PhD students starting out now may not need conventional publications to climb the career ladder by the time they graduate, according to the chair of the European University Association¡¯s Council for Doctoral Education.

Luke Georghiou, who took on the role in mid-October, said that it was likely there would be ¡°significant changes¡± in the research publication model in the coming years.

He added that PhD students are ¡°adept¡± at dealing with new models, such as online peer review.

Professor Georghiou, who is also vice-president for research and innovation at the University of Manchester, has taken over from Melita Kova?evi?, a professor at the University of Zagreb, who served as chair of the committee from 2012 to 2016.??

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The EUA¡¯s Council for Doctoral Education was established in 2008 to help universities develop their PhD programmes and create a voice for doctoral education in Europe and beyond. It has 238 members in 35 countries.

Professor Georghiou said that he was attracted to the position because the council is the ¡°largest and most influential body¡± in Europe on doctoral education and the role offered the opportunity to ¡°forward the agenda for this area¡±.

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Among the issues that he hopes to tackle in the role are those surrounding research integrity, global collaboration skills and the ¡°digital challenge¡±, he told Times Higher Education.

¡°The way in which research is done is changing, [there is] a strong move towards open science,¡± he said.

¡°At the moment, we tend to define academic careers, not necessarily correctly, by the status of journals people are publishing in. If we are in a more open model, we might see other ways of measuring that contribution to knowledge,¡± he added.

¡°The path into the career ladder may not remain in the conventional publication route by the time people starting a PhD now get to the point that they are producing their outputs. I think we will probably see quite significant changes in the publication model,¡± he added.

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He said that PhD students are ¡°often more adept at dealing with these new models¡±, such as online peer review. Doctoral candidates have access to many digital resources, and he will look at what this means for the nature of a doctoral student¡¯s work, he added.

He is also keen to recognise the ¡°critical role¡± that doctoral research plays in advancing knowledge.

¡°There is always an issue with managing the tension between seeing [PhD candidates] as students and seeing them as research colleague[s]. There is a lot of evidence to show they make a critical contribution to research at the highest level and we need to both recognise and foster that,¡± he said.

He added that at Manchester he has set about changing attitudes to doctoral researchers by looking at the contributions they made to highly cited papers for the research excellence framework.

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¡°Once you start exposing these contributions, people start realising how important they are,¡± he said.

holly.else@tesglobal.com