Last month I sat with the operations manager of a 40-person London firm and watched her spend an entire morning copying order data from one spreadsheet into another. She'd done this every Friday for two years. Nobody had questioned it because that's just how we do things. UK workers waste 11.3 billion hours a year on administrative tasks like emailing, scheduling, and data entry, according to research from Dropbox.
Many researchers are surprised and relieved over an unusual step taken by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH): the agency is rolling back the red tape on a host of basic-science experiments that involved human participants and had been classified as clinical trials. The decision, which was announced on 29 January and is part of a broader NIH effort to reduce administrative burden, should free such research from the heavy bureaucratic requirements that are designed for clinical trials but are sometimes ill-suited to other fields, such as basic psychology and behavioural studies.
Under the Department of Education's proposed Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, institutions would have to submit applied, admitted and enrolled student data broken down by test score quintiles, grade point average quintiles, income ranges, Pell Grant eligibility and parental education levels, as well as data regarding aid and student outcomes. Institutions would also be required to send historical data going back to 2020.