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I bibliotecari hanno solitamente a che fare con attività di valutazione che hanno come protagoniste le biblioteche. Cosa emerge se invece si analizzano le indagini finalizzate alla valutazione dell’università, nelle quali le biblioteche appaiono soltanto come comparse? Considerare queste attività valutative può farci capire molto a proposito dell’immaginario che è collegato alle biblioteche accademiche e dell’impatto che i valutatori e i decisori si aspettano che esse generino. Partendo da questo presupposto, l’articolo prende in considerazione le indagini volte alla valutazione delle università italiane nelle quali le biblioteche appaiono come comparse. Alcune indagini elaborate dall’Anvur saranno analizzate al fine di comprendere se e in che modo le biblioteche siano prese in esame per valutare la ricerca, la didattica e la didattica a distanza, le opinioni degli studenti e la terza missione delle università. Dalla presentazione dei risultati di questa analisi emerge la necessità di aggiornare l’immaginario associato alle biblioteche accademiche, ripensando le loro strategie di comunicazione ai decisori e la loro narrazione e auto-rappresentazione.

SCIRES-IT - SCIentific RESearch and Information Technology has been a Diamond Open Access Journal since its founding (2011). It does not require authors to pay any APCs (Article submission or Processing Charges) for submission or publication of articles. Since 2013 it has been included by ANVUR in the list of "Scientific" journals for the areas 08, 10, 11, 13 and 14, and in 2018 it was also ranked as a "Class A" journal in the area 08 - Architecture. SCIRES-IT has faced many operational challenges, relying mostly on volunteers, and playing a crucial role for scientific communities around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the criteria adopted from 2016 by the ANVUR – the Italian Agency for the evaluation of the Universities and of the scientific research – in order to classify the scientific journals in the SSH fields, in which bibliometric indicators are not used. In particular, the paper analyzes the decision to create a class of excellence for journals and to assess the quality of articles, and of journals, using the VQR scores. Besides, the paper addresses problems connected to the peer-review, the methodology proposed by ANVUR in SSH evaluation, and highlights the lack of international guidelines and ethical criteria in scientific research evaluation.

The paper reviews the Italian experience in the evaluation of research in the 2000–2020 period. The initial exercise (VTR 2000–2003) did not involve all researchers and had no impact on funding. After a long political and cultural debate there was a decision to create an independent Agency in charge of a periodic research assessment, involving all researchers, and having impact on performance-based funding. The legislation was approved in 2006 and the Agency was created in 2010–2011. In parallel, a major reform of academic promotion was approved in 2010. The Agency (ANVUR) launched three exercises, two of which have been completed and published ('Valutazione della Qualità della Ricerca', or Assessment of Research Quality, VQR 2004–2010 and VQR 2011–2014). It also developed a complete array of quantitative indicators to be used as a threshold for candidates to the academic promotion (Habilitation). The paper offers detailed evidence of the evaluative framework, the main methodological and practical problems and the changes and adaptations introduced over time. It concludes with several policy implications.

The paper reviews the Italian experience in the evaluation of research in the 2000-2020 period. The initial exercise (VTR 2000-2003) did not involve all researchers and had no impact on funding. After a long political and cultural debate there was a decision to create an independent Agency in charge of a periodic research assessment, involving all researchers, and having impact on performance-based funding. The legislation was approved in 2006 and the Agency was created in 2010-2011. In parallel, a major reform of academic promotion was approved in 2010. The Agency (ANVUR) launched three exercises, two of which have been completed and published (Valutazione della Qualità della Ricerca, or Assessment of Research Quality, VQR 2004-2010 and VQR 2011-2014). It also developed a complete array of quantitative indicators to be used as a threshold for candidates to the academic promotion (Habilitation). The paper offers detailed evidence of the evaluative framework, the main methodological and practical problems and the changes and adaptations introduced over time. It concludes with several policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Open Access and Research Evaluation, and the experience by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR). It is an updated version of the work presented at the Workshop "Open Science: new models of scientific communication and research evaluation", organized by Virginia Valzano at the University of Salento, on January 30, 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Italian research evaluation system is based on an administrative agency that is in control of all the facets of academic life, it would be easy to add an OS mandate to the researchers' duties. But, if we conceive OS as a philosophical ideal of human emancipation through the opening of scholarly conversation rather than a management model, we have to ask: why does open science, today, need to be mandated? But, above all, can it be mandated? A Kantian thought experiment will help us to show that: (1) OS needs to be mandated because, against the spirit of the modern science revolution, it is not open any longer; (2) the very submission of research to blueprints dictated by an administrative authority reduces it to a bureaucratic, commodified enterprise whose horizon is not the advancement of learning - or discoveries and revolutions yet to do - but the production of information and data whose goal is determined by economic and political powers rather than by the will to knowledge [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the recent issue of the national research evaluation program 2011-2014, the paper discusses results and rankings for the forest sector, both for research institutes and universities in Italy. Having a general look to the different research groups operating in the country, and referring to the institutional situation, rapidly evolving for forests, forestry and wood chains, the most important challenges and aims of the future research topics to be discussed and carried forward are presented.

