Re: Guardian on research publishing

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

Interestingly, this critic does not mention the one approach that 
is likely to be effective in solving the problem he notes, viz., 
limiting the number of papers that a scholar can submit to a 
promotion-and-tenure committee. That forces scholars to select 
what they believe to be their most valuable contributions to 
scholarship, undercuts the incentive to waste time publishing 
many more papers than the number than can be submitted, and 
limits what those on the committee need to read to make their 
assessments. This approach has been implemented in a number of 
places, such as Harvard Medical School as i recall, but it should 
be much more widely adopted.

Sandy Thatcher


>The Guardian has a piece on the problems of research publishing
>(part of what it appears to be an ongoing conversation at the
>paper):
>
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/05/publish-perish-peer-review-science?CMP=twt_gu
>
>The essay calls for post-publication peer review.  The author's
>position is that the crisis in research publishing has come about
>because people are publishing material when they do not in fact
>have anything to say.
>
>Joe Esposito