Up and down the ivory tover
Creators: name: Wien, Charlotte
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022

description: 3500 Ord Presentation: Up and down the ivory tower As far as is known, there has never been an ivory tower of such size that humans could climb it and stay in it for extended periods of time. Yet the notion of such has appeared periodically since antiquity. There are references to the tower in both the Bible and the Odyssey, and in medieval and renaissance literature. Even in modern literature, the tower appears on a regular basis. No wonder, because it is a good image: the expensive and exotic ivory with its fine cream color signals something elevated and refined. Correspondingly the tower. It rises above the surface of ordinary things and approaches the sky. From the tower you can maintain an overview without being caught up in the tumultuous events of daily life. In the beautiful surroundings of the ivory tower, you can take care of your esoteric tasks far from the noise and bustle of the real world below. Over the years, ideas about who lived up there have changed: the Virgin Mary is supposed to have lived there in the 12th century. She was followed by various religious celebrities towards the 19th century, after which the tower was occupied by artists and other esthetes. For the past 50 years, the ivory tower has most often been used to describe a place where especially researchers seem to have a strong urge to stay. In that context, the tower is used to describe an elitist and self-sufficient research culture, which is relatively indifferent to the extent to which the conducted research is useful for society, and whether society is informed about the research and its results. In the ivory tower, research is done for the sake of the researchers and the results of the research are communicated to a small, selected, and narrow group of research colleagues. Below the tower, in contrast, citizen science is carried out, presentations are given at community centers, interviews are given to journalists, exhibitions are held, popular science articles are written, all to make the research understandable and digestible outside the tower. Over the past 50 years, scientists have alternately been chased up and down from the ivory tower. Because on the one hand, the current New Public Management paradigm at the universities has required measurable results that could be easily reported to the funders. Such requirement can most easily be obtained through a single-track publication strategy with a focus on publishing research results in international peer-reviewed journals. The reason for this is simple: If researchers only publish their work on one type of platform, then it is fast, cheap and easy to obtain data on their production. This is much more complicated if “anything goes” – if researchers are allowed to publish on any platform they like. The publishing industry has underpinned this development by making data on publication behaviors of researchers widely available to university management. However, many of the international peer-reviewed journals are neither accessible nor readable outside the ivory tower. On the other hand, university laws, journalists, the general population, politicians, together with a large group of socially committed researchers, regularly argue that activities held below the tower should also count on the researcher cv. You cannot blame the researchers who have entrenched themselves up in the tower: if you are a researcher under the current paradigm where it is largely only the number of publications and citations in international peer-reviewed journals that counts in relation to promotions and job opportunities, then there is simply no time and no incentives to mend the space below the tower. But there are many indications that changes are on the way. Because the single-string publishing system has brought countless ills with it. Including cheating with citations, trading in authorships, peer reviewer fatigue and the establishment of a para-academic industry consisting of amongst others the scientific publishers and university rankings that milk the universities for tax-payer money. The business model of the scientific publishers is well known and much criticized by librarians and researchers. The publishers receive their raw material – our articles – for free. They make us do the processing – that is the editing and peer review – for free too, and then they sell our own research back to the university libraries at constantly increasing license fees and constantly increasing Article Processing Charges. But what is even more fascinating about the whole thing is that the academic publishing industry has established a system where they both own our publications and the data that are being used to calculate the most generally accepted performance measures like h-index, citation rates and Journal Impact Factor. In this way the academic publishing industry is holding academia hostage. If they have both our publications and the data used to assess us, there is no way escaping. The only thing we can do is to pay our APCs and annual subscription fees. Less well known but quite similar is the business model of the global university rankings. They were born in China in the 00s. The regime had launched an ambitious education and research policy, and wanted to show the world that the China was making an academic frog leap. Therefore, they created ARWU a dynamic ranking list so that everyone could see how China moved up while the rest of the world consequently moved down. The idea of such lists fitted like a glove with the New Public Management winds that seriously ravaged the academic world in the early 00s. The Chinese had put together a kind of compound measure consisting of data that were relatively easy to obtain: number of publications, citation rates, student evaluations, employee satisfaction, amount of external funding, degree of internationalization and so on. Each data set was assigned a percentage weight. This method came to form the subsequent ranking lists. It sounds enticing, but as always, the devil lurks in the detail: It is highly disputed what these data indicate. For this reason, the lists are continuously criticized. But paradoxically, it has only made it worse, because an interesting distillation process emerged from the discussions: The most conscientious ranking agencies fold their cards in recognition of their own inadequacy, while the others 'ride out the storm' by slightly adjusting the weighting of the various data sets and then continue as if nothing had happened. I will zoom in on one list Times Higher Education. It was originally a supplement to the newspaper 'The Times', published by the company TES Global, which provides various 'services' to the education and training sector. In 2021, TES Global was sold to Canadian Onex for a sum not less than 5 billion EUROs. TES Global has a gross profit of almost 90 million EURO per year. Over the past several years, earnings have increased by 4% annually. What THE offers is a freely accessible database containing information about the worlds universities. It is widely used by students who seek information on where to study and faculty looking for job opportunities and collaborations and last but certainly not least politicians and decision makers distributing funds for research. Times Higher Education’s income stems a palette consisting of web advertisements for universities, academic jobs, ranking of search results and optimization of searches. And from consulting services to the universities that want to climb up the rankings. A three-hour visit by such a consultant cost about 20.000 EURO. In this way, the ranking agencies have created a financial perpetual motion machine: for every time a university moves up the list, another one moves down and will therefore feel encouraged to hire a consultant to regain its position. Because there are big money at stake for the universities. Temple University Business School offers an online MBA. In November 2021, the dean of the Temple University Business School in the US was convicted of having tampered with the students' exam data to get a better ranking. While the schools ranking was high it received approx. 