Printer friendly version

Please register to view contact details

Preliminary Program for CASRAI Occupy Impact Conference

10 October 2012 — 12 October 2012 CASRAI

Location: Montreal, Canada

We have a preliminary program ready. The following sessions and speakers are confirmed but we are still working out the scheduling of these sessions across the conference days. Additional sessions and speakers (including workshops) are still in development. We will post updates to the program here. In addiiton to plenary sessions we think we will divide the program into two tracks. Although there are focus overlaps these tracks are primarily either focused on policy or implementation.

Please take advantage of early registration savings and book now: http://reconnect.casrai.org/

Here is a current list of sessions:

PLENARY KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Rémi Quirion, OC, PhD, FRSC, CQ Chief Scientist of Québec, Fonds de recherche du Québec - CANADA
Claire Donovan, Reader, Health Economics Research Group, Brunel University - UK
Cameron Neylon, Advocacy Director, Public Library of Science - US

LIGHTNING TALKS:

Lightning sessions are still under development and will be posted soon.

CONFIRMED BREAK-OUT SESSIONS:

Linking Academic Research with Impact: An Ethnographic Study of Research Use in a Public Health Unit

ABSTRACT: This ethnographic study sought to understand the use of academic research from the perspective of the “user” in contexts of policy and practice. In particular, it sought to gain a better understanding of the relevance and application of academic research. The overarching question guiding the study is: how does academic research interact with programmatic decisions within a public health unit (PHU)? The study offers a unique view of research use: the ‘users’ view in a policy and practice setting. The PHU uses the term ‘research’ interchangeably with ‘evidence’, thereby rendering academic research as a form of evidence, along with in-house generated data/knowledge; program evaluations; experiential knowledge, best practices, cultural
and political evidence, and expert input. The results of the study indicate a more complex relationship of research use that goes beyond the current conceptualization of the interactive relationship between researcher and ‘user’. The results suggest the public health unit, is not only a discerning user of research, but also an intermediary knowledge broker sharing evidence with colleagues and community stakeholders. It begins to suggest that researchers may have a less central role in influencing how their research is accessed, used and applied than currently understood and the potential value of knowledge brokers and intermediaries in research use and impact. The different ways in which the public health unit engaged with academic research will
be described in this presentation.

SPEAKER(S):

Amy Lemay, PhD Student, University of Toronto - CANADA

Evaluation is hard. Your numbers should be hard. But your stories should be soft

ABSTRACT: What counts as metrics for evaluating the impact of research? How do you mix quantitative and qualitative metrics? Do you use proxy measures and hope that no one asks you to explain how they map onto benefits to Canada or do you create a portfolio of stories of impact and worry that your VP wants you to quanitfy a return on investment? How do you compare impact when context is so variable? This panel session will feature local practitioners of quantitiative and qualitative methods of articulating the impacts of research on society and a systems level evaluation expert who will make the case that both are important if only we could figure out how to marry the two.

SPEAKER(S):

David Phipps, Director, Research Services & Knowledge Exchange, York
University - CANADA
Martin Kirk, Director, Research Services Office, University of British
Columbia - CANADA
Dr. Claire Donovan – Reader in Assessing Research Impact at the Health
Economics Research Group, Brunel University - UK

Achievement Reporting: Capturing Outcomes of the Social Sciences & Humanities

ABSTRACT: SSHRC's Achievement Reporting initiative will introduce innovative new reporting tools to simplify information gathering and facilitate the sharing of results and impacts in real time -- during and beyond the period of funding. This project aims to reduce the response
burden by maximizing the re-use of data already collected, AND to facilitate research, research administration and knowledge mobilization.

SPEAKER(S):

Juliana Bravo, Senior Evaluation and Performance Officer, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council - Canada
additional SSHRC rep to be confirmed

Approaches to the Economic Impacts of Research

ABSTRACT: This session will discuss evolving data, tools, and methods for assessing the economic impacts of science and research at multiple points in the chain linking inputs to impact, particularly the approach of STAR METRICS. This model is tied to individual researchers rather
than the direct output of those individuals and consists of two phases: the first tracks direct workforce outcomes from science; the second is a platform to measure secondary and tertiary efforts of science. Inputs, such as grant funding, provide the necessary resources to researchers,
who then produce outputs such as patents. By creating data linkages to items such as patents, data can be filtered to reveal possible qualitative approaches to assessing the outputs. Science works in steps, and so having data to understand each step can be important to achieving
particular goals.

SPEAKER(S):

Bruce Weinberg, Professor, Ohio State University, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) – US
Julia Lane, Senior Managing Economist, American Institutes for Research - US
Ron Lai, Fellow at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University - US

Beyond Input and Output 'We Are Like a Dog Tied to the Accountability Cart'

ABSTRACT: The Stoic Cleanthes once likened the human condition to a dog tied to a cart, forced to follow where it leads. But such a situation still conditions a choice: one can either resist the motion of the cart until exhaustion demands submission, or one can accept the cart’s momentum and make it one’s own. This session attempts to do the latter, to stretch the bounds of disciplinary research evaluation; to imagine alternative ways of valuing academic work, and to help academics embrace and take ownership of impact. The session will feature four speakers
with experience in impact assessment, research evaluation, philosophy of science policy, and the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity. This panel touches on a number of identified conference themes, most notably on the implications of what we measure for how impact is identified and rewarded, as well as the relative roles of quantitative and qualitative indicators in developing balanced impact portfolios. It is a particular attitude about impact assessment that the panel wishes to discuss, and the outcomes of this discussion are aimed at providing fruitful grounds for developing a more proactive attitude among researchers toward the identification and measurement of research impacts.

