Academics Not Productive Enough? Sack 'em

ananyo writes "One hundred academics at the University of Sydney, Australia, have this week been told they will lose their jobs for not publishing frequently enough. The move is part of a wider cost-cutting plans designed to pay for new buildings and refurbishment to the university. Letters were posted to researchers on Monday 20 February, informing them their positions were being terminated because they hadn't published at least four 'research outputs' over the past three years. It is unclear which research fields the academics work in. Another 64 academics were told they had a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position, he said."

Comments

That'll work well.

[sethstorm]

So if they were to publish more to make up for a quota, wouldn't that'd lower the quality a bit?

Re:That'll work well.

[Samantha Wright]

Yes. Any questions?

Re:That'll work well.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Of course not. How could quality be going down if the metric we are using because it is easy and convenient is going up? That would be difficult to model and therefore unthinkable. Why, it might even require me to have some subject-matter knowledge in the areas that my human resources do! I am way too focused on lining my bookshelf with copies of books about management fads for shit like that.

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd recommend a study on it. Seriously, right now unless you want to lose your job.

Re:That'll work well.

[TheRaven64]

In general, I'd agree, but publishing just over one paper per year shouldn't be hard for any moderately competent researcher. At the very least, they can publish something saying 'we tried this approach, and now we can show why it's a bad idea'.

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

But which is more productive - writing up "this failed" for publication or getting to work on the next project? I'm a little biased here in that I'm a mathematician, so negative results are generally of the form "I wasn't able to show what I wanted to but still believe the conjecture is true/now believe it to be false.

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck getting something like that published for example in Computer Science. Reviewers won't even bother reading past the abstract. "No significant contribution", "nothing novel", etc.

Re:That'll work well.

[elrous0]

"Publish or Perish" has been a part of academia for as long as I can remember (in the U.S. anyway). When I was in academia, it was the ONLY way to get tenure. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of bad stuff like profs cooking numbers and fabricating sources just to get an article out of it and insisting on putting their names as co-authors on all their grad students' papers (even if they didn't write a word).

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Researchers only publish positive results. Makes for real good science.

http://xkcd.com/882/

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest they quickly create the following papers supported and published by all academics at the U.S.A.
1) Does publishing more papers lower their quality?
2) Is using quantity a good metric to judge academics?
3) Does using quantity as a metric produce more useless papers?
4) Do professors and academics in teaching-only position lose touch with their field and does it affect their teaching abilities?
5) profit?

Re:That'll work well.

[masternerdguy]

Be sure to republish with a new cover and changed word yearly.

Re:That'll work well.

[Coryoth]

It's my opinion that if you work in academia and don't publish at least one paper a year you should probably be doing something else(either to another field which leads to results, not just food for thought or to another job).

Yeah, I hear that guy Andrew Wiles spent 7 years not publishing any papers. Oxford stupidly put up with that instead of canning has ass at year 2, and they've gotten nothing but disrepute ever since. I mean has anyone ever heard of Wiles? Has he published anything of note at all? Oxford definitely would have been better off without him.

Re:That'll work well.

[hvm2hvm]

In the short run you are better just continuing with the next approach. However if all the people keep publishing said "failures" and constantly look for other researchers' failures then in the long run, everyone does more research because they know what attempts are going to fail beforehand.

Ideally, researchers would also publish the attempt when they get started on it s.t. there aren't too many people working on the same approach but then you need to factor in the fact that an approach might be to tough for a researcher in which case he should let someone else do it. (Of course, this also assumes that all people are honest and their skills perfectly quantifiable which is obviously wrong)

Re:That'll work well.

[godrik]

I agree with you. The point of OP remains. forcing people to have a publication count won't solve anything. Close to the deadline, people will start submitting crappy papers until they pass the quota.

You can not put a simple counting rule to administrate people whose job is to understand, develop and bypass models. Researcher are the less suitable people for being subject to this type of rules.

