EUA has published a new report that discusses the experiences and views of EUA members on U-Multirank, a multi-dimensional ranking of higher education institutions produced with seed funding from the European Commission.
Despite the issues raised by the survey respondents, the majority of them found that the cooperation with U-Multirank consortium worked smoothly and all those who actively contributed to the data collection in the first round are also planning to do so in the future. This comes in spite of the fact that four in 10 universities included in U-Multirank had no plans to use the results of UMR or did not yet know how they could use them. The paper can be downloaded here.
The first results of U-Multirank were unveiled in May 2014. The results of 2015 edition are expected to be published in March 2015. More...

By Dennis Hayes. Freedom of speech is at the heart of academic life and a university should be a place where every issue is discussed and debated. Not so, according to the findings presented in the first ever Freedom of Speech University Rankings (FSUR). They reveal that 80% of UK higher education institutions routinely regulate and actively restrict students’ free speech and expression in some way. More...

By Tom Slater. It's easy to laugh at students who try to ban sombreros or applause, but new free speech rankings show how their censorious megalomania is getting out of hand. Read more...

The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings 2015 will be published on 11 March, it was confirmed today.
The fifth annual list of the world’s 100 most prestigious universities, as judged by 10,000 senior academics from across the world, will go live online at 21.00 GMT on Wednesday 11 March 2015 and will be published as part of a special supplement with Times Higher Education magazine on Thursday 12 March.
The ranking will be based on the most balanced and comprehensive global academic reputation survey ever produced.
The invitation-only survey, which was distributed in partnership with Elsevier, was issued in 15 languages (up from nine last year) and was closed in January 2015. More...

Bloomberg's 2015 ranking of the world's 50 most innovative countries takes a more prosaic approach to the question, focusing on six tangible activities that contribute to innovation. South Korea tops this year's overall ranking. The U.S. places sixth, and China 22nd. Morocco finishes last. You can click here to go straight to the full results, but don't do that just yet. The point of this list isn't to award bragging rights to one country over another—it's to see whether a broad formula for innovation can in fact be identified, and what companies, and governments, need to do to reproduce it. More...

Bloomberg has produced its latest rankings of the world’s top fifty counties ranked according to six indicators that contribute to innovation. The indicators are Research and Development, Manufacturing, High-tech Companies, Postsecondary Education, Research Personnel and Patents. Altogether more than 200 countries and sovereigns were evaluated. More...