[GOAL] Re: [Open-access] Re: Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke
Heather Morrison
hgmorris at sfu.ca
Wed Nov 7 22:21:24 GMT 2012
Thanks to Sally for raising an interesting point, and to all for
contributions ~
Publishing is one means of disseminating the results of scholarly
work. It makes sense to me that the motives of scholars for publishing
stem from their motivations to do the scholarly work in the first place.
The list of possible motivations, in my opinion and experience,
include advancing the knowledge of humankind, solving particular
problems for humanity and/or our world, and making the best use of
one's talents.
For example, I would never underestimate the determination of many a
cancer researcher to reduce or eliminate the suffering caused by
cancer. It is true that doing and publishing this work can result in
communication with peers, prestige, and career rewards, but for many
if not most, these are side-benefits.
In my own discipline of critical communication studies, many scholars
are very concerned with issues such as social justice. This is the
primary reason for their work, and publishing is a means of
establishing a career that gives the scholar an opportunity to
continue to do this work.
If we are agreed that scholarship today tends to give incentives for
scholars to focus on the rewards (prestige, metrics of impact whether
impact factor or altmetrics) rather than on the main point of doing
the work, then this is a key issue / question for me, that is, how to
reshape the academic system so that we can focus on what really
matters rather than the measuring-sticks we have devised as means of
assessing progress that are all too often mistaken for actual progress.
As an example of an interdisciplinary line of research I'd really like
to see us all taking on: finding means of solving or mitigating to the
greatest extent possible, global warming. To me, it seems obvious that
this would take a concerted, collaborative effort to find clean,
sustainable energy sources and transition from current to the new
sources. This takes science, but also understanding of people,
economics, and politics. Here, only one metric really matters: global
average temperature. Any other metrics are a distraction.
This latter is an example of what I call a society-wide trend toward
irrational rationality, discussed at some length in my draft
dissertation:
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/2012/10/04/dissertation-defence-draft/
my two bits,
best,
Heather Morrison
On 7-Nov-12, at 1:18 PM, Marcin Wojnarski wrote:
> Sure, career is nothing bad in itself, but if "career survival" is
> the primary motivation and the main factor that drives ones'
> decisions - as hypothesised in your blog post - then its proper name
> is "careerism".
>
> Changing the system is a responsibility of everyone: every scholar -
> senior or junior - who cares about doing good science. For some
> reasons (experience, reputation) senior scholars have more power to
> make changes, but on the other hand, junior scholars have more fresh
> ideas on what could be done and more skills (entrepreneurial,
> programming etc.) to do this.
>
> Definitely, some senior scholars feel fine in the current system and
> can be afraid of changes, although I'd be careful with generalizing
> this statement to all senior faculty. On this mailing list alone
> there are many senior academics who strive for changes and have done
> a lot to change the system - without their efforts we would have 1%
> open access today rather than 20%.
>
> -Marcin
>
>
> On 11/07/2012 06:52 PM, Eric F. Van de Velde wrote:
>>
>> Marcin said:
>> The statement that "scholars publish for prestige" is an euphemism
>> for "scholars are careerists who care more about tenure than
>> quality and meaningfulness of their research". I don't believe this.
>>
>>
>> I most definitely do not believe that myself for a minute. I don't
>> do euphemisms. The young and untenured need to publish in
>> prestigious journals for career survival. I don't see why that
>> needs to be turned into the negative "careerism". If you want to be
>> a researcher, you need a compelling cv. Publications are a big part
>> of that.
>>
>> Changing the system should primarily be a responsibility of senior
>> faculty and university administrators. Unfortunately, they are
>> beneficiaries of the current system, give it more value than it
>> deserves, and are probably too cautious in their attempts to change
>> it.
>> --Eric.
