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.

Open or shut?

A new breed of academics is emerging in the digital age. They are the researchers and teachers who freely share their knowledge and studies online. They are circumventing traditional approaches and discovering new ways of sharing their work. They are the open scholars.

Increasing numbers of high profile academics (such as danah boyd and Martin Weller for example) are turning their backs on traditional methods of research dissemination, publishing their work exclusively on free-to-read open access platforms or on their blogs. Many have openly pledged to never write, edit or review for closed journals again. Others choose to continue publishing their work in conventional peer-reviewed journals, but also disseminate their work widely through non-peer reviewed digital channels.

There are clear advantages to publishing your work by open access (see this article on open scholarship) as this article by Melanie Fullick highlights:

"...for a growing number of academics the benefits of blogging outweigh the drawbacks. Those who blog – including me – agree there are positive outcomes, such as networking and collaborating, finding new audiences and opportunities, disseminating research more widely, and building one’s reputation. Bloggers argue that far from diluting scholarly success, online writing can be a serious tool for academic practice."

These are clear benefits that any academic who has blogged for a while will attest to. The opportunities of networking, discovering new audiences for your research and that rapid dissemination capabilities of the web are just a few of the benefits you cannot find easily in more traditional avenues of publication. Additionally, the potential of social media to amplify content and expand reach exponentially should also be acknowledged.  But there are also disadvnatages, mainly of a political nature. Fullick highlights the disdain some academics hold for open access publishing and personal publishing through blogging:

"Peer-reviewed articles are still the benchmark for academic professionalization, and some graduate students and early-career academics feel that blogging is a waste of precious time that could be spent on “legitimate” publishing. Because it’s a form of self-publishing that lacks peer review, blogging isn’t usually viewed as a legitimate form of scholarship."

Blogging and other non-conventional forms of research dissemination tend to hit a road block where tenure and promotion are concerned. They are not accepted by universities when it comes to applications for research funding either. Blogging and unconventional publishing are not for the faint hearted. Indeed, many early career researchers are forced to toe the traditional line just to stay within their posts. This is a shame, but a necessary obligation.

For established researchers and those who have gained a reputation, it's different story. The benefits of publishing your work through blogging can be huge. Some academic bloggers can boast of thousands, or even millions of views each month. Many would argue that this is what research dissemination is really all about - sharing your knowledge with as many people as quickly as possible, with maximum impact. Universities usually reject this approach because peer-review is absent from the process, and it is difficult to assure the provenance, quality, rigour and veracity of the work. Having had first hand experience of a number of closed journal review panels, I have to say that formal peer review doesn't always assure these. But the universities and the funding bodies persist in their support of this antiquated and far from effective method of research dissemination, and the dominant publishing houses rub their hands as they cash in.

And yet as increasing numbers of academics and scholars are pledging their allegiance to open scholarship and open publishing, so the blogs written by reputable scholars continue to appear. Recently, Dutch universities boycotted the publishing giant Elsevier because of its 'stranglehold' on the academic community. Academics are beginning to stand up and speak out. There is a sense that a change is in the air. We must fervently hope so, because our academic communities deserve to have access to the latest knowledge in a timely manner, in a format that is of high quality and, in an openly accessible form. What they don't deserve is for publicly funded research to be hidden behind pay walls that only a handful of academics will ever read.

Photo by Justinc on Wikimedia Commons


Open or shut? by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Life in the freezer

Post graduate students at University of Antarctica

I'm very lucky because I get to travel the world and visit many exotic places. My research into learning technology has attracted many invitations to speak at universities in far flung places. Although I sometimes find the travel to these places tedious, once I have arrived I really enjoy meeting and talking to people. I learn a lot and I'm excited to discover new approaches and practices in education. I therefore jumped at the chance recently to visit one of the most remote (and coolest) universities on the planet. It was the mother of all invitations, and an offer that I simply couldn't refuse. Here's the story:

My invitation to present a research seminar for staff and post graduate students at the University of Antarctica, came out of the blue. My first thought was that it must be some kind of a joke. I have played pranks in the past, and others have played pranks on me. Some of the jokes have been quite sophisticated, and I assumed that this was yet another one. Before I responded I decided to investigate, make a few enquires and do some searches, to make sure there was actually such a place as the University of Antarctica. After all, the continent is international territory. No-one actually owns Antarctica, and it is so remote and so covered in a permanent icecap, that only long bearded research scientists and penguins live there, surely? And that of course, should have been the clue. The University of Antarctica (UANT) turns out to be a very small, but never the less incredibly active research university, attached to the U.S. science base, McMurdo Station. UANT specialises in geological, biomedical, marine science, climate studies and astronomy, and of course, it is uniquely positioned to do so.

McMurdo Station thaws out in the summer month of January

And so I took a deep breath, and agreed to go and speak at UANT. I then endured a tortuous journey lasting more than 40 hours to get to the university campus, and I couldn't say that I would recommend the journey to anyone. It wasn't easy. From London Heathrow, on a British Airways flight, I made my way via a stopover in Singapore, to Brisbane, Australia. From there, with New Zealand Airlines, I travelled onwards to Christchurch. After far too long a layover, I then caught another flight down to the very tip of the South Island of New Zealand to a place called Invercargill. Finally I managed to board a supply flight on a cargo plane across the Southern Ocean due south down to McMurdo Station, Antarctica. To be honest, the in-flight catering wasn't much to write home about, and McMurdo isn't the most desirable tourist destination. The live webcam at the base shows the conditions perfectly all year round.

I have to say arriving in such a remote place was a bit of a shock, both culturally and thermally. I have never been so far flung - it felt as though I had arrived on another planet. Everything was white, and even the airstrip was carved out of ice. The -10 C degree temperature (in the Southern Hemisphere summer month of January) cut right through you and took your breath away. There is little at this southernmost air base except for a few squat concrete buildings, several large storage tanks, dozens of half track vehicles and lots of men running around wearing long beards. And of course, there are plenty of penguins. The University of Antarctica is located very close to McMurdo, about 10 minutes away by halftrack. Fortunately there were no blizzards, the sky was clear blue, and I made it to my centrally heated bivouac with no mishap.

My research seminar the following day in the Arctowski College of Education (named after the Polish polar explorer Henryk Arctowski) was well attended by around 20 of the university's bearded academics (they only have around 60 full time staff, so this was quite a turn out), and several penguins.  I spoke about distance education, for which there was a great deal of interest, because clearly, it is difficult to get to UANT, and although it's a great place to visit, no-one in their right mind actually wants to stay there. The university wishes to attract more students, but accommodation is very basic, student life is somewhat dull, and people often go missing and are never seen again. So distance education seemed like the best method for them to gain more students. The college has already invested heavily in correspondence courses, and is also gearing up to deliver its first MOOC later this year once they get their internet connection. The subject? - Antarctic Studies, of course.

After a lunch of roasted penguin, the head of education, the heavily bearded Dr Ivan Ivanovich Zykov and his assistant Annie Spysz (also bearded) took me on a short tour that included a visit to the Astronomy Observatory atop University Peak, and the very small but extremely well appointed UANT history and culture Museum. The display of artwork by the indigenous population was spectacular, but not particularly extensive. It was a brief, fascinating, and very chilly tour, and a fitting end to my visit before catching my flight back to New Zealand. I never got the chance to visit the South Pole, which still remains one of my life's ambitions, but who knows, maybe next time. After all, it's a mere 850 miles journey south across the ice from the University of Antarctica - literally the coolest university on the planet.

Photos by Eli Duke and Gaelen Marsden


Life in the freezer by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.