The Prestige Economy of Academia

Helsinki. 5th November 2015.

A book

Dr. Martin Paul Eve, Birkbeck, University of London

Why do we publish humanities research?

To be read. To be assessed. To collaborate?

A research paper

Dissemination: Quality Control, Validation and Space-Time Compression

  • Dissemination of work
  • Preservation of record
  • Footnotes and scholarly genealogy (vs. science?)
  • Labour of reading: reading-avoidance techniques
  • Dissemination at a distance
    • Difference to conferences?

Assessment

Symbolic Economy

The Symbolic Economy Maps onto the Real Economy

Library Economy

Reading and assessment are in conflict

  • Drive to produce ever more work
  • Hyper-inflationary price increases
  • Micro-monopolies
  • New forms don't fit

Dual crises of supply and demand

For assessment to work, we must restrict publication volume to size of academic job market: predicated on teaching

Three Problems

Three Problems: researcher access, public access and re-use

Problem 1: Researcher access

See under "serials crisis".

Problem 2: Public access

  • Increasingly educated populace
  • Institutional missions to benefit society
    • Or what is a university?
  • The academy becomes irrelevant
    • Especially the humanities

Problem 3: Restrictive Re-Use Rights

  • Photocopying licenses
    • Even for teaching
  • Text mining/derivatives prohibited
  • Inclusion in Wikipedia and other resources
  • Community translation

Open Access (OA)

  • Peer-reviewed research
  • Free to read online
  • Permission to re-use

  • Gold: at publisher/source
  • Green: institutional/subject repository

  • Gratis: free to read
  • Libre: free to re-use
Background image © PLOS. Used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

But the prestige economy makes collaborating harder

  • Culture of scarcity-thinking
  • In a digital world of abundance
  • Slow evolution of assessment paradigms
  • Rhetoric of "Excellence"
  • Individualist thinking (paper authorship in Big Science)

Abstract idea of "collaboration"

  • "We want to collaborate"
  • But on what?
  • Institutional affiliation/pressure
  • Authorship as proxy for activity
  • But there is hope...

The End

Thank you!

Presentation licensed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. All institutional images excluded from CC license. Available to view online at http://meve.io/FinlandWorkshop2015.