>>
>> http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com
>>
>> Google Voice: (626) 898-5415
>> Telephone: (626) 376-5415
>> Skype: efvandevelde -- Twitter: @evdvelde
>> E-mail: eric.f.vandevelde at gmail.com
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Marcin Wojnarski <marcin.wojnarski at tunedit.org
>> > wrote:
>> Eric's distinction between publishing for communication or for
>> prestige is quite thought-provoking, if not provocative. Does
>> anyone have an idea how many authors fall to each group? What's
>> more important for majority of academics: communication or
>> prestige? ...
>>
>> I think there's a misconception regarding prestige and its real
>> significance. This issue has been raised many times recently in
>> discussions about OA: the frequently repeated claim, expressed also
>> by Eric in his blog post, is that scholars publish for prestige
>> (and for: high metrics, tenure, "exposition", benefits, rewards,
>> incentives, ...) - that's why adoption of OA is slow and costs of
>> traditional journals are high. Do you think this claim is true?
>>
>> I don't.
>>
>> The statement that "scholars publish for prestige" is an euphemism
>> for "scholars are careerists who care more about tenure than
>> quality and meaningfulness of their research". I don't believe
>> this. I don't believe that majority of academics are careerists who
>> don't care if their papers are read by anybody. Suggesting that
>> entire academic communication is nothing else but a PR bubble
>> (prestige! prestige!) driven by primitive rules of social darwinism
>> - is not just totally wrong, but also offending to academia. Maybe
>> 5% of academics are careerists, the other 95% are extremely
>> interested in whether their papers have real impact or not ("real"
>> in contrast to "measured by IF"). I mean: they have a deep hope
>> that their research will ultimately have an impact. I'm convinced
>> that this hope accounts for at least 90% of motivation of those
>> people for becoming a scientist and doing laborious research job
>> that's compensated with a half or 1/3 of what's paid for similar
>> skills outside academia.
>>
>> The key problem is that prestige of the journal and size+quality of
>> potential audience for the paper - are correlated. Every author who
>> respects his own work seeks as large and reputable audience as
>> possible - not for prestige (!) but for the ability to communicate
>> own discoveries to people who are able to understand, appreciate
>> and make use of them. That's why authors must rely on prestiguous
>> journals even if prestige itself has no value for them! (BTW,
>> looking at the society as a whole, I think scientists are the
>> people with least respect for prestige, compared to any other
>> community).
>>
>> The way to change the situation is by decoupling communication
>> potential of journals from their perceived prestige; and by
>> enhancing visibility of small, niche, low-prestige journals. The
>> focus must be on communication, community and readers; not on
>> prestige.
>>
>> -Marcin
>>
>> --
>> Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT
>> http://tunedit.org
>> http://www.facebook.com/TunedIT
>> http://twitter.com/wojnarski
>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski
>>
>> TunedIT - Online Laboratory for Intelligent Algorithms
>>
>>
>> On 11/06/2012 09:58 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>>> Copied only to the OKFN open-access list.
>>>
>>> It may be useful to consider the question: "what can we do to
>>> change the situation?" - the OKF has a strong tradition of
>>> building things to change the world. The distinction between
>>> publishing for communication and publishing for reputation is
>>> valuable. Maybe by changing and improving the former (which I
>>> think OKFN is well placed to do) we can separate them.
>>>
>>> On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Leslie Carr <lac at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
>>> wrote:
>>> Publishers are capitalists - I don't think they'd argue the point.
>>>
>>>
>>> This is a generalization. Many learned societies and scientific
>>> unions are not capitalists.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Peter Murray-Rust
>>> Reader in Molecular Informatics
>>> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
>>> University of Cambridge
>>> CB2 1EW, UK
>>> +44-1223-763069
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> open-access mailing list
>>> open-access at lists.okfn.org
>>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-access
>>> Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/open-access
>>>
>>
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>
> --
> Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT
> http://tunedit.org
> http://www.facebook.com/TunedIT
> http://twitter.com/wojnarski
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski
>
> TunedIT - Online Laboratory for Intelligent Algorithms
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