L’articolo si concentra sull’uso di liste di riviste per la valutazione della ricerca nell’ambito delle Scienze umane e in particolare nel settore di Storia e filosofia della scienza. A un panorama delle principali problematiche inerenti l’uso delle liste di riviste con particolare attenzione alle iniziative di valutazione della ricerca in Italia segue uno studio che ha messo a confronto le liste di riviste ERIH, Norwegian list, CIRC e ANVUR. Nelle conclusioni vengono proposte considerazioni sull'uso delle liste di riviste per la valutazione della ricerca del settore considerato, anche in relazione al dibattito internazionale originato dal Manifesto di Leiden, e alcune riflessioni sui database internazionali e gli strumenti in uso nel sistema della valutazione scientifica in Italia.

A critical essay about a reform proposal of the Italian research assessment system shared by Giuseppe Valditara at the beginning of 2019.

Quella che segue è una lettera che ho inviato alla mailing list interna della Società Italiana di Filosofia Politica, in seno al dibattito per l’elezione del nuovo presidente. Il testo non tratta propriamente di persone, ma si interroga sulla funzione delle società scientifiche ai tempi della valutazione di stato.

The aim of the present study is to provide an overview of the research activity, in terms of productivity and impact, of the Italian public universities and their academic staff in the engineering sector (EngSec), that is about seven thousand researchers. Beyond the increased bibliometric performance of the considered research area in the last decade, attention will be focused on the possible feedback on publication habits induced by regulations which progressively introduced, in the research world, strong competitiveness elements, such as evaluation exercises, covering both the single researcher career and the funding system. The effects of this feedback are also explored from the point of view of the self-citation phenomenon, which is said to increasingly affect the research world at large. The EngSec is analyzed both as a whole and decomposed in cultural areas to give a more comprehensive view of this important cultural segment of the academia. In 10 years, the productivity of the sector in term of Scopus documents is roughly doubled, with a consistent shift from conference papers to journal articles. The impact also showed a similar trend with self-citations exposing an evident peak in the year 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Italian universities have so far experienced three assessment exercises (2001-3, 2004-10 and 2011-14). The fiscal law approved in December 2016 dictates that from now onwards the reference periods will be quinquennial, reducing the discretionary power so far exercised by the Ministry of Education in designing the exercise.

Relazione della Tavola rotonda «Quale futuro per le riviste accademiche? Open Access, valutazione e distribuzione», 28 novembre 2014, Padova, Collegio Morgagni.

The article focuses on journal lists oriented to research evaluation in Humanities, specifically concerning History and philosophy of science. It begins with an overview of main issues concerning the use of journal lists, especially in connection to the Italian research evaluation initiatives, and afterwords it presents a study about a comparison between ERIH, Norwegian list, CIRC e ANVUR journal lists In conclusion the article gives some opinions about the use of journal lists in research evaluation of considered field of study, also related to international debate caused by Leiden manifesto, and about international databases and tools used in Italian research evaluation system.

