One major factor that makes some research questions more suited to academia is requiring technical or logistical resources that would be hard to access or deploy in a generalist EA org like RP (some specialist expertise also sometimes falls into this category). Much WAW research is like this, in that I don’t think it makes sense for RP to be trying to run large-scale ecological field studies.
Another major factor is if you want to promote wider field-building or you want the research to be persuasive as advocacy to certain audiences in the way that sometimes only academic research can. This also applies to much WAW research.
Personally, I think in a most other cases academia is typically not the best venue for EA research, although the latter considerations about field-building and the prestige/persuasiveness of academic research recurs sufficiently commonly that I think the question of whether a given project is worth publishing academically recurs fairly commonly even within RP.
Thanks a lot for the response—can I just ask what WAW stands for? Google is only showing me writing about writing, which doesn’t seem likely to be it...
And how often does RP decide to go ahead with publishing academia?
One major factor that makes some research questions more suited to academia is requiring technical or logistical resources that would be hard to access or deploy in a generalist EA org like RP (some specialist expertise also sometimes falls into this category). Much WAW research is like this, in that I don’t think it makes sense for RP to be trying to run large-scale ecological field studies.
Another major factor is if you want to promote wider field-building or you want the research to be persuasive as advocacy to certain audiences in the way that sometimes only academic research can. This also applies to much WAW research.
Personally, I think in a most other cases academia is typically not the best venue for EA research, although the latter considerations about field-building and the prestige/persuasiveness of academic research recurs sufficiently commonly that I think the question of whether a given project is worth publishing academically recurs fairly commonly even within RP.
Thanks a lot for the response—can I just ask what WAW stands for? Google is only showing me writing about writing, which doesn’t seem likely to be it...
And how often does RP decide to go ahead with publishing academia?
“WAW” = Wild Animal Welfare (previously often referred to as “WAS” for Wild Animal Suffering).
I’d say a small minority of our projects (<10%).