Tenure and journals (RE: Elsevier profit)

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> What can Academia do? Give authors a break and when it comes to tenure
> decisions, promotions, funding proposals, et cetera, judge on intrinsic
> merit of their papers rather than the badge attached to them.

Man, wouldn't it be nice if it were that simple?  The problem is that
tenure decisions are made by committees, and members of those committees
are typically drawn from across the campus and curriculum.  A professor of
French may not be able to judge an article by an astrophysicist on its
intrinsic merits (and vice versa).  The "badge" conferred by publication
in a highly-regarded and refereed journal is a good shorthand way of
communicating the depth and quality of an article to those who are not
equipped to judge for themselves.  It's not a perfect method, of course,
but asking tenure committees to evaluate the publications of tenure
applicants on their intrinsic merits is simply not reasonable.

There's no reason why this same function can't be served by new journals
that are organized outside the territory of the big STM publishing
monoliths, of course -- BioMedCentral is one step in that direction, and
more power to it.

-------------
Rick Anderson
Director of Resource Acquisition
The University Libraries
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rickand@unr.edu