Funding agencies and research councils around the world rely on peer review to assess the potential impacts of proposed research. This article compar

The increasing pursuit of replicable research and actual replication of research is a political project that articulates a very specific technology of accountability for science. This project was initiated in response to concerns about the openness and trustworthiness of science. Though applicable and valuable in many fields, here we argue that this value cannot be extended everywhere, since the epistemic content of fields, as well as their accountability infrastructures, differ. Furthermore, we argue that there are limits to replicability across all fields; but in some fields, including parts of the humanities, these limits severely undermine the value of replication to account for the value of research.

Currently, established research evaluation focuses on scientific impact – that is, the impact of research on science itself. We discuss extending research evaluation to cover productive interactions and the impact of research on practice and society. The results are based on interviews with scientists from (organic) agriculture and a review of the literature on broader/social/societal impact assessment and the evaluation of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. There is broad agreement about what activities and impacts of research are relevant for such an evaluation. However, the extension of research evaluation is hampered by a lack of easily usable data. To reduce the effort involved in data collection, the usability of existing documentation procedures (e.g., proposals and reports for research funding) needs to be increased. We propose a structured database for the evaluation of scientists, projects, programmes and institutions, one that will require little additional effort beyond existing reporting require ments.

This essay argues that political, economic, and cultural developments have made the twentieth century disciplinary approach to philosophy unsustainable. It (a) discusses the reasons behind this unsustainability, which also affect the academy at large, (b) describes applied philosophy as an inadequate theoretical reaction to contemporary societal pressures, and (c) proposes a dedisciplined and interstitial approach—“field philosophy”—as a better response to the challenges facing the twenty-first century philosophy.