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about:

First year: "We have built up this experiment, and we are now collecting data."
Second year: "We are still in the process of collecting data; up to now we haven't seen anything interesting."
Third year: "We are still in the process of collecting data; up to now we haven't seen anything interesting."

No journal would publish any of that.

However, the following would make the headlines if the researcher hadn't been fired due to three years without publication:
Fourth year: "We have proof for superluminal supersymmetric magnetic monopoles!"

Yes, I'm exaggerating. But the point is, some things just need time.

The right thing to do if someone has few publications is not saying "sorry, you've got too few publications, you're fired" but to ask "you've got very few publications, what are you doing?" And only if he can't give a good answer to that, firing him is justified.

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a very old saying specific to this: Publish or perish.

Re:That'll work well.

[crmarvin42]

This isn't necessarily an "either/or" senario. Writting up negative results is just as important as writing up positive ones. That way other researchers in the field know what not to try. My bias comes from the life sciences, where a lack of expected response to a product is just as important as its presence. You may not want to go out and write up a full journal article, and instead go the route of presenting an abstract at a relevent conference, but that still counts as a 'research output' most places, even if it is of lesser impact than a journal article.

We academics are hired to perform a job, and as much of a PITA as publication can be, it is one of the major job requirements. Not doing a part of your job well enough is definitely grounds for termination, assuming the academic didn't have some sort of tenure protections.

Re:That'll work well.

[hal2814]

Did you ever do research that wasn't heavily directed by your professor? I haven't. I've never listed my prof as a co-author but I would've had no qualms about doing so. Actually putting words on paper was the easy part. I also wouldn't hesitate to put the more helpful members of my research team as co-authors. We didn't do that in computer science at my university but both practices were commonplace for the education department where my wife went to grad school.

Re:That'll work well.

[Ihmhi]

But which is more productive - writing up "this failed"

Writing up "this failed" is absolutely just as (if not more) productive. Too many published papers are "this works" and not "this didn't work". A huge part of science, mathematics, etc. is failing and then explaining how and why you failed.

What's the worst that can happen? "Oh noes, Professor Straya tried a completely logical methodology but it didn't work out?" The only fear is to be exposed as incompetent (contaminated experiment, bad methodology, etc.) and that's a good thing as well.

Re:That'll work well.

[crmarvin42]

...insisting on putting their names as co-authors on all their grad students' papers (even if they didn't write a word)

Not sure what the problem is here. Maybe it's because of the field you are in, but in my field (animal science) it is expected that your major advisor be on every manuscript. Usually becasue they played a major role in designing the experiment, procuring the funding, and paying the students stipend. My advisor's primariy contribution to the writing process of my manuscripts was as an editor, but he definitely made "meaningful intellectual contributions" to the research projects described, which has always been the bar for co-authorship in my opinion.

Re:That'll work well.

[ceoyoyo]

It sounds like they're counting more than just papers. "Research output" sounds like it includes abstracts as well. Any non-tenured prof would probably get the sack if his 5 year review came up and he'd published so little.

Re:That'll work well.

[j33px0r]

One of the expectations when hired in many academia roles is to publish papers. If you don't want to publish papers then perhaps you should be taking on a different career or different position. If you are hired on as an assistant/associate professor at a major university, they will often only assign you 2-3 courses to teach per semester with summer courses being extra money in your pocket. Teaching 2-3 courses per semester is a part-time job and they are not typically paying you to be a member of a professional organization.

With that being said, firing someone because their articles were not in the "Top Five" journals of their field is a little ridiculous if you consider how many universities, professors, and researchers are out there. Those journals can only handle so many articles, and even then the articles must align with the theme of the issue.

Re:That'll work well.

[ceoyoyo]

Most conferences will publish method and interm report abstracts. Many journals will also publish novel method papers.

Re:That'll work well.

