Enhancing Research Culture in Higher Education in Kosovo – ResearchCult
The overall aim of the project is to support enhancement of research culture in Kosovo higher education institutions by supporting enhancement of existing policy and practices as well as establishing and installing new regulations and mechanisms in project beneficiary institutions in Kosovo.
This is expected to be fulfilled by achieving the following specific objectives:
SO#1: Assessing current state of research capacities in Kosovo higher education sector;
It is initially needed to obtain a recent clear picture of current state of research situation in Kosovo, in terms of present researchers, number of publications internationally published in certain fields of research priorities, assess the existing university regulations on research and modalities for reviewing them, as well as other aspects (such as researchers challenges to conduct research activity and research work) that would provide a clearer situation that will guide developing and installing the project outputs in a more consistent manner.
SO#2: Increasing research stimulation and support by establishing university offices/centers and their strategic plans to support constant research activities among their institutions.
Since the universities in Kosovo (except University of Prishtina) have not yet established research office and developed research strategic plans, this objective aims to support universities in tackling these gaps.
SO#3: Enhancing university strategy for publication of scientific research work through developing and approving internationally recognized standards for scientific journals, as well as establishing inter-institutional scientific journals in the key research priorities in Kosovo;
National standards for establishing scientific journals are weak and higher education and research institutions in Kosovo are not well guided in their initiatives to establish scientific journals. This objective will particularly tackle this situation and in collaboration with MEST and universities national standards will be enhances with taking into account international practices by getting advice and support from international partners in the project. Besides that, because of the lack of a national scientific journal that will serve opportunities for research to publish their research work, this objective will contribute to the establishment of the joint scientific journal in the key research priorities in Kosovo. This objective further will support actions towards establishing scientific committees for the journals, as well as establishing a register of reviewers, who will be reviewing submitted papers for the research.
SO#4: Promoting research work through annual research joint conference
Actually MEST organizes an annual research conference, the ‘Week of Science’, with no quality standards in scientific research. This objective will support on that premises to re-frame such initiative under the newly developed standards for research, which conference will enable the presentation of research work undertaken by researchers. This objective will be linked with activities under the SO#3, respectively the sessions of the conference will be harmonized with the scope of journals in research priorities of Kosovo.
SO#5: Improving research quality and standards by developing research ethics and integrity regulation and establishing research ethics committees in higher education institutions;
Besides University of Prishtina to some departments, other universities have not yet in place decent research ethics and integrity policy, neither they have established ethics bodies/committees to guide researchers undertake quality research as well as to oversee research standards are being respected. Therefore, this objective will support the fulfillment of these gaps among partner universities.
SO#6: Facilitating regular access to research publication and establishing an online open access platform/database for accumulating research knowledge;
In relation to SO#4 this objective will support the development of an online open access databases, which will gather the published papers from the established journals as well as other research work which takes place from researchers throughout Kosovo. This database will serve as source of knowledge to researchers, academics, students and other actors (governmental, CSOs, industry and, so on). Purchase of access also to electronic reearch resources will be supported in order to provide recent research knowledge to KOsovo researchers.
SO#7: Increasing research publication opportunities through building capacities among researchers in preparing research articles as per international criteria and requirements for publication of research work;
Because there is a low number of publications internationally from Kosovo researchers, one major reason for this is because the lack of know how in the preparation of scientific articles in order to be better accepted by peer reviewers and international journals approached. A certain number of (possibly young and unexperienced) researchers will be targeted for the training in this regard.
