On Learning from Peer Review | Extending ‘Peers’ to Include non-Academics

Posted on May 27, 2013 by jbrittholbrook

Absent from the many analyses and discussions of scientific peer review are two intangible but very important byproducts: 1) feedback to the applicant and 2) exposure of the reviewers to new hypotheses, techniques, and approaches. Both of these phenomena have a virtual mentoring effect that helps move science forward. Such learning can occur as a consequence of both manuscript review and grant application review, but the review of grant applications, by its very nature, is more iterative and impacts the direction in which research moves very early in the investigation.

Opinion: Learning from Peer Review | The Scientist Magazine®.

There are at least two funding agencies that recognize this phenomenon in the actual design of their peer review processes, so they deserve mention. The idea is to include non-academics as peer reviewers precisely to effect the sort of co-production of knowledge the article above suggests.

The first is STW, the Dutch Technology Foundation. I outline their peer review process in this article, available Open Access.

The second is the US Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program. Details of their peer review process are available on their website here.

San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment — Well done, DORA

Posted on May 23, 2013 by jbrittholbrook

Anyone interested in research assessment should read this with care.

DORA.

It’s been presented in the media as an insurrection against the use of the Journal Impact Factor — and the Declaration certainly does … ehr … declare that the JIF shouldn’t be used to assess individual researchers or individual research articles. But this soundbite shouldn’t be used to characterize the totality of DORA, which is much broader than that.

Honestly, it took me a few days to go read it. After all, it’s uncontroversial in my mind that the JIF shouldn’t be used in this way. So, an insurrection against it didn’t strike me as all that interesting. I’m all for the use of altmetrics and — obviously, given our recent Nature correspondence (free to read here) — other inventive ways to tell the story of our impact.

But, and I cannot stress this enough, everyone should give DORA a careful read. I’m against jumping uncritically on the bandwagon in favor of Openness in all its forms. But I could find little reason not to sign, and myriad reasons to do so.

Well done, DORA.

Altmetrics for the Nature correspondence on negative metrics of impact

Posted on May 22, 2013 by jbrittholbrook

Fascinating.

Article details.

Impact from beyond the grave: how to ensure impact grows greater with the demise of the author | Impact of Social Sciences

Posted on May 17, 2013 by jbrittholbrook

We all know — don’t we? — that our H-index can only grow with the passage of time. But Geoffrey Alderman has a plan, an impact plan, to ensure that our impact keeps growing in other ways, as well.

This is funny, and I’m sure Professor Alderman is poking fun at the very idea of impact. Nevertheless, there’s a serious angle to this. Many of us, whether we want to admit it or not, are involved in academia in an effort to change the world. And many of us are well aware that we may have to wait to be born posthumously, as Nietzsche said.

In any case, while we play the long game, it’s nice to have diversions such as this, occasionally:

Impact from beyond the grave: how to ensure impact grows greater with the demise of the author | Impact of Social Sciences.

A call for the philosopher librarian

Posted on May 17, 2013 by jbrittholbrook

This is a reblog of something I originally posted here. Thinking of the philosopher-technologist today recalled it to mind.

Librarian Dave Puplett discusses the role of the librarian.

Academics must be applauded for making a stand by boycotting Elsevier. It’s time for librarians to join the conversation on the future of dissemination, but not join the boycott. | Impact of Social Sciences.

Interesting to view the librarian as midwife — very Socratic. At the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity (CSID), we’ve discussed the possibility of the philosopher bureaucrat before, along with what constitutes ‘real’ philosophy. What about the philosopher librarian?

A librarian should be well positioned to affect scholarly communication — for instance, she may well be involved with Open Access policies, such as the one we recently adopted at UNT, or be an advocate for them at her institution.

In the latter situation, the librarian will have to convince the university community that an Open Access policy is in the university’s interest. In the former situation, unless the existing policy is mandatory, it will be up to the librarian not only to disseminate information about the policy to the researchers at the institution, but also to make a case that those researchers ought to participate. In other words, the librarian will have to be able to construct an effective argument — the classic skill of the philosopher. Either the librarian will have to become a philosopher, or a philosopher will have to become the librarian.

For our other posts on Open Access, click here.

Philosopher Technologists

Posted on May 17, 2013 by jbrittholbrook

So, I found Amber today on Twitter. I forget exactly how. Anyway, she was, or so I thought, an IT person saying philosophically interesting things. Now, she has revealed that, in fact, SHE’S A PHILOSOPHER! I should have known.

fragments of amber

I’ve been thinking a lot about how my philosophy degree has shaped my thinking, and how many people I meet in my workworld that have philosophy degrees. In fact I was discussing that with David Mossley just recently.

I’ve been forming a little theory about why that is, and this evening I just read a post by Professor Peter Bradley, a philosopher about why there are not very many visible philosophers in the “digital humanities” field. It didn't quite match my perception of the digital space, so I got to thinking I might write this post after all.

Way back I heard an episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage on BBC Radio 4, where they were debating philosophers vs scientists. It struck me as rather a “what did the philosophers ever do for us”? question.

In everyday language, philosophy is seen as:

Complacent: being philosophical about it =…

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Academics: bring your own identity

Posted on May 17, 2013 by jbrittholbrook

A good rundown of some of the technology available to academics (including altacademics) that raises the question of academic identity. Nice to see an IT person questioning this idea. Librarians also tend to be aware of this stuff — as they should be. I think both university librarians and IT professionals can help reach out to academics to spread the word.

Amber at Warwick: academic technology

You’re probably familiar with Linked-in: it is a profile service for many sorts of people and I’ve noticed that outside the UK it is used for academic networking too, more so than inside the UK, at least in the circles I move in. It has 225 million members. You might not know about Academia.edu (nearly 3 million) and researchgate (2.8 million). They are examples of social networks for academics. Google scholar allows academics to manage their publications profile. Flavours.me is one of several personal profile tools that allows you to pull together identity over many platforms.

Now comes ORCID, a researcher identifier scheme increasingly being adopted by big publishers and third party web services alike. In it’s own words:

“ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated…

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Do multi-year contracts, sans tenure, prevent academic freedom?

Posted on May 9, 2013 by jbrittholbrook

Florida Polytechnic U. to offer multi-year contracts, not tenure, to faculty | Inside Higher Ed.

Reading this, it’s interesting to see some of the views about the connection between tenure and academic freedom. Which conception do most share of what constitutes academic freedom? I’d say it’s the negative sense of freedom from interference.

My question would be not what are we free from, but what are we free for, if we have tenure? The problem with so many tenured professors is not that they face interference, but that they do so little with tenure. Too many see tenure as a laissez faire policy, but then they act to lazy to do anything interesting once they get it.

I note, also, the idea that top quality faculty will not go to FPU. What this reveals is a deep-seated prejudice against folks not on the tenure track.