need to be addressed (Erdt, Nagarajan, Sin, & Theng, 2016). Nevertheless, through altmetrics, it is possible to make a certain impact on the society visible or to visualise attention. How this impact is interpreted and set into context is essential.

Additionally, it was suggested by some interviewees that altmetrics might play a larger role in reporting on funded research rather than demonstrating impact in research funding applications. Criticisms were put forward by some respondents on altmetrics. Further, altmetrics should only be seen as a complementary measurement compared to citation counts and, especially, peer review. For instance, the impact of sharing a research data set can be made visible in a timely manner compared to citation counts of a journal article. The context of altmetrics data and aggregated scores needs to be analysed, as suggested by several scholars. As previously mentioned, the study findings for this sample of stakeholders in research funding indicate that altmetrics are mostly unknown. This needs to be considered if and when the usage of altmetrics is proposed by policymakers.  

 

Grischa Fraumann is a recent graduate of the Master in Research and Innovation in Higher Education (MARIHE) at University of Tampere (Finland) and Danube University Krems (Austria). This blog post is based on his master’s thesis: ‘Valuation of altmetrics in research funding’.

 

References

Bornmann, L. (2014). Do altmetrics point to the broader impact of research? An overview of benefits and disadvantages of altmetrics. Journal of Informetrics, 8(4), 895–903. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2014.09.005

CWTS. (2017). CWTS Research Line in Altmetrics. Retrieved June 5, 2017, from https://www.cwts.nl/research/working-groups/societal-impact-of-research/altmetrics

Erdt, M., Nagarajan, A., Sin, S. J., & Theng, Y. (2016). Altmetrics: an analysis of the state-of-the-art in measuring research impact on social media. Scientometrics, 109(2), 1117–1166. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2077-0

European Commission. (2017a). Europe’s future – open innovation, open science, open to the world: reflections of the Research, Innovation and Science Policy Experts (RISE) High Level Group. Brussels.

European Commission. (2017b). Mutual Learning Exercise on Open Science: Altmetrics and Rewards under the Horizon 2020 Policy Support Facility (PSF). Second Workshop on “How to use Altmetrics in a context of Open Science.” Retrieved from https://rio.jrc.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/Agenda MLE Open Science_Meeting 31 May 2017_Helsinki.pdf

Fraumann, G. (2017). Valuation of altmetrics in research funding. Master’s Thesis. University of Tampere.

Holmberg, K. (2016). Altmetrics for information professionals: Past, present and future. Waltham, MA: Chandos Publishing.

Liu, J., & Adie, E. (2013). New perspectives on article-level metrics: Developing ways to assess research uptake and impact online. Insights: The UKSG Journal, 26(2), 153–158. http://doi.org/10.1629/2048-7754.79

Piwowar, H. (2013). Altmetrics: Value all research products. Nature, 493(7431), 159. http://doi.org/10.1038/493159a

Priem, J., Taraborelli, D., Groth, P., & Neylon, C. (2010). altmetrics: a manifesto. Retrieved from http://www.altmetrics.org/manifesto

Robinson-García, N., Torres-Salinas, D., Zahedi, Z., & Costas, R. (2014). New data, new possibilities: exploring the insides of Altmetric.com. El Profesional de La Informacion, 23(4), 359–366. http://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2014.jul.03

Thelwall, M., Haustein, S., Larivière, V., Sugimoto, C. R., & Bornmann, L. (2013). Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services. PLoS ONE, 8(5), e64841. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064841

The post Discussing indicators in research funding: What role do altmetrics play? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

AMENDMENTS 2 - 65 - Draft opinion Further macro-financial assistance to Georgia
Committee on Foreign Affairs

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

Delegations

Source : © European Union, 2017 - EP

In his annual press conference Russian President Vladimir Putin again spent several hours answering journalists' questions. Over 1,600 media representatives jostled to get their questions in. A major media event in Russia, the conference is also closely followed by the rest of the world. Europe's journalists ask what the president's answers mean for future Russian policies.

The row over a fair distribution of refugees has reignited at the EU summit in Brussels. EU Council President Donald Tusk wants to scrap the refugee quotas system, which he recently described as "divisive" and "ineffective". However, states like Germany, Austria and the Netherlands made a push for solidarity at the summit. The deeply entrenched front lines are also reflected in Europe's commentaries.