Metascience Alliance - Initial Concept and Request for Feedback

The Metascience Alliance is launching at Metascience2025! This new cross-sector network is building collaboration to better understand & improve the research system.

Read the concept: Metascience Alliance - Initial Concept and Request for Feedback - Google Docs

Share feedback: Metascience Alliance - Initial Concept Feedback

Join the mailing list: https://mailchi.mp/c1fc9c67fa5f/metascience-alliance

What do you think about this initiative? (if you reply here, don’t forget to send feedback at the link above)

My main point of feedback is that the purpose of ‘maximizing impact’ is ambiguous. What is impact - citations, policy influence, commercialization outcomes, social media reach, etc? Without qualification, impact can also be negative, in which case it should probably be minimized. So I think that this would be better re-phrased as something like ‘maximizing positive impact’, or even better ‘maximizing societal benefits’.

At Unjournal.org, when we prioritize “what research should we commission evaluate” as well as “what should evaluators consider” the focus is indeed (mainly) on maximizing the social benefits of the research, of the evaluation process, and of the research environment this will engender. Although not everyone on our team has the same perspective, and we allow diversity, one of the major approaches is “value of information”.

E.g., for one of our recent initiatives, “Pivotal Questions”, we ask organizations

Which open questions most affect your policies and funding recommendations?

For which questions would research yield the highest ‘value of information’?

See some elaboration of this at the link.

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