Posts Tagged ‘Academia’

I can haz tenure

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

And now, for your viewing pleasure, my tenure letter. This is, I would just like to point out, the culmination of thirteen, fourteen years of my life, since I started my Masters program in 1995… though it wasn’t until 1996 that I decided that I wanted the job of a faculty member and that I was going to go on to do the Ph.D.

And I would just like to point out this passage in the letter:

I look forward to your acceptance of this promotion and ask that you sign the enclosed copy of this letter and return it to me within three weeks for our records.

As if I’m going to say no? I suppose this is my opening to negotiate salary, though this is a pretty sucky economy for that kind of thing.

Peer review and institutional repositories

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

“Now you have two problems…”: On mandating Open Access, from Open Access Anthropology

So, you might ask yourself: what in the world is the [scholarly society that publishes its own journal] providing authors who seek to publish in their journals? It certainly isn’t the article… The answer, to my mind is actually simple:

  1. prestige;
  2. high quality peer review;
  3. creative, path-breaking editorial vision;
  4. promotion and marketing;
  5. public policy relevance and creative use of new information technology and new networking and publicity possibilities.

To my mind, the interesting item in this list is #2, peer review. Why do scholars review submitted manuscripts for publishers? It sure ain’t for the prestige or the promotion and tenure rewards. I really believe that we do it because we’re civic-minded. It’s a gift economy. We do it because we understand that science is predicated on validity and reliability, and that therefore without peer review the whole system would collapse. Ok, so why do we perform peer review for publishers? Because up to now, publishers have been the only dissemination game in town. So I’d argue that there’s nothing special about publishers re peer review, except for the fact that they have the resources to manage the process. So in principle there’s nothing to prevent scholars from performing peer review for institutional repositories. Except maybe that they’re institutional: seems to me that there’s value in publishers being third parties. If scholars were to conduct peer review for an institutional repository, would the reputation (impact factor or whatever) accrue to the institution? So where’s the incentive for the scholar outside of that institution? So ok, we still need a third party to manage the peer review process. And so I’ve worked my way around to where Peter Suber has been for yonks: trying to figure out how publishers and institutional repositories can play nice together.

Intellectual debates in public forums

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

In the latest issue of JASIST is an article by Marcia Bates, which is a response to an article by Birger Hjørland, which is a response to an article by Marcia Bates. Bates’ first article was published in 2006; Hjørland’s article was published in 2007; Bates’ second article was published in 2008. First of all, let me say that I love these sorts of exchanges. First, in a schadenfreude kind of way, observing the academic equivalent of fisticuffs. But more importantly, as an example of exactly the sort of thing that academia excels at: airing intellectual debates in a public forum. But my real point is, that’s a solid 2 years in which this particular debate has played out, and I suspect it ain’t over yet. Plus it’s only had three moves.

I witnessed another intellectual debate with three moves recently: Paul Courant to Siva Vaidhyanathan to Paul Courant. Total elapsed time: two days. Two days! The Courant-Vaidhyanathan exchange was literally 365 times faster than the Bates-Hjørland exchange.

Ok, so it’s not a perfect comparison: Bates1 and Hjørland are a little meaty to be blog posts, though Bates2 could possibly have been. And really this is not a novel observation: academic bloggers have been saying forever that blogs have the potential to speed up the pace of intellectual exchange. Still, though, it’s rare to see such a clear-cut example; most of the discussion of the benefits of blogging for academia are hypothetical (academic, one might even say)… what it amuses me to call the “ooh shiny object” argument: Look at this cool new toy! Here are some ideas for how we can use it! Aren’t you as excited about this as I am?

Anyway, I love seeing this actually happen, with bona fine Really Smart People™ having an interesting debate. Not to mention the added value that the blog exchange enables: comments. Other Really Smart People™ pitched in on that discussion: Brewster Kahle, Paul Duguid, John Gilmore, Kristin Antelman, and no doubt other Really Smart People™ whose names I just don’t know. Now that’s airing an intellectual debate in a public forum. That has the potential to really raise the level of the debate.

That word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

Project of Publishers’ Association Is Criticized by Some of Its Members and Open-Access Advocates, from the Chronicle

Mr. Dezenhall’s advice to the publishers’ association, says Nature, included a suggestion that it focus on messages such as “Public access equals government censorship.”

That advice echoes throughout Prism’s Web site in language like this: “Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at risk the integrity of scientific research.”

The site, announced late last month, decries “bureaucratic meddling,” and warns that the peer-review process will be undermined “by compromising the viability of nonprofit and commercial journals that manage and fund it.”

