Editorial
While performing his military service, my son must have learned to fold and store his clean laundry with precise edges, tellekanter (counting edges) stacked in perfect alignment on designated shelves so any inspecting officer could simply run a finger down the edges to check that the requisite number of clean shirts, underpants, socks, towels, etc. were present and accounted for. Immediately on demission he forgot this skill. In civilian discourse, the term tellekanter is associated with pedantry bordering on insanity, with a compulsion for order so strong as to be a compulsive dis-order. Thus it must be in self-ironic jest that the Norwegian Research Council (NFR) has given the title “Tellekanter” to one page of the forms we with NFR grants must submit for our annual reports. There we are to report the number (and only the number; not the titles, authors, content, length, journal, publisher etc.) of our project’s publications in various categories in the past year – articles in refereed journals, articles in other journals, chapters in anthologies, books, textbooks, invited lectures, conference papers, … and so on down the shelves.
NFR can allow itself this self-irony. The counting of publications is a well-known ritual in academe, and in this particular context the ritual is without formal consequences. In other contexts, however, there are serious formalized consequences. Our departmental budgets are now comprised of three elements, all of them consisting of tellekanter – the number of courses of varying intensity levels (i.e. formats requiring different teacher:student ratios) in our instructional programs, the number of passing-grade credits we produce, and the number of publications we produce in various status categories (articles in refereed journals, articles in other journals, chapters in anthologies, books, textbooks, … and so on down the shelves). Logically, our departments must therefore hire those who draw students, pass students, and publish. Of these, our ability to publish is apparently deemed easiest to predict by counting. Thus when we apply for positions, tenure, promotions, and raises, we are instructed to structure our CVs according to the same shelving system, and evaluating committees are instructed first and foremost to run their fingers down the shelves counting publications on each and calculating the rate of publications per year.
Furthermore, once hired, we are encouraged to act strategically. After all, departmental budgets affect even those of us on tenure. If budgets are tight, we have less money to hire research and teaching assistants, to buy books, to replace our aging computers, to travel to conferences, etc. So even those of us with tenure, though no longer perishable must continue to publish. And we must not only publish, but must publish in the right places. The shelf-counts carry different values in the budget system. In Norway, the top shelf (the foremost 20% of refereed journals in a given field) counts two points, other refereed journals one point, and other publications fractions of a point. That “top 20%” is also identified by counting on shelves. Roughly speaking, a national committee starts with the most-cited ISI-abstracted journals in the field and works their way down the ISI shelf until they reach a cumulative total of 20% of published articles in that field’s journals. Since our budgets are competitive within a zero-sum “game” (i.e. we compete with all other departments for a proportion of the university funds on the national budget, as opposed to gaining some fixed sum per publication), a recent departmental memo instructed us to act strategically by publishing not only in our own field’s top journals, but also in other fields’ journals. A publication in another field’s journal effectively counts double – two points to us, and two points “stolen” from them.
Of course, all of this also leads to less explicit, often unintended consequences. It probably changes how and where we publish. Since journals have different preferences, that also affects what we write. It may change how editors choose among well-reviewed manuscripts (Is our primary goal to provide reading for our field, or to provide publication points?). It certainly changes the dynamics of the journal market, probably also other qualities of our discourses. In other words, it changes us as scientists and as a community of scientists. For us in science studies, it even changes the dynamics of our object of study. Like Schroedinger checking on the cat, we affect the publication data we observe by the very act of observing them … and that effect is magnified because powerful others are observing our observations. Furthermore, we ourselves are the cat. If our discourse decays, we die.
As editor of EASST Review, where am I going with this theme? I’m trying to come to grips with the implications of this for our thoughts regarding taking the Review on-line and opening up for peer-reviewed articles. What might the consequences of that move be for discourse within the field? Is a fractional-point journal nevertheless in some way invaluable, and would that value be lost if we move up a shelf? Might we elevate another journal to the top shelf by filling in from below? Would there nevertheless be manuscripts left for us worth our reviewers’ and readers’ time? Might we get more manuscripts than now? (As of now, filling in issue can be a struggle!) Might our readers pay us more attention? (As of now, we get very little response!) Can we provide a level of service that might contribute to maintaining a constructive discourse within the field, or would we be adding to writers’ frustrations and tensions? Would we add to the field’s pool of reviewers, or merely add to the workload on those reviewers the field has?
Four other items in this issue focus on this theme: One is a commentary by Aksel Tjora, ignited by what he experienced as an unacceptably slow and disrespectful review process. In her response, Ulrike Felt, editor of Science, Technology & Human Values, describes how pressure to publish has created an unsustainable situation for editors and reviewers. The third is a report on member responses to our recent on-line survey about the future of the Review. In addition, note that the use of quantitative indicators was among the aspects of health research management studied by Inge van der Weijden in a recent dissertation presented in this issue. We invite you to read and comment on all of these texts.