Ending the Series
it’s beginning of yet another story to tell
[Pluto Series] #0 — Academia, Structurally Fxxked Up
[Pluto Series] #1 — Research, the Knowledge Creating Industry
[Pluto Series] #2 — Academia, Publishing, and Scholarly Communication
[Pluto Series] #3 — Publish, but really Perish?
[Pluto Series] #4 — Publish or Perish, and Lost in Vain
[Pluto Series] #5 — On Where they Publish
[Pluto Series] #6 — On Number of Publications
[Pluto Series] #7 — On Citation Fundamentals
[Pluto Series] #8 — On Citing Practices
[Pluto Series] #9 — On Tracking Citations
[Pluto Series] #10 — On Peer Reviews
[Pluto Series] #11 — Ending the Series
For 4 months since last December, throughout 10 posts we have discussed the incentive imperatives of academia. To briefly stress out the main point of the series again, for academia to work better with collaborations among scholars and to better leverage the current information technology, its incentive structure should be modified.
Academia is about generating more pieces of original and robust knowledge. The way they do it is called scholarly communication, which at the moment focuses on the peer reviewed journal publications. In a broader sense, scholarly communication is about creation, evaluation, and reuse of knowledge, in which knowledge is created in a circulating system.
In this very system, researchers are often not directly compensated for their work. They don’t get money for the knowledge they create (i.e. the papers they write). Rather academics are rewarded in the forms of career opportunities such as job positions, promotions, tenures, grants (i.e. research funding), honorary positions, prizes, and so forth.
When academics are determined whether they get these career opportunities, they are subject to certain evaluations. The way they are evaluated thus constitutes the incentives for them to do specific things and disincentive to not to do some other activities. This incentive structure of academia has been so absurd for more than decades and needs to be fixed.
Within a lot of these evaluations, researchers and their research performance are often evaluated with how many they publish, and where they publish. This obsession on publication is often referred to as “Publish or Perish”, implying that failing to publish enough often leads to failing to sustain their career. The number of publications is thus increased ridiculously, regardless of the actual increase of knowledge. Moreover, researchers are discouraged from actively sharing their information, since academics would want to secure more publications by not sharing them.
It should be noted that where their research findings are published shouldn’t supersede what they publish. Plus, no single judgement on research-related decision must rely on single, simplistic indicator. There are so many aspects of academia we need to cherish, ranging from social implications and economic values to their impact within and across different academic disciplines. These diverse and complex values of academia cannot, and should not, be measured with ONE simple metric.
Citation is another major component of academic incentives. Citation is not only important in that it is possibly the only and ultimate answer to quantitative measure of research evaluation, but also because in its very nature citation is the act of acknowledging and attributing the contribution of prior studies. Cautions are required at the same time, as citations are highly dynamic. Citations to a specific publication not only changes over time, but it also depends on how we define what counts as citation.
Thus, in the first place when researchers actually cite others, these perspectives on citations should be taken into account. Publishers, journals, and their editorial boards and staffs should also amend to such perspectives. On a higher layer, the way these citations are aggregated, often by citation databases, should as well change. Last but not least, the use of metrics around citations should amend to these changes. It should always be warned that citations are practiced in diverse contexts, thus the use of citations must be as well. Moreover, because citations come back and forth between different sources and even more sources could be added to empower citations with more contextual information, it is very important that the diverse stakeholders of academia cooperate to build better systems.
Above all, the current incentive structure of academia is focused too much on publications: be it how many they publish, where they publish, or how many times their publications get cited. While the whole system focuses on publications, there are so many valuable activities of academics being lost in vain. One highly notable example is peer review.
Peer review is the most distinctive feature of modern academia, as it is often referred to as “gatekeepers of science”. While peer review takes such important role in academia, it is ridiculously undervalued such that reviews are given no compensation, or even never shared around the learned societies. Not only to ensure better incentives to peer reviews but also to raise responsibility in them, the most imperative is transparency: we need to share more information about peer review processes.
At the end of the day, it’s something that can’t be fixed with efforts of specific group of people. It’s complex and dynamic. Efforts are required from individual researchers as authors, reviewers, readers, or as editors, to groups and organizations such as journals, publishers, service providers, institutes, and funding agents. It is important that they all communicate to identify the nature of the problem, and take actions to fix these problems which essentially requires cooperation between them.
Why incentivize the academics?
Instead of repeating the points already addressed such as that it makes human lives better or that it’s what makes us different, I’ll just get straight to the numbers. The world is pouring an annual spending of 1.7 trillion dollars for research, which is as large as 10% of U.S. GDP in 2017, to a population as small as less than 1% of total.
Incentive is quite central to any human intervention. It’s about reasoning. It’s why we do certain things and why not others. Why not give those so important people better reasons to work for the other 99%, when we can?
How it’s different
During the late 2017 and early 2018, Pluto had been interested in Open Access and the like, since the team was genuinely interested in decentralizing the academic publishing and thought the most central power was on the publishers taking control over the paywalls. Over the course we’ve learned that even within the community of academics who’re highly aware of Open Access discourses have controversies over it.
There are criticisms like Open Access led to yet another business model like APC, or they led to predatory publishing (although I personally disagree with this). We’ve also come up with our own doubts such as whether there is strong incentive for authors to actually submit to these OA journals, how partial changes to OA would actually affect library budgets, or whether the shift from “reader pays” to “author pays” is what we ultimately dream of.
After all, paywall (the access control) was where the profits were harvested. One couldn’t simply stop them from harvesting revenues, and even if one could do, still the publishers would find other ways to harvest their money (just as they did with APCs). Instead of focusing on these points where profits are harvested, we’d rather wanted to look at how their businesses are sustained. That’s why we turned to the incentives of academia and the complex, dynamic relations between different stakeholders, including the publishers.
Much More Stories to be Told
As noted in the first introductory post, the series is never meant to (and never can) exhaustively list all the problems of academia. There are topics that needs to be dealt beyond this series. As a notable example, creating more knowledge is not the sole raison d’être of academia, but it also spans to conveying the knowledge across generations, i.e. education and training.
Anglophone focus of modern academia is another example. Speaking single, universal language throughout the global academia has its advantages. Yet, this comes with costs. Non-natives have to put in substantial efforts in learning the language, which instead could be directed to more time for genuine studies if they used their own languages. English-written publications within English speaking regions are given more attentions to the detriments of other languages and regions. (*if you’re interested, this story is a great reference for English convergence of modern academia)
There’re tons of other topics as well, such as underrepresented groups in academia, inequalities, ever-increasing competitions, severe workloads of graduate students and their mental health, communication to the public, or the obsolete taxonomy of roles and positions in academia. As such, the story doesn’t end with this series, and we’ll be discussing more insightful stories about academia on and on.
[Pluto Series] #0 — Academia, Structurally Fxxked Up
[Pluto Series] #1 — Research, the Knowledge Creating Industry
[Pluto Series] #2 — Academia, Publishing, and Scholarly Communication
[Pluto Series] #3 — Publish, but really Perish?
[Pluto Series] #4 — Publish or Perish, and Lost in Vain
[Pluto Series] #5 — On Where they Publish
[Pluto Series] #6 — On Number of Publications
[Pluto Series] #7 — On Citation Fundamentals
[Pluto Series] #8 — On Citing Practices
[Pluto Series] #9 — On Tracking Citations
[Pluto Series] #10 — On Peer Reviews
[Pluto Series] #11 — Ending the Series