SPEAKER(S):

Kelli Barr – Graduate Research Assistant at the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity, University of North Texas - US
Dr. J. Britt Holbrook – Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity, University of North Texas - US
Dr. Claire Donovan – Reader in Assessing Research Impact at the Health Economics Research Group, Brunel University - UK
Dr. Robert Frodeman – Director of the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity, University of North Texas - US

Assessing faculty productivity and institutional research performance using publication, citation key performance indicators and funding acknowledgements

ABSTRACT: Accurately tracking the grant applications submitted by leading research universities each year is both time sensitive and time consuming. The pressure to provide instantaneous analysis for major competitions is enormous. With thousands of applications every year this is no small feat.
An institution must demonstrate return on investment in all areas, including sponsored research. This presentation will cover various bibliometric indicators used to measure research performance, including article output, citation count, h-index, citation impact, etc. looking in particular at grant funding and tracking the impact of awarded research in the literature. Assessment at the institutional, as well as researcher level will also be discussed.

SPEAKER(S):

Ann Kushmerick, Manager, Research Evaluation and Bibliometric Data,
Thomson Reuters - US

Building and Leveraging an Integrated Semantic Research Information Infrastructure

ABSTRACT: The VIVO project and adopting institutions have over the past few years transformed a single-university research information system into a dynamic open-source community attracting attention internationally as well as in the U.S. This talk introduces VIVO and its key semantic principles including the use of Linked Open Data and query endpoints, the VIVO ontology and its connections to other ontologies and terminology standards, and an overview of the range of institutions and projects working with semantic technologies, including
the CTSAconnect project combining researcher, research resource and clinical information. Much of the talk will focus on how to leverage the structure and relationships inherent in VIVO and other semantic tools to discover and mine connections, develop new ways to provide scholarly attribution and identify expertise, and support search and direct data interoperability across multiple institutions. We will explore the potential impact of the emergence of a growing body of semantic data about research have for individual institutions, for virtual organizations targeting a shared research domain, and for international efforts to promote closer integration of research information systems. In closing, we will describe VIVO and CTSAconnect's efforts to work with the researcher identifier, ontology, scholarly attribution, and research data standards communities and review recent progress and remaining challenges.

SPEAKER(S):

Jon Corson-Rikert, Cornell University - US
Brian J. Lowe, Cornell University - US

Performance Measurement - A Project Management Approach

ABSTRACT: "What cannot be measured cannot be planned”. This holds true in all circumstances, however, it is mandatory and inevitable for the outcome measurement. The presentation offers a project management approach to what it took at OICR to improve the performance measurement system, overcome the challenges and identify areas for further improvement. Outcome measurement requires concerted effort and a well-defined program that needs longer term commitment/resources within any organization starting with the logical planning models. In the short-term most organizations roll out collection of data on pre-identified key performance indicators and/or outcome indicators that result in measurement of quantitative and qualitative outputs. In the OICR project the team was reflecting on how far down the chain of impact we should attempt to measure. This question was particularly relevant in the context of leveraged funding and reporting on initiatives whose funding have ended but got their start from OICR. To what extent can we attribute their success to OICR?

SPEAKER(S):

Renu Minhas, Director, Grants & Awards, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research - CANADA

Research Information Use Cases from the VIVO Experience
Contributors: Stella Mitchell, Cornell University; Paul Albert, Weill Cornell Medical College

ABSTRACT: VIVO is an open source semantic web application for integrating and sharing information about researchers and their activities and outputs at a single institution while supporting discovery of related work and expertise across a distributed network. Originally developed and implemented at Cornell, VIVO is now in use a many universities worldwide and has also been adopted by government agencies, international organizations, and professional associations. VIVO is designed to complement existing institutional systems of record by providing a normalized layer of publicly visible information organized for discovery and viewing via multiple points of entry and output facets and views. This talk will review several use cases from the contributors' own experiences as well as demonstrate examples of VIVO implementations and data being applied in conjunction with academic portfolio management, research activity overviews, research data registries, digital libraries, and research output discovery.

SPEAKER(S):

Jon Corson-Rikert, Cornell University - US
Brian J. Lowe, Cornell University - US
Kristi Holmes, Washington University in St. Louis - US

Data Flows: Putting Standards-based Processes into Place at Funders and Institutions

ABSTRACT: The research community can applaud itself on the success made with CASRAI in bringing together the key players and advancing a common platform for the reuse, sharing and comparing of information. But what now? Funding agencies have started to implement the standards in their systems, vendors are also implementing the standards in their commercially available off-the-shelf products. This is a good thing. But with systems that can 'speak CASRAI' coming online we as a community have new questions to ask. Where do these standards fit into the full lifecycle of our daily work? What concrete steps can we take (within the funding agency and within a college or university) to reap the rewards (time and cost) and increase our capacity to advance this new approach? In this session I will walk through the key stages in the research administration lifecycle and speak to how each can and should be affected by the presence of information standards and compliant software for information management and exchange.

SPEAKER(S):

Adil Hamdouna, Executive Director, eVision Inc. - CANADA

Federation and the Necessity of Standards: A Case Study

ABSTRACT: Federated scenarios, in which different research information systems are interacting with each other in a loosely coupled manner are increasing in number nowadays (especially as a result of efforts by CASRAI). Motivated to accomplish an added value by collaborating with each other, for instance, through the exchange of research information,
such as meta data about publications or projects, systems within a federation keep their autonomy, while enabling inter-organizational business processes. In this presentation we will give concrete examples of federated scenarios, both to demonstrate the manifestations of a federation and to emphasize the need and scope of standards in federated systems.

SPEAKER(S):