Digital Science

New REF Readiness post: Strategy, People & Research Environment (SPRE) "is where institutions have to show that their environment is genuinely enabling their research"—Ann Campbell, Digital Science.

See what that evidence base really requires, in our analysis of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029.

🔗 https://ow.ly/JUTq50Ze879

AI is enabling small research teams to do what once took decades and thousands of people. But there's another dimension to this story - and it involves Open Research.

In his latest blog post, Mark Hahnel (VP of Open Research, Digital Science) traces the pattern across recent breakthroughs involving small research teams and AI - AlphaFold, GNoME, the first new antibiotic class in 60 years, and more.

He makes the case that what's changing isn't just what small teams can achieve, it's that AI has effectively split research into two tiers:

1. the large, slow collaborative work of building open data infrastructure
2. the small, fast teams who can leverage the open foundation with the power of AI - and go further than anyone thought possible.

The question now: as that foundation grows, what else becomes possible?

🔗 Read Mark's post, "The new era of going 'Fast and Far' in research": https://ow.ly/FGOO50Z7xUZ

📣 We're excited to share that Digital Science is partnering with Wikipedia on a new course, "Wikipedia for Researchers: Building reliable knowledge through citations" – now open for enrollment on WikiLearn!

Free, self-paced, and open to all.

As AI systems increasingly draw on to answer questions, the quality of its citations has never mattered more. Wikipedia for Researchers teaches academics how to contribute to one of the most critical knowledge infrastructures of our time.

Developed with leading experts in academic publishing and open knowledge – including our own Carlos Areia, PhD (Senior Data Scientist, Digital Science) – this online course equips researchers to contribute peer-reviewed citations to Wikipedia responsibly and critically.

🔗 Enroll today: https://ow.ly/EQn950Z6xiK

Wikimedia Foundation

📢 Great news for universities and academics: Digital Science has launched AI-Assisted Profile Curation in Symplectic Elements - helping to keep faculty profiles accurate, complete, and up to date in a fraction of the time.

🔗 See our announcement: https://ow.ly/GwSQ50Z62eg

Researcher onboarding shouldn't be a manual data entry exercise. But for most institutions, that's exactly what it is. Some universities have reported spending an average of 20 hours establishing a complete profile for a single new faculty member.

AI-Assisted Profile Curation enables researchers and administrators to upload a CV or document, have AI extract and map the metadata to their institution's existing schema, then review and confirm before anything is saved - a human-in-the-loop workflow that puts control firmly with the institution.

The solution covers the full range of academic outputs - including publications, grants, teaching, and professional contributions - making it particularly valuable for Arts, Humanities, and other disciplines.

🔗 Learn more about AI-Assisted Profile Curation for Symplectic Elements: https://ow.ly/gXKq50Z62ef

News, the web... systems we built to establish authority & trust are breaking down. What if research is next?

This guest blog post by Emily Alagha (VP of Government & Nonprofits, Digital Science) suggests that research authority runs on the same architecture as Google's: credibility flows through signals other people generate about you. Citations, impact factors, journal prestige - structurally identical to PageRank, and decades older.

How authority is built, gamed, and erodes are all explored - but what are the lessons learned, and is there a solution?

🔗 Read now: https://ow.ly/TTjC50Z4NfU

AI agents can hallucinate & behave unpredictably - but Gartner research has identified an antidote: a context layer.

Our new blog post explains why your agents are only as good as the knowledge behind them, and what you can do to strengthen context.

🔗 Read now: https://ow.ly/v5TI50Z45Vf

📣 Mapping Manipulation of Research. Because you cannot fix what you cannot see.

In her latest blog post, our VP of Research Integrity & Security, Dr Leslie McIntosh, discusses the launch of the very first Forensic Scientometrics Report - and what it means for all stakeholders across the research ecosystem.

"If we continue to evaluate scientific trust based only on what is visible at the surface, we will miss the structures that shape and support it," she writes.

"...this raises uncomfortable but necessary questions."

🔗 Read her post on the FoSci Substack: https://ow.ly/I2Nm50YZwjr

🌟 NEW blog post: Most UK universities aren't short of high-quality research. The challenge for is presenting it as a coherent, representative & defensible account of contribution.

That's harder than it sounds.

See what it really takes in our latest Readiness post:

🔗 https://ow.ly/KWqQ50YZqJI