330 students annually, when it was removed from the rankings because of the scandal, student enrollment dropped to approx. 100. Each student pays 50.000 EUROs for the program. Long story short: An industry that parasites on the current New Public Management inspired managerial paradigm, where quick fix numbers are in demand as proxies for research quality has emerged. It has grown out of and thrives upon the current single-track publishing system. The good news is that this system is currently under tremendous pressure, so much that it is reasonable to assume that change is inevitable: The research libraries battle to pay the constantly increasing subscription fees, the researchers struggle with the research funders to grant article processing charges that are far beyond the actual production costs of the academic publishing industry. The journal editors find it increasingly hard to find qualified peer reviewers because the qualified ones suffers from reviewer fatigue. So they end up settling for unqualified reviewers, making the whole process of peer review increasingly dubious. And last but certainly not least, there is a growing awareness of the perverse incentives created by the focus on publishing in international journals. It is therefore good news that on July 8th this year an agreement that serves to reform the current methods for assessing researcher and research quality have been finalized. The initiative comes from the EU Commission and the process has been short and effective. From March to November 2021, investigative work took place, which led to a so-called 'Scoping report'. https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/36ebb96c-50c5-11ec-91ac-01aa75ed71a1/language-en Based on this report the drafting the agreement started on January 18th 2022. During the spring 2022 the European and other international research institutions were invited to contribute to the text. Approximately 350 institutions signed up for this in support for the agreement. The list can be found on this link. https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2022-07/ec_rtd_call-for-interest-ra.pdf The agreement’s vision is quite clear and straight forward “ […] that the assessment of research, researchers and research organisations recognises the diverse outputs, practices and activities that maximise the quality and impact of research. This requires basing assessment primarily on qualitative judgement, for which peer-review is central, supported by responsible use of quantitative indicators.” What should be highlighted is the recognition of diverse outputs and focus on qualitative assessment: This is good news for researchers of Humanities and Social Sciences who due to the current publishing paradigm has been largely deprived of incentives for participating in the societal debates, essential to these disciplines and to societal developments below the ivory tower. The vision of the agreement is promising and could be an important step towards pulling the rug under business models of the ranking agencies and the scientific publishing industry. How? Well simply because it is the use of simplistic quantitative measures for assessing research quality, that is the basis of their business models and the data for such calculations are easy to obtain _because_ of the single-track publication strategy where only double-blind peer reviewed articles count. So a new system where publishing on different kinds of platforms are encouraged and where more weight are put on qualitative assessment will in the long run undermine the current paradigm. The institutions that sign the agreement must implement ten core commitments of which five seem particularly relevant in this context. First of all they must as stated in the vision statement “Recognise the diversity of contributions to, and careers in research according to the needs and the nature of the research” And again inaccordance with the vision statement they must “Base research assessment primarily on qualitative evaluation for which peer-review is central, supported by responsible use of quantitative indicator.” They should: “Abandon the inappropriate uses in research assessment of journal- and publication-based metrics, in particular the inappropriate uses of journal impact factor (JIF) and h-index” Note here that the agreement still allows for the use of traditional metrics but aims at establishing better standards for when to use them and when not to. The signing institutions should: Avoid the use of rankings of research organisations in research assessment And finally they must “Commit resources to reforming research assessment as is needed to achieve the organisational changes.” There is hope that the all the approx. 350 European research institutions and international organizations that have expressed an interest in the reform work will sign the agreement during 2022. But if we truly want to reform the current system then more than a signed agreement will be needed. We need a genuine shift of managerial paradigm and a cultural change in Academia, and both are prone to meet resistance. Numerous research careers are built on the current system. Researchers have been recruited over the last 20 years on their ability to produce international journal articles and not on their ability to do academic multitasking. Qualitative research assessment is expensive and time consuming and takes away time that could have been spent on researching. Politicians and decisionmakers have been relieved of the burden of studying long research assessment reports and it has made their life a lot easier to outsource the assessment of research quality to peers at the international journals, and then to determine research quality as a sort of sum of the institution’s international publications and their citations. If the new reform is successful, this will naturally become much more complicated, more expensive, and time-consuming. But will, in return, give laypeople better access to research and its results and, in the long run, contribute to making research more present in everyday life outside the universities. Previous attempts to do this have often run aground on how difficult it is for us researchers to disseminate on many platforms. But the good news is that the publication pressure of the previous years has contributed to the researchers themselves creating new forms of collaboration that could help them shifting towards a multi-facetted publication system. Researchers have moved further away from a culture of 'lonely cowboys' towards the formation of research groups that collaborate across disciplinary, institutional, and national boundaries. This could be the key to the realization of a different, flexible, and multi-facetted publishing system, because research groups can be put together like cycling teams: Everyone on the team is strong riders, with some being strongest in the mountains, others in headwinds and others thriving as water carriers. Establishing research groups with an eye for talent diversity, it will be possible to inhabit and populate the area below the ivory tower and all its floors. Thank you for your time and attention