Censorship? That word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (Prism)

ARL’s talking points memo, addressing the nonsense that Prism would like us all to believe.

None, I think, do there embrace

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

Scholars Embrace New Publication Modes in Theory More Than in Practice, Study Finds, from the Chronicle

The report concludes that “the UC faculty largely conform to conventional behavior regarding scholarly communication, such as publishing in traditional venues, but widely express a need for change in the current systems of scholarly communication.”

Well, I can’t say that’s a huge surprise to me. Everyone recognizes that the existing scholarly communication system is dysfunctional, but promotion and tenure processes reward operating within it, and either actively discourage or at a minimum do not reward operating outside of it. I’ve thought for a long time that addressing this issue will require a radical revision to the reward system in academia.

Duke faculty are apparently more workaholic than UNC faculty

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

Study: Duke Is N.C.’s Most Productive Research University, from WRAL

Well, the headline pretty much says it all. UNC-CH comes in second, and I should bloody well hope so. The study is from Academic Analytics, using their Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index.

UBC is not ignoring Google Scholar

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

Five (5) Reasons Why Academic Librarians Can’t Ignore Google Scholar, from the UBC Academic Search – Google Scholar Blog

For my money, reason #2 is the killer: GS will now contain on the order of 800 million to 1 billion citations, thus making it probably one of the largest scholarly citation databases on the planet. Ignoring that is like ignoring the elephant in the room.

And, I would just like to add, interesting that UBC has a blog devoted to GS.

Miss Collegiality

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007

Top Academic Workplaces report, from The Collaborative On Academic Careers in Higher Education

While the majority of junior faculty at America’s colleges and universities are satisfied at work, some institutions are doing extraordinarily well in this area. The survey, administered by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) in 2005, determined that some colleges and universities are “exemplary” on certain key dimensions of faculty work life.

UNC-CH is among the top Research/Doctoral Universities ranked for collegiality!

Open Peer Review Closed

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

Nature Ends Experiment With Open Peer Review, as Responses Are Disappointing, from the Chronicle

…while participation by authors was greater than anticipated, the posted remarks were disappointing. … Nearly half of the papers received no comments at all. Most of the messages made reasonable but minor points. Others, such as “nice work,” were far from useful.

Once a decision had been made to accept or reject a paper, the entire post was removed. “Any comments that were made on the paper before publication would be lost,” he said. “If you’re going to take time to think about and analyze a paper, you want what you say to be in a more permanent record.”

Actually, I entirely disagree with this last point. Blind reviews of papers are not in the permanent record either: there is no reason for the author, the reviewer, or the publisher to archive them, and I doubt that any do. Though actually publishers may, given that much of the publishing lifecycle is managed with some form of content management app, so reviews may be stored; I don’t know. Nevertheless, my understanding of the purpose of open review is that it allows more people to review papers than would do so in a blind review process, not that it allows reviews to be archived.

The Chronicle article links to a report on Nature’s site.

…we believe that this process works as well as any system of peer review can. Furthermore, in our occasional surveys of authors we receive strong signals of satisfaction: in the most recent survey, 74% agreed with the statement that their paper had been improved by the process, 20% felt neutral, while 6% disagreed.

We sent out a total of 1,369 papers for review during the trial period. The authors of 71 (or 5%) of these agreed to their papers being displayed for open comment. Of the displayed papers, 33 received no comments, while 38 (54%) received a total of 92 technical comments.

Grading completed, on leave

Monday, December 18th, 2006

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I have finished all of my grading for the semester and submitted my grades. I am feeling the unbearable lightness of being. I’m especially feeling it since I now don’t have to grade anything for about 9 months. I’m on leave for the Spring 2007 semester, so I may not even set foot in a classroom until next August. Unless I have a meeting in a classroom.

For those of you in my beloved audience unfamiliar with the tenure process, here’s the deal. Every junior faculty member in SILS gets a semester leave prior to submitting our tenure portfolio. This may be a university policy, I don’t actually know. In fact, all 3 of us juniors who started together are taking our leaves next semester. Clearly, great minds think alike. We can schedule this leave at any time pre-tenure, and I tried to be as strategic as I could with regard to the timing of my leave, in terms of both having something to write about and having enough time for what I write to appear in print before I submit my portfolio. I can only assume that Cathy and Diane were thinking the same way.

So, no teaching for 9 months, and minimal committee work. Now all I have to do is finish up two projects in January and one in March, write project reports from these, and then write journal pubs from the reports… continue one project and write two or three pubs from that… write one or two or three theory pieces that I’ve been saving for leave… maybe submit a grant proposal or two in there… Which brings me to my big plan for my leave: to stay home and write a lot.