Winner, Best Paper Ever

Hi Rebecca,

It’s so good to hear from you, and thank you so much for sharing your work here. And congratulations!

At the risk of sounding too gushy or hyperbolic, I think this is one of the best (if not THE best) papers I’ve ever read on any topic in this space. For all OSIers (and beyond) interested in how we might go about reforming the culture of communication in academia (particularly in HSS)---a central theme this group has recognized---this HuMetrics report should be required reading. Please do carve out an hour to give it a read (it’s only 40 pages long---with an additional 180+ pages of references and appendices).

I won’t attempt to re-summarize the report here---the report’s abstract already does a good job of this---but I will attach a few of the more salient (and, BTW, beautifully written) passages that really caught my eye:

“The responsibility for making change in systems of RPT and evaluation more generally seems at once to belong to everyone and no one. Departments bow to disciplinary convention or the bylaws laid out by deans and provosts; deans and provosts swear that the departments themselves set the standards by which they are evaluated. A refusal of agency for fear of failure — and of consequences for the attempt (such as plummeting university rankings, loss of grant money, and so on) — results in a foundering machine aware of its defects but unwilling and unable to fix them, with the weight of these defects coming down hardest on the most vulnerable members of the academy.” (p. 2)

“Whether it is because of willful ignorance about how tenure and promotion processes are determined, unacknowledged investment in the idea that merit equates to success in a hierarchical system, a feeling of being overcome by the enormity of a decades-long problem, or a trepidation to poke an already irascible bear, it seems that no one feels that they have sufficient agency, authority, or energy to change the system, although there is broad recognition that the system is broken. There is a tendency for administrative leaders at one level of the promotion and tenure process to point to leaders leveraging power at a different level of the hierarchy as the source of the resistance to change.”(p. 11)

“There is little incentive for administrative leaders or pre-tenure faculty to advocate for substantive changes to the promotion-and-tenure process given the time horizon such changes would require. Developing long-term, strategic interventions in the tenure and promotion process under these circumstances is very difficult as administrative leaders have little incentive to make meaningful change while pre-tenure faculty yearn for clear expectations and stability.” (p. 21)

“The prestige economy relies on rankings, metrics, and practices that punish those institutions who might move first to change the manner in which scholarship is evaluated and rewarded.” (p. 22)

“If there is a three-legged stool for the tenure and promotion process, the legs are not equal in length or strength. Research, as understood and measured in narrow ways, is the most important of the legs, while teaching is an uneven second, and service a very weak third. This makes for a very unbalanced and precarious stool indeed!” (p. 23)

“In the interviews we held over the past 18 months, we experienced the stress, strain, and anxiety of the liminal space we currently inhabit. We heard the exhaustion, the frustration, the exasperation, and the alienation. But we also heard the hope, the creativity, the deep and enduring love of learning, and the abiding commitment to creating a more just and equitable ecosystem of scholarly engagement. Higher education stands at a crossroads. The policies and practices that shape scholarly life are not aligned with the core values for which higher education institutions profess to stand or with the personal values many in higher education hope to enact through their work. The alienation, frustration, exasperation, and exhaustion our colleagues voiced throughout the interviews may have been amplified by the pandemic and the reckoning with racism, but they can ultimately be traced to the misalignment between the values we profess to hold and the practices that shape contemporary academic life. Without direct action to redress this misalignment, we will remain unable to tap into the hope, creativity, and joy that are the catalysts of genuine transformation. Through our conversations we identified opportunities for intervention in quotidian interactions, small policy changes, slight shifts of emphasis, and innovative structural adjustments. We learned that substantive institutional transformation is, in fact, possible — and that each of us involved in the higher education endeavor, however exhausted we may feel, can be an agent of the change we envision if we remain committed to putting our values into intentional practice in every encounter we have, in every decision we make, in every policy we create, and in every practice we undertake. There is enormous creative potential for transformative change in higher education in the recommendations we have outlined here. Many, as you will note, do not require tectonic shifts in institutional structures but rather adjustments in how we put the values we say we care most deeply about into concrete action in the habits, practices, and policies that shape the way scholarship is pursued. Each intervention moves us closer to living up to the values so many of us sought to embody in our decision to dedicate our lives to higher education; together, over time, the changes we suggest will have a broader transformative effect. Only when higher education lives up to the values for which it has long advocated will the university be in a position to address the grand challenges of our time with new creative energy, integrity, and grace.” (p. 40)

Going forward, as this group (or more accurately, OSIers who elect to engage in this process) attempts to draft open scholarship policies that work for researchers first and foremost, I expect your work will be hugely informative and provide a substantial bedrock for what these broad, flexible, inclusive, and sustainable policies might look like.

Thank you again for sharing!

With best regards,

Glenn

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)

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Indeed. Hopefully not. But several of the fundamental drivers here (for example, the publishing incentives and choices researchers face) are rooted in the prestige and reward structures Rebecca and her colleagues highlight in their paper. So, some amount of movement will be needed. We (UNESCO, cOAlition S, UCal, etc.) can create new publishing solutions, but these won’t take root if they don’t align with what researchers want and need. That’s why---to shamelessly plug how this all fits in with OSI’s 2022 to-do list---it’s important to build from the ground up with these solutions instead of continuing to assume that our grande mocha APC with zero embargo and extra data is what researchers ordered. As we’re seeing in spades now with how APCs are closing off publishing from the Global South (at least in the case of Elsevier’s mirror journals---more evidence here would be helpful before getting too panicked), the wrong solutions can harm the very thing we’re all trying to help.

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