Plan S: learned societies have a lot to lose
In the article “Plan S may ‘consolidate power of big publishers’, ?academy warns” (News, 15 March, www.timeshighereducation.com), David Sweeney, executive director of Research England and co-chair of the Plan S implementation committee, is reported as saying that “there has to be some discussion about whether these services are wanted”, which appears to refer to the comment by Julia Mortimer, journals director at Bristol University Press, that “the amount [of work] we put in to help shape articles is far beyond peer review and it comes with a cost”.
As a journal editor, I entirely agree with her. The editorial process is not something that just happens, and yet there has been, through the debates over open access, a refusal to accept the role of journals in shaping (and often nurturing) the work of contributors.
Sweeney doubtless feels that just placing ill-written, often ill-thought-through papers in a university repository is enough. He may be right, but if so, I conclude that he does not believe in quality, merely volume. This may work with largely technical papers reporting results in the STEM subjects, but it will not work in the humanities and social sciences. The overall argument is largely correct, though: once Sweeney has put the learned societies out of business, there will be greater recourse to the conglomerate publishers.
Richard Hoyle
Editor,?Agricultural History Review
A safe space ceded
In times of pussy-grabbing politicians, the persistent gender pay gap and the #MeToo movement, it is a questionable choice to remove safe spaces that women have long fought for. And yet, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, the last mature women’s college in the UK, wants to do exactly that (“Women-only Cambridge college to admit men from 2021”, News, 14 March). Without holding an actual conversation with alumnae and students, the college has decided to open up for the admission of men in 2021 and to lower the admissions age to 18.
The college justifies this move by saying that its mission of providing access to under-represented groups such as women and mature students has been accomplished. This flies in the face of the experience of most alumnae and also of statistics, which testify to the lack of women in top-level jobs. After the introduction of tripled student tuition fees in 2010, the college showed no radical action to assist students to meet the new challenges, making a mockery of its claim to widen access to under-privileged groups regardless of gender.
We are beyond belief shocked and grieved.
Florence H
Via timeshighereducation.com
Misplaced targets
The one-size-fits-all performance targets and expectations at the heart of the story “Strike action over ‘unrealistic’ REF targets looms at Liverpool” (News, 14 March) do not take into account the significant variations between disciplines and even subject areas within a discipline in terms of publishing practices and opportunities.
In my subject area, publication in any of the (US) top journals is now almost impossible without a US-based co-author and the use of quantitative methods and a very narrow paradigm. This is important because in my discipline, the assessment of individual “outputs” is often gauged from journal rankings despite the research excellence framework guidelines suggesting that a work should be judged on its merit alone.
Further, it can take more than two years to get through the review process of even middling journals – not counting the time needed for actually doing the research and drafting and polishing a paper before submission. With rejection rates of above 95 per cent, there is no guarantee of a paper’s being eventually published even after the review.
The naivety of the assembly-line model of research that underpins such performance targets shows that those devising them are not conversant in the vagaries and pitfalls of research, writing and publishing. Too much of this is dominated by the lab sciences and their mode of enquiry.
Of course, the corporate bean counters and metrics monkeys who run academia now do not care about such subtleties. They rejoice in having been provided with yet another stick with which they can whack academics and which allows them to “cut out the dead wood” who do not produce papers (which they mistake for research or scholarship) like sausages in a sausage factory.
An Academic Somewhere
Via timeshighereducation.com
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