[fast turtle]

I'm going to throw a Car Analogy out here:

Old guy walks back into bank, waits in line and when he gets to teller, asks her to validate his parking stub. She tells him no so he steps aside and requests to speak to bank manager. When manager comes over he informs them that he's closing his accounts (plural) with the bank due to poor customer service for the refusal to validate the parking stub he'd forgot to have done when he was first in. Same teller. Manager discovers that said customer holds account in excess of 5million, then begs him to remain with the bank. Sorry but the quality of customer service has gone to hell here over the last 10 years.

What'll happen is that one of the people they've fired brings in 30-50 percent of all research funding yet they've never published? Well they've now lost all of that funding along with all of the projects because the funding owns the hardware that is being used in the research. Can they now afford to pay for the building upgrades/repairs? Not likely since they just lost a major source of money for that.

Re:That'll work well.

[PlatyPaul]

Speaking as a computer scientist: negative results in my field are massively discounted, unless you are proving impossibility. Producing a less accurate image feature, or a less effective scheduling algorithm, is not generally considered publish-worthy.

Re:That'll work well.

[Mirvnillith]

It wouldn't be a rule without exceptions now, would it? It should only mean that those not meeting the "quota" would be challenged, not automatically fired.

Re:That'll work well.

[elrous0]

Did you ever do research that wasn't heavily directed by your professor?

My research was always assisted in various ways by my mentor professor and many other people as well. But it was still MY research, MY writing, and MY article at the end of the day. If I had listed everyone who critiqued it, offered me advice on it, or provided information for it as co-author, the list of authors would have went on for two pages.

I was fortunate that none of my mentors ever had the gall to ask for such a thing (I was blessed to work with some very good people). But I knew plenty of other grad students who weren't so lucky. There was one prof who was NOTORIOUS for this. He would demand a co-author credit on papers and articles he hadn't even READ. If you were one of his grad students and you wrote a paper for another professor in a research class, and then you later decided to present it, he expected a co-author credit even on that. And he would openly threaten grad students who didn't want to do it (and since having a member of your dissertation committee turn on you was essentially the end of your academic career, his threats carried a lot of weight). And this prick was the DEPARTMENT CHAIR. He got that because he brought in a lot of grant money (the prick looked GREAT on paper, and wasn't above using all sorts of..."questionable" means of getting those grants).

Re:That'll work well.

[Colonel Korn]

In my field, the papers and article's authors' were the people who actually researched and wrote them. They were not treated as tribute to your academic master. I find the very idea of treating my work as some form of academic kickback repulsive. And I have little respect for anyone who would even THINK of demanding this of one of their students.

In most sciences the writing of the paper is seen as a chore and the authorship of the paper is based largely on 1) who did the work and 2) who came up with the key ideas. In the vast majority of graduate student work, the advisor played heavily into #2, usually through periodic discussions with the student. Most advisors choose to have their names listed last to place the focus on the student as the first author and the follow custom - the final author usually got the funding or laid the foundation for the project. I see no problem with this in fields where work is highly collaborative.

Re:That'll work well.

[iamwahoo2]

It is not a quota. Quota's are given in advance and you work to meet them. In this case the University needed to reduce research salaries. They just happened to choose this existing metric to make a decision on how to meet their salary reduction goals. There is no indication that this metric will be used in the future. It is very easy to criticize the use of this metric, but beeing currently part of a work force that requires similar efficiency improvements, I can tell you that their is no metric or means that will not be criticized for being unfair to some individuals. In my own personal opinion, this approach is a hell of a lot better than the typical practice of protecting the highest paid and longest retained individuals.

Re:That'll work well.

[Attila Dimedici]

Except that Oxford did not "put up with that". Andrew Wiles was only at Oxford from 1988-1990 according to your wikipeia link. He appears from that link to be have been a professor at Princeton for much of the time that he spent working on his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. It is not clear whether or not he was teaching classes during the time that he was at Princeton.

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

More important is that he may not have ever finished his proof of Fermat if he had to hassle with trivial papers to fulfill a quota. It's not as simple as Write it, submit it, watch it get printed. It often takes a year to get something to appear after it's submitted. Editors are picky, want stuff redone, etc. Sometimes it takes multiple resubmissions to have the paper finally accepted, all of which takes major time.

