Project Snowball – Sharing Data for Cross-institutional Benchmarking

Abstract

Project Snowball (www.projectsnowball.info) is a public service project that aims to help universities benchmark their performance across a broad range of research activities. The objectives of the project are to determine a standard set of common metrics and to share the methodology behind those metrics publically. With a set of common metrics defined by and adopted across UK institutions, it will be possible for them to make meaningful comparisons with each other. There is global interest in the opportunities that Project Snowball represents, and it remains to be seen how generally applicable the method that is being worked out for the UK will be.