This week I attended a two-day workshop put on by members of the Library staff that discussed the nature of research publications, the implications for which journals you publish in and how you recognise the differences in quality, and above all the whole notion of maximising your research impact.
None of these are factors I’ve ever thought about; none of them are things I’ve ever had to think about. As a non-academic, I have no mandate to publish, no quota of annual publications to meet, and therefore not the slightest clue about that entire aspect of academia. So the experience was extremely insightful into the way the academic side lives.
At the same time though I couldn’t help but become extremely cynical about what I was hearing. The feuds and seeming sense of self-serving behaviour that sees groups of people try to get their journal ranked higher, and therefore increase their relative impact, not to mention the extremely convoluted nature of what ranks how, where and relative to what – and above all the notion that the purpose of publishing seems largely as a vehicle to increased funding and prestige. It made my head spin!
Surely that’s not the aim of everyone who publishes though, it just seems to be the nature of the system. In order to survive in the system you need to know how to manipulate it and work within it. Publish or Perish as they say.
There is of course the aim of adding to the literature pool in the field and increasing the aggregate of human knowledge as well. Yet I didn’t hear much of anything in the workshop about the altruism that drives people to publish. All I heard was how best to work the system to maximise your advantage, meet the expectations of the university and requirements of federal funding bodies, protect your IP and enhance your profile and identity.
This baffles me, truly. I’m a blogger and open educator. Everything I think, produce or discuss I do openly, and share freely. There has never been a time I’ve thought to do otherwise. The notion of IP and protecting my intellectual property is not something that I ever think about. I blog to think, I blog to help others, I blog to learn and to help others learn. Surely there’s an impact in that as well, however in the scheme of publications, prestige and citations, impact in blogging doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.
It’s a bit of a depressing thought really – especially when considering the implications a perceived lack of impact has on funding proposals.
On a practical level though I find that blogging and interacting through social media are far more productive ways to engage in research in my field of endeavor. Emerging technology is by nature constantly emerging, with the innovations, discoveries, discussions and debates taking place in online circles and offline communities of practice long before the results ever hit the printed page. So to a fair degree, staying current in this field demands you interact in spaces and en that aren’t recognised as having a tremendous research impact – if any at all.
On the other hand, it seems in some circles that being published is how you are taken seriously, and how you earn your voice. No publications, no voice. So I have a lingering fear that relying exclusively on the highly interactive, blog early and blog often nature of social media – while highly beneficial to my research and learning – may in the long run be detrimental – both to reputation and career.
Yet with time at such a premium these days, the prospect of enduring the excruciating demands of the editorial and peer review processes and threat of constant rejections requires more of a time investment than I can possibly afford – while blogging does not.
It would seem that both publishing and blogging can be scholarly, but each offers its own affordances and challenges. How do you know where to focus your energy?
As you can see, I’m in a major quandary about all this, so anyone with thoughts or experiences please share them.
Academic institutions tend to be very conservative. Look at the governance model–decisions about promotion, tenure, and hiring are made by senior faculty, and faculty often have very long careers. (My wife has colleagues who produced their dissertations using manual typewriters and carbon paper.) Of course they're skeptical of new media–it's not “real scholarship.” And to be fair, there is some value in the peer review model. It forces authors to spend time carefully crafting and expressing their ideas, at which time they are reviewed anonymously, at which point they usually get suggestions for revision.
That said, as you point out, use of interactive media allows for a more rapid spread of ideas and a conversation rather than a lecture. Ideally, then, the academy ought to recognize both forms of scholarly communication.
And there are signs of hope. Here in the US at least, legal scholarship has begun to embrace blogging and has an active and ongoing blogosphere. I don't know to what extent blog participation affects promotion and tenure decisions in law schools, but the conversation is much more lively than in, say, the college of education.
If you think that your long-term career development requires publication, have you thought about co-authoring (which is the norm in many fields)? Are there data that you are in a position to collect that someone else might want to analyze and write about? A good set of data can be academic gold. Find someone to write up the results, and you'll both benefit.
As a recovering academic after 20+ years in Higher Ed, I understand your response to the issue of 'publish or perish' because it mirrors mine exactly. The real-politik of the academy insists on traditional verification by peers of one's scholarship and research … an agonisingly slow and often just plain agonising process. Some fields do, to be far, encourage e-journal publication with a much faster turnaround time by evaluation panels. This leads to getting the work out there faster. This gradual acceptance of the technology may bridge the gap between the paper-publication (slooow) and the immediacy of the blogs. I do think that blogging and social networking amongst peers is an incredibly valuable part of the whole research/scholarship/publication process. It's rather like an ongoing debate and chat with colleagues. Out of this interaction emerges new insight and impetus for submissions for peer-reviewed publication as well as new global collegial contacts. I thought you might like this quote that I found last year and sent to my Tumblr. I knew I'd want it some day! Best wishes, and don't let the fustian turkeys of academe get you down. “Today’s senior faculty members look at blogs the way a previous generation of academics looked at television — as a guilty, tawdry pleasure that should not be talked about in respectable circles.” (Daniel W Drenzer)