One point of tenure is to allow people to work on difficult projects that might not pan out. Trying to prove Fermat is NOT easy--it took 400 years for someone to figure it out! Wiles surely knew that when he started that project, he might not ever get the answer. Certainly, if he were under pressure to solve something or be fired, he never would have worked on Fermat at all. That would be a real loss.

Just putting out papers to put out papers is a waste of everyone's time. There's thousands of journals, most of which aren't so good. Putting a paper in there to satisfy a suite is a waste of time and money.

Re:That'll work well.

[Theovon]

It depends. Just because the university has required them to increase their research output doesn't mean the peer-reviewed venues are going to lower their standards. They won't get too far by just doing MORE research. They have to do HIGHER QUALITY research, so that they are able to publish in higher-tier venues. One of those counts a lot more than 10 publications in low-ranked journals that no one reads or cites.

I'm a nobody grad student, yet I have papers in MICRO and HPCA. Mind you, I have a good advisor, but he's new with little funding, and the paper topics were my ideas. If I can do it, then faculty with more experience can do it better.

Re:That'll work well.

[Attila Dimedici]

Well, yes, but exactly how would you recomend that the university determine if they are actually doing any of the work they are being paid for?
The fact of the matter is that the university is paying them to conduct research because published research papers increase the prestige of the university. If they do not publish anything they are not delivering value to the university.
This does not mean that this is a good idea. It just means that it is unlikely that most of us on slashdot will be able to judge this action fairly.

Re:That'll work well.

[Attila Dimedici]

First, how is that a car analogy?
Second, I think it is likely that they have taken the amount of funding that these researchers have obtained through their own efforts (as opposed to getting funding from grants that someone else at the university did the actual application work for). I worked at a company that as part of what it did did research. It applied for grants and received grants for some of that work. One of the bigwigs at the company took a lot of credit for many of those grants when in fact they were obtained despite his presence with the company, rather than because of his presence with the company (he did do some of the research work on those grants and did contribute something useful to some of them...although he was also an obstacle on more than one of them as well). This example is not directly related to the story, but it illustrates how someone might be getting paid out of grant money that their absence would not negatively effect.

Re:That'll work well.

[legont]

If they publish more, the quota will go up. Come to think about it, they need to make sure publication per dollar is higher than outsourced.

Re:That'll work well.

[BeardedChimp]

If you don't publish, what prevents people from investing time in that less effective scheduling algorithm again and again?

Re:That'll work well.

[luis_a_espinal]

Speaking as a computer scientist: negative results in my field are massively discounted, unless you are proving impossibility. Producing a less accurate image feature, or a less effective scheduling algorithm, is not generally considered publish-worthy.

^^^ This. I'll dare to say that negative results are massively discounted not just in CS, but in other fields as well. It is a lot easier to publish a rosy (and completely irrelevant) scenario than a realistic, but modest negative one. That on itself is what makes academic publishing so hard. It's not the research process that makes it hard/impossible for many academics to publish so frequently, it is the publishing process itself that is anything short of corrupt IMO.

Re:That'll work well.

[jellomizer]

As a researcher writing papers is part of your job.
Almost every job requires you to do something that sucks.

Your paycheck doesn't come out of thin air. If it is a Government Grant then it is coming out of Tax Payers, if it is from the university it is from Students Tuition, Grants (Public (Government(Tax Payers)) and Private (Rich People/Companies), Alumni etc... Basically a group of people who hope to see their money put to good use, that will make their lives more profitable or help the general community.

Now for these people who are paying you, they need to see some results for their pay. Is it optimal... No but it makes good business sence to give out some output just to keep the payers happy.

Re:That'll work well.

[Tim C]

Good lord, are you mad!? Don't waste time studying it, get publishing papers now!!

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

The school doesn't give a F#$% about quality. They will reward thesis students with anything to keep them. Non-thesis students. Good luck.

