Pluralisation of research power is diversifying science

After the internet emerged in 1990, universities and scientific institutes across the world became joined in a single collaborative research network for the first time in history, and in the manner of networks, global science began to expand continually with exceptional speed.

World research is shaped by five simultaneous trends that feed into each other and are transforming the processes whereby human societies create and share knowledge.

First, rapid growth in investment in research and in science paper output. Second, expansion in the number of research-active countries with their own science systems. Third, growth in the proportion of papers co-authored from more than one country. Fourth, the increasing weight of the networked global science system compared to national systems. Fifth, the distribution of leading research power among more countries.

OECD data shows that, between 1995 and 2018, almost every country expanded its spending on research. This more than doubled in the United States in real terms, almost doubled in Germany and the United Kingdom and multiplied by 5.6 times in South Korea and by an incredible 16.5 times in China.

You can read the full blog post at University World News.

Professor Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, founding Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education, and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education, and higher education and social inequality. Simon led CGHE’s project 8 which investigated the public good role of higher education in ten countries. The project found that while a broad notion of public good has been largely emptied out of policy in the English-speaking countries, where economic definitions of individualised pecuniary value are dominant, recognition of the broader individual and collective outcomes of higher education continues in different ways in other jurisdictions including France, Finland, South Korea and China. The study in England discovered however that despite the narrow economic framing used by Westminster policy makers, both higher education practitioners and policy professionals believe that higher education makes a large and multiple contribution to both national and global public goods.