Research
Projects within the Advancing Research Quality and Value objective
The Berlin University Alliance pursues and supports projects and activities that further develop existing scientific expertise on relevant aspects of scientific performance, research quality and their assessment. The funded projects conduct research on the topics of research quality and open science, design good practice models – taking into account disciplinary differences – and implement experimentally relevant procedures and processes in the facilities of the BUA partner institutions.
Fellowship-Programm
As part of the Advancing Research Quality and Value priority area, BUA awards incoming and outgoing fellowships. The aim of the program is to support measures and projects on research quality and open science as well as to facilitate research collaborations and knowledge exchange.
New BUA projects strengthen quality and transparency in research
The Objective 3 - Advancing Research Quality and Value of the Berlin University Alliance is funding three new projects as part of its "Implementation Projects" call. The projects will start their work by January 2024 at the latest.
What are the hallmarks of high-quality research? How can Open Science practices be consistently integrated into everyday research? Which mechanisms can be identified at BUA to improve the transparency and quality of research through concrete measures?
In the call "Implementation Projects" of the Berlin University Alliance's Objective 3 - Advancing Research Quality and Value, previously funded projects of the Objective 3 were invited to (further) develop research results from their predecessor projects into explicit measures for implementation that contribute sustainably to quality assurance and quality improvement.
The focus was especially on the character of transferability of the developed measures: Can the results be transferred from one discipline to other disciplines? Do the measures contribute to the (further) development of structures and processes? Can guidelines and good practice examples be derived from the proposed measures? These and other questions were considered in the evaluation of the submitted project proposals.
The two-stage selection process was accompanied by external reviewers who prepared their reports in an open peer review process. The names of the reviewers and the reviews themselves were disclosed to the applicants when the selection was announced. Overall, the international experts attested the high quality of the projects submitted in the call. Professor Manfred Hauswirth, member of Steering Committee 3 and the selection committee, emphasizes that the decision was not easy for the committee: "We received a number of highly relevant project applications with promising approaches. Even if we will not be able to fund all projects, we would like to thank all our colleagues for their excellent work. Last but not least, we would like to thank the members of the selection committee and the reviewers for their extraordinary commitment. A special congratulations goes to our selected projects. We look forward to further cooperation!”
The projects will start work by January 2024 at the latest and will run until October 2026 at the latest. More detailed information on the projects will be available shortly on the project list of current research projects of the Objective 3.
The funded projects are:- Closing the Gap in Non-Latin-Script Data
Project lead: Prof. Dr. Beatrice Gründler (Freie Universität Berlin), Jonas Müller-Laackman (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky).
The project pursues three overarching goals, which include community building and the development and dissemination of best practices for the digital humanities. To this end, exemplary workflows for Open Science practices in Digital Humanities projects are being developed. Last but not least, the project seeks to contribute to the development of suitable infrastructures and research data management for Non-Latin Script sources and to develop approaches to overcoming existing technical and project-organizational obstacles. It thus makes a significant contribution to the promotion of digital humanities and the so-called "small subjects" at the BUA and beyond.
- Open.Make II
Project lead: Prof. Tim Landgraf (Freie Universität Berlin), Prof. Matthew Larkum (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Prof. Roland Jochem (Technische Universität Berlin), Prof. Petra Ritter (Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin).
The project aims to build a community of (open) research hardware developers within the BUA, embedded in the international open hardware landscape. This community aims to develop new standards and tools for the documentation, evaluation and publication of open hardware and to provide a system for publishing hardware. The overriding goal of the project is the establishment of a competence center for open hardware at BUA, which will build up long-term expertise in the field of open hardware and make BUA an internationally visible partner in the field of open science and open hardware.
- BUA Open Science Magnifiers
Project lead: Dr. Evgeny Bobrov (Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin), Dr. Maxi Kindling (Freie Universität Berlin)
The project collects key figures and individual positive examples of Open Science practices from various research areas of the BUA institutions. Building on experiences from the previous project "BUA Open Science Dashboards", the implementation project aims to develop monitoring and indicators for different communities and to visualize them in dashboards. In addition, positive examples should be visualized and disseminated, e.g. in the form of a network graph of citizen science projects. The specific knowledge about the various research communities is generated from the cooperation with the Berlin Science Survey, the results of which are also presented interactively in the form of a dashboard. The project should enable discipline-sensitive monitoring in the BUA area and develop into an internationally visible example of the implementation and usefulness of open science monitoring.