Starting from the recent issue of the national research evaluation program 2011-2014, the paper discusses results and rankings for the forest sector, both for research institutes and universities in Italy. Having a general look to the different research groups operating in the country, and referring to the institutional situation, rapidly evolving for forests, forestry and wood chains, the most important challenges and aims of the future research topics to be discussed and carried forward are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on journal lists oriented to research evaluation in Humanities, specifically concerning History and philosophy of science. It begins with an overview of main issues concerning the use of journal lists, especially in connection to the Italian research evaluation initiatives, and afterwards it presents a study about a comparison between ERIH, Norwegian list, CIRC e ANVUR journal lists. In conclusion, the article gives some opinions about the use of journal lists in research evaluation of considered field of study, also related to international debate caused by Leiden manifesto, and about international databases and tools used in Italian research evaluation system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prediction of the long-term impact of a scientific article is challenging task, addressed by the bibliometrician through resorting to a proxy whose reliability increases with the breadth of the citation window. In the national research assessment exercises using metrics the citation window is necessarily short, but in some cases is sufficient to advise the use of simple citations. For the Italian VQR 2011-2014, the choice was instead made to adopt a linear weighted combination of citations and journal metric percentiles, with weights differentiated by discipline and year. Given the strategic importance of the exercise, whose results inform the allocation of a significant share of resources for the national academic system, we examined whether the predictive power of the proposed indicator is stronger than the simple citation count. The results show the opposite, for all discipline in the sciences and a citation window above 2 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to understand whether the probability of receiving positive peer reviews is influenced by having published in an independently assessed, high-ranking journal: we eventually interpret a positive relationship among peer evaluation and journal ranking as evidence that journal ratings are good predictors of article quality. The analysis is based on a large dataset of over 11,500 research articles published in Italy in the period 2004-2010 in the areas of architecture, arts and humanities, history and philosophy, law, sociology and political sciences. These articles received a score by a large number of externally appointed referees in the context of the Italian research assessment exercise (VQR); similarly, journal scores were assigned in a panel-based independent assessment, which involved all academic journals in which Italian scholars have published, carried out under a different procedure. The score of an article is compared with that of the journal it is published in: more specifically, we first estimate an ordered probit model, assessing the probability for a paper of receiving a higher score, the higher the score of the journal; in a second step, we concentrate on the top papers, evaluating the probability of a paper receiving an excellent score having been published in a top-rated journal. In doing so, we control for a number of characteristics of the paper and its author, including the language of publication, the scientific field and its size, the age of the author and the academic status. We add to the literature on journal classification by providing for the first time a large scale test of the robustness of expert-based classification.

The academic reforms in Italy have introduced innovations in a Napoleonic administrative apparatus unfit to receive them, thus generating a completely unbalanced institutional system. The system's center of gravity has moved from the administration by the ministry to the National Agency for the Evaluation of University and Research (ANVUR), assigning directly to the elite group chosen by the government enormous power on research and the universities, without counterweight. The poor design of the governance of the ANVUR has resulted in the realization of technically inadequate evaluations. Criticism addressed to the evaluation activities and to the bibliometric methods used have revived the debate on research policy in Italy, with the emergence of a scientific counter-public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short Editorial focuses on the inclusion of SCIRES-IT SCIentific RESearch and Information Technology Journal in "Class A" as ranked by ANVUR - Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Italian National Agency for the university and research evaluation (Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione di Università e Ricerca - ANVUR) funded in November 24, 2006 with the Law 286 (art. 2, par. 138-140). On expiry of the first Board of Directors, we believe it is time to take stock and try to evaluate the work of those who have been called upon to rationalize the quality evaluation of the Italian University System. In this work we will focus only on the aspects of the evaluation of university teaching envisaged in the ANVUR - AVA system. The AVA system was aimed, among its other objectives, to strengthen self-assessment of the quality and effectiveness of the university educational activities. In this paper, we will compare, in particular, AVA current regulations with what is actually achieved and achievable by the universities, both from a logical and technological point of view. Finally, regardless of the different techniques of assessments adopted by the various universities, it is hoped that the Agency may in the future provide a single system of analysis of the results of the evaluation process, flexible and open to innovative proposals coming the statisticians that deal with the assessment of the quality of teaching. We feel that the Statistical Information System for Evaluation of Educational SISVALDIDAT1 could be the system having the above-mentioned characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roars ha puntualmente segnalato l’ancipite vicenda delle nuove liste di riviste last minute per l’abilitazione scientifica nazionale. E’ cambiato qualcosa fra le riviste di filosofia politica italiane di serie A, di cui avevamo già avuto modo di discutere?

Il Tar del Lazio ha accolto un ricorso contro la classificazione Anvur a favore di una rivista di area 11, la “Nuova Rivista Storica”, disponendo il conseguente annullamento delle valutazioni operate dall’ANVUR – gruppi di lavoro Area CUN 11 e … 14.

Segnaliamo ai lettori che, a giudicare dai log, passano di qui in cerca di notizie sulle abilitazioni, l’articolo di Giuseppe Di Nicolao e Antonio Banfi appena uscito su Roars, intitolato Commissioni per le abilitazioni: i misteri dei sorteggi fai-da-te...