These are my woes at a midwestern college in the engineering top 10:

When I visited ***** when deciding on where to get my MS they kept pushing that "We will find you funding. Near 100% of people are funded in some way (RA or TA) and the only ones that aren't are independently wealthy or their company is paying for it." Over and over. I weighed my options and chose ****** over Michigan and U of I primarily because of this. I chose Non-Thesis because I wanted in and out ASAP. I've already written the equivalent of at least 2-3 in various R&D roles and I was fairly unimpressed with most papers being paraded around in front of me. (Most 2 semester "projects" would be a 4 week 6-Sigma project in the "real world").

I applied to be a TA. Bright eyed and eager. I had 5 years of industry experience in the specific classes I wanted to TA. I had a 3.5 undergraduate GPA. I went to ***** for my undergrad so I know all the classes. I have this wonderful skill of being able to 'translate' any idea or notion into another realm. Come up with 10 ways to explain something based on what you already know. (I've gotten my Biology GF to understand control theory by relating it to her background in self regulating biological systems). I speak fluent & neutral accented Midwestern English. I WANT TO TEACH. What more could you ask for in a TA?

I had to drop down to 1 & 2 classes a semester because I couldn't afford full tuition AND I was out-of-state. Thankfully I got some intern/PT work at ****** to help pay some bills because I was expecting the TA stipend to help cover food, tuition and health insurance. I reapplied every semester and every semester it was the same thing.

I've bit my tongue until today. I was in 500 level class with a guy that was a TA. I've been in a few other classes with him and he sleeps or 'take notes' with his head down about 50% of the time (if he shows up). Just hearing him talk is like nails on a chalkboard. He was talking with someone else in the class and joking about a 300 level course (That he is a TA for). "Oh man, yeah. That class was rough. I barely go a C in it, I think they really curved the final." A class that I nailed with one of the top grades in the class when I took it. He got a C in a class and they let him TA it. Oh wait, he got funding. He's doing "research" (I can only imagine how useful that is). He's eventually going to be published. The schools name will show up in some obscure journal somewhere. The professor will get another notch in his publishing headboard.

AC for obvious reasons.

Re:That'll work well.

[interkin3tic]

When you cut staff with such broad strokes, you're going to be cutting valuable ones and at the same time retaining crappy ones. Unless you're going on a case-by-case basis carefully, you're going to make mistakes. There's no perfect single metric for any job of a good employee. It's much easier to pretend there is, and say "Your number isn't high enough, so you're fired." If you don't care about the long-term health of a company or organization, that's the way to go. Gotta reduce expenses, everyone below this number gone, give myself part of their salaries in consulting fees, and done!

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are absolutely right. But nonetheless it is almost impossible to get negative results - even interesting negative results - past the referees. We hocked one paper round a dozen journals trying to get it published.

Re:That'll work well.

[gnick]

For example, all sorts of drugs are tested for all sorts of diseases, but generally the results aren't published unless there is some success.

Unfortunately a lot of failures are published, but sensationalized so that the people doing the research don't appear to have been wasting their time and their sponsors' money. Example:

Researcher: I have reason to believe that Tylenol causes cancer. If this is true, it could have dramatic effects across the planet and could possibly save millions of lives. I only need $150k to research this and believe that the possibility of saving lives drastically outweighs the cost.

Sponsor (University or whatever): If we could prove that, our public image would soar once the world learns what we've done for society. Here's a check.

[Results are inconclusive]

Embarrassed researcher: After my research, I can not say that Tylenol is safe to take from a cancer standpoint. Many people taking it did indeed develop cancer while on the drug.

Sponsor: Splendid - Let's publish and tell the world that we've done the study and can not say conclusively that Tylenol doesn't cause cancer.

Re:That'll work well.

[interkin3tic]

That's only an option if you're convinced the whole project was a waste of time. If you're not sure you were an idiot to begin that research, it might be better just to shelve it for the moment and maybe come back to it when you have a different idea or new tool to investigate it with.

