Creativity and Collaboration in the Academy
USC is taking action, creating the culture, infrastructure and institutions to support creativity and collaboration:
- Revisions in USC’s tenure and promotion to reward collaborative research, and creation of attribution standards for collaborative work and new media.
- Financial support through the collaboration fund, enabling groups of faculty to work together on interdisciplinary research topics.
- Developing resources to support sharing of data and information, through our new digital repository.
- Workshops and symposia exploring the future of scholarship and research, organized by the Norman Lear Center.
- Shared bio-repositories to build collaborations among patients, doctors and researchers in research that leads to new medical discoveries.
Visit us on twitter or at Creativity and Collaboration at the Norman Lear Center.
Randolph Hall
Vice President, Research
Innovation in How Universities Do Research
Activities
Symposium: On December 3, USC held a symposium on creativity, collaboration and the enabling power of technology.
Workshops: A series of five meetings organized by the Norman Lear Center exploring the future of scholarship, with respect to: (1) Networked Science, (2) Digital Arts and Humanities, (3) Social Science Research, and Effects of Technology on Collaboration, (4) Engineering and Technology to Support Collaboration, and (5) Collaboration in the Health Sciences.
University Research Committee: Reviewing how our practices and procedures should be adapted to enliven and reward innovation in the conduct of research, including tenure and promotion, and digital scholarship. See the ucapt_2011_cover_memo.
Collaboration Fund: A program instituted by USC to support faculty who wish to organize research communities around interdisciplinary projects.
Clinical and Translational Science Institute: is part of a national consortium that is transforming health research, aiming to provide new treatments more efficiently and quickly to patients, through collaboration, interdisciplinary research and enabling technology.
Issues
Broadening the Agenda for Scholarship and Research
Technology has made:
- Information distributed & shared, quickly & cheaply
- Desired information easier to find and retrieve
- Research networks expandable well beyond the home institution
- Relevance and significance of information & sources easier to assess
- Archives dynamic, interactive and collaborative.
This has made research fast, dynamic, collaborative and personalized, while challenging some of our academic traditions:
- Peer reviewed print publications.
- Recognition of individual accomplishments, as viewed by others.
- Focus on one’s own (sub)discipline or academic department
- Contemplation
Given what technology offers, do our traditions stand in the way of our core mission of expanding knowledge and using that knowledge to benefit society? USC is exploring the future of:
- Academic publishing?
- Libraries?
- Assessment of faculty achievements in tenure and promotion?
- IT infrastructure to support collaboration?
- Academic units that span physical space?
- Shared laboratories and experimentation?
- Doctoral education?
- Measures to assess impact and significance of research products?
To Join the Dialogue
We are looking for examples of innovation in how research is done, in any of the following areas:
- Search
- Sharing and collaboration
- Review and feedback on research product
- Dissemination media
- Access and archives
- Measuring impact and significance
Contact the Office of Research at vpres@usc.edu or (213) 740-6709.