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The "Standardized Score" indicator for University Departments based on the research assessment exercise VQR 2004-2010. In this paper the authors describe an indicator (called Standardized Score) for the evaluation of university departments based solely on the quality of the research-related products presented in the framework of the Italian research assessment exercise VQR 2004-2010. This indicator is built by normalizing with the Italian disciplinary sectors (SSD), thus taking full advantage of the information collected by ANVUR. It has the advantage of comparing and sorting, according to research quality, departments very different form each other both in terms of number of members and/or disciplinary sectors (SSD) thereof. This indicator is complementary to those provided by ANVUR according to the Ministry rules, for it provides support to different needs and it is not normalized over research areas (Aree CUN). The paper describes the concepts behind the Standardized Score indicator, its characteristics, the questions it aims to answer and the possible limitations of its application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to show that the irresolution of the National Agency for the Evaluation of the University System and Research (ANVUR) referred to its institutional position derives from a ungoverned hybridization of the reform of the University with the type of evaluation that has been considered as part of the reform administrations. This irresolution destroys the technical role of the Agency, which prevents it improve the role that the law has assigned, of support of the activities of evaluation and self evaluation of universities; it hinders the diffusion of reflective practices, and, with this, the development of an effective institutional evaluation. After explaining the regulatory steps that have made this possible, the work focuses on the three evaluation exercises hitherto made, to show how the limitations and distortions with which ANVUR is born created obstacles to the diffusion of the culture of evaluation in the universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After nearly 20 years of evaluation in Italian higher education, a new national agency for the evaluation of the university system (ANVUR) came into being in 2011. This article traces the history of evaluation in Italian universities, discussing the tasks assigned to the national evaluation bodies and their functions within the university system. In order to analyse the evolution of national evaluation systems the article discusses the contribution made by evaluation to the governance system mechanisms and the legitimacy requirements to which the universities are subject. The adoption of quantitative parameters and standards in the evaluation process is one of the elements that contributes most to interpreting the significance and consequences of the evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mettiamo a disposizione di tutti, qui, il documento approvato dall’assemblea dei soci così come l’abbiamo ricevuto, con la sola aggiunta di un paio di link illustrativi. E’ un testo pensato per essere diffuso: chiunque abbia interesse a distribuirlo può dunque riprodurlo liberamente. Di mio aggiungo solo un’osservazione che ho scritto altrove, per non confondere le [...]

Research evaluation in Humanities is a theme of topical interest especially after the start of the national framework for research assessment (VQR 2004-2010). The debate on indicators, on how to correlate quality and quantity, on the notion itself of research quality, is very intense not only for the main characteristics of the research area, but for chronic lack of bibliographic and bibliometric data, too.This paper aims at making the point on what has been done until now, taking into account positive and not positive experiences of other research systems; it tries to individuate some ways to follow in the future: the creation of a bibliographic database according to international standards, a refernce guide for assessing monographs, a better technological exploitation both for distribution and validation of research products, and for their evaluation as well.

In seguito alla riunione della Società italiana di filosofia politica, e su sua richiesta, ho rielaborato la bozza di soluzione del problema delle riviste presentata all’assemblea straordinaria del 19 maggio. Il nuovo progetto, che sviluppa un’idea della Società Italiana di Filosofia Teoretica, è a disposizione di tutti qui. E’ pubblico sia perché chiunque possa trarne [...]

E’ appena stata resa pubblica su Roars, qui. Chi, per avventura, non conoscesse il suo autore può farsi un’idea di chi sia a partire da qui. Il testo è circolato in via informale ed è probabilmente già noto a chi appartiene alla comunità accademica. Chi però non l’avesse ancora letto è invitato a farlo – [...]

Il tema della valutazione nelle scienze umane è divenuto di grande attualità soprattutto dopo l'avvio dell'esercizio di valutazione nazionale (VQR 2004- 2010). Più ancora che per le scienze dure il dibattito sugli indicatori, sul come (e se) correlare qualità e quantità, sul concetto stesso di qualità della ricerca è molto vivace non solo per le caratteristiche intrinseche della produzione scientifica in queste aree, ma anche per una cronica mancanza di dati bibliografici e bibliometrici. Il contributo fa il punto sullo stato dell'arte, tenendo presente le esperienze, di altri sistemi della ricerca, e tenta di individuare alcune direttrici lungo le quali sarebbe opportuno muoversi in futuro: la creazione di una base di dati bibliografici secondo standard condivisi, la costruzione di un griglia di riferimento per la valutazione delle monografie, un migliore sfruttamento delle nuove tecnologie sia per la distribuzione e validazione dei lavori di ricerca che per la loro valutazione. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]