Re:That'll work well.

[Slippery_Hank]

writing up "this failed" seems more productive if it's going to let you keep your job. At least by forcing people to write up failed results they are held more accountable. This way we can weed out all the terrible researchers that are contributing to the problem (and there are plenty of terrible ones).

Re:That'll work well.

[LordNimon]

If you're doing research, then you should have some published results of that research. Doing research without publishing seems pointless to me.

Re:That'll work well.

[MisterSquid]

As a researcher writing papers is part of your job.
Almost every job requires you to do something that sucks.

Most faculty, especially ones above the Junior College level, think teaching is the part of the job that sucks, not writing and publishing.

Re:That'll work well.

[MisterSquid]

Teaching 2-3 courses per semester is a part-time job and they are not typically paying you to be a member of a professional organization.

As a former academic at a research university, I can say you know not whereof you speak.

Re:That'll work well.

[KramberryKoncerto]

It also makes good sense to to negotiate and explain, even with a massive concerted effort. The scenario isn't take-it-or-die; a businessman that doesn't negotiate can't live long, and we want to use that fact.

Re:That'll work well.

[TheRaven64]

In bioinformatics you can easy publish multiple papers in a year. In high energy physics, not so much.

I just checked the web sites of a couple of friends of mine who work in high energy physics, because I found that a bit hard to believe given how often they claimed that they were in the middle of preparing papers. Even PhD students and postdocs seem to be able to publish at least one journal paper per year. Lecturers usually get their names on their students' work as a second author, so publishing one thing a year is trivial for them, if being first author is not a requirement.

Re:That'll work well.

[bzipitidoo]

In many cases it's the other way around. The grad student comes up with the ideas, and the professor goes along for the ride. In my case, he suggested an area. Then I came up with all the ideas, including one he initially dismissed because he didn't think it would work. I coded it, and showed him it did in fact work. And I put together a rough draft and gave it to him. He rewrote it, expressing the ideas ten times better than I had. He dug up some stock software for another part of the work. He thought of another way to check the results and did that too, finding that it all checked out.

We could go into more details of who contributed what, but why? So some bean counter can decide who gets to keep their job? Because the only thing that matters is whose ideas they were? I have no problem with adding other names to my work if it helps them keep their jobs and I feel they're worthy and they haven't tried to cheat me somehow. Fight bad, oversimplified criteria with creativity. Show them that their metric is stupid. Still, one should be careful. The pressure can be too much and some will stoop unethical means to pump up their stats. It's still too easy to be victimized by the desperate.

Something else that might make Australia reconsider is if other countries rush to hire these scientists. Probably there are some bad ones in the lot, but most may be good. Australia has already done all the work of vetting them and now wants to throw that away.

Re:That'll work well.

[gnapster]

The sum of the powers of *Whoosh* is not equal to the power of the hypotenuse of *Whoosh* for any integral power greater than two.

I have an elegant proof for this conjecture, but I can't type it here on slashdot because it requires Unicode.

Re:That'll work well.

[gtall]

Almost worse is trying to publish research in computer science that ties up a lot of approaches into a more general prescription. Who will review your paper? Why, the people who have a stake in the approaches you are generalizing. Now why would they want to allow your paper to succeed their "seminal" work?

Re:That'll work well.

[gtall]

unless after years and years of study you publish a single earth shattering paper. It has happened in the past, but it won't in the future as long as unenlightened people run the research institutions where wiggling your tail for suitors is more important than thinking hard about hard problems.

That said, who decides whether someone is just whacking off or knowledgeably pursuing a valid avenue of research? This is why we have departments in universities, rather than let professors just work. Those departments need to properly review their flock.

Re:That'll work well.

[crmarvin42]

what is your field?

I like Colonel Korn's response. I may have written all of the papers, and even run all of the research, but without my advisor none of the projects would have come my way. Research is collaborative, especially for a graduate student with no resources and little training. That is the point of a graduate degree. In exchange for training you, and easing the procurement of resources you do a lot