"Two things happened recently that might, in the long run, make life easier for casual, sessional staff and early career academics. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) was released and the International Council for Open Research and Open Education (ICORE) held its first meeting.
DORA addresses research quality metrics and calls for revision of the use of the Journal Impact Factor. It has strong support from senior academics and research institutes across the world. In Australia (where I write from) The Garvan Institute, the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes, the Bionics Institute, the Burnet Institute and the Victor Chang Institute are all signatories.
While many of the original signatories are medical researchers, DORA isn’t just for the medical research fraternity. The way that research quality metrics are used is an issue of concern to all researchers. DORA says that research assessment should look at the underlying research, not the metrics. The first Excellence of Research in Australia (ERA) exercise showed how journal rankings can be used to compare research across Australia. Once the government does that, universities usually extend the measure to departments, centres and individuals. That can have particularly serious consequences for part-time, sessional and new staff ...
Which brings me to the International Council for Open Research and Open Education (ICORE). ICORE is the first group that is explicitly trying to integrate open research and open education. They talk about open publishing and open data, both of which are important to research and education.In the world of journals, 'open publishing' now means many things to many people. For me, open publishing is a no-brainer. It is based on the proposition that most of the work on journal articles (writing, reviewing, editing) is publicly funded (or not funded at all), so the public should have free and open access to the results. Open access publications have been gaining ground even though, as Professor McDermott points out, 'these new journals often don’t have any impact factor at all.' ICORE also champions open data. So does DORA, in that it calls for the data behind publication metrics to be open and transparent. Open data is a more recent development than open publications, but has quickly been adopted by national funding agencies ..."