Is the ivory tower crumbling?

In yesterday's post entitled 'Open or shut', I wrote about a rise in the number of academics who are turning their back on traditional research publications such as closed journals, in favour of more open, accessible outputs such as blogs and open access journals. They are doing so to ensure their research is read by larger audiences, to open up public debate, and to disseminate their knowledge as widely as possible. They are doing this without the approval of their parent institutions, and as an act of conscience. The pitfalls are there, but so are the benefits. As Claude Lord tweeted yesterday, 'it's no longer publish or perish, it's now publish to flourish'. 

The fact is, academics are still judged on their ability to research and publish their findings in 'high impact' peer reviewed journals. High impact journals are those considered to be the most influential in their field, and they are calculated by an algorithm that considers a number of factors including article citations. It's notoriously difficult to get articles accepted for publication in these elite journals - the editors often pride themselves in their high rejection rates. However, the elite journals may have had their day, because as John Bohannon highlighted in 2014, the more highly cited papers are actually beginning to emerge from less prestigious (non-elite) journals. 

"In 1995, only 27% of citations pointed to articles published in non-elite journals. That portion grew to 47% by 2013. And the non-elite journals published an increasing share of the most highly cited papers within each field as well, growing from 14% to 24%."

So is the journal impact system still a valid measure of academic value?

Publication in high impact peer reviewed journals has been the yardstick to measure academic prowess almost since academia began. And yet, as Asit Biswas and Julian Kirshherr argue in a recent online article for the London School of Economics, there is yet another big problem with this:

"Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually. However, many are ignored even within the scientific community: 82 percent of articles published in humanities are not even cited once. Rarely do scholars refer to 32 percent of the peer-reviewed articles in the social and 27 percent in the natural sciences. If a paper is cited, though, this does not imply it has actually been read. According to one estimate, only 20 percent of papers cited have actually been read. We suspect that an average paper in a peer-reviewed journal is read completely at most by no more than 10 people. Hence, impacts of most peer-reviewed publications even within the scientific community are miniscule."

Those who publish their work elsewhere, in lower echelon journals or (perish the thought) in open access journals, are often frowned upon by the academic community, or are certainly not regarded as playing the game. They are often excluded from research assessment exercises, and can be overlooked for promotion or tenure. This is all part of the ivory tower game that is played out in universities across the globe. 

It has to stop. 

Maintaining such exclusivity is damaging to the credibility of academia, and restricts knowledge that is made available to the general public. There has always been a power struggle between those who control knowledge and those who require it. What would have happened if Jimmy Wales had been overruled by his colleagues, and Wikipedia had been exclusively a knowledge repository populated by credentialled academics and scholars? What if talented and knowledgeable lay-people had been excluded from contributing to Wikipedia? Would it be as popular and useful as it is today? Fortunately Jimmy Wales won the argument, and Wikipedia is testament today of crowd sourced knowledge, the wisdom of the many, and dialogue of the masses. It is the largest and best used knowledge repository in the world. 

In their LSE article, Biswas and Kirshherr go on to argue that academics should participate more in public debate to raise the profile of scientific issues that impact on daily lives. There is currently a paucity of academics willing to do this. Without the use of popular tools such as social media, blogging and public press however, this situation is unlikely to improve. You see, the problem with peer reviewed journal articles is not confined to their lack of accessibility and their exclusivity. They are often lengthy pieces of text that are laden with impenetrable language and scientific jargon, peppered with obscure diagrams, complex tables and statistics. Brevity and to-the-point summaries are required if most people are to understand the implications of research. How do we solve real world problems, and what are the practical applications of academic research results in daily life? These are the questions the general public are interested in, and academics will need to find better ways to disseminate their findings than publishing as they always have, in obscure, privileged-access journals that are read only by a handful of their own community.

If we are going to see a shift away from this elitism, then the universities, the funding councils and ultimately, governmental education ministries must take a lead. Some universities are now beginning to accept opinion pieces, open access journal publications and social media contributions as a part of submissions for the promotion process. It's a good start.

Photo by Tom Murphy on Wikimedia Commons


Is the ivory tower crumbling? by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.