It's time for academics to take back control of research journals | Higher Education Network | The Guardian

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-05-25

Summary:

"'Publish or perish' has long been the mantra of academics seeking to make a success of their research career. Reputations are built on the ability to communicate something new to the world. Increasingly, however, they are determined by numbers, not by words, as universities are caught in a tangle of management targets composed of academic journal impact factors, university rankings and scores in the government’s research excellence framework.

The chase for metricised success has been further exacerbated by the takeover of scholarly publishing by profit-seeking commercial companies, which pose as partners but no longer seem properly in tune with academia. Evidence of the growing divergence between academic and commercial interests is visible in the secrecy around negotiations on subscription and open access charges. It’s also clear from the popularity among academics of the controversial site Sci-Hub, which has made over 60m research articles freely available on the internet. Over-worked researchers could be forgiven for thinking that the time-honoured mantra has morphed to 'publish, and perish anyway'."

Link:

https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/may/25/its-time-for-academics-to-take-back-control-of-research-journals

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.journals

Date tagged:

05/25/2017, 20:11

Date published:

05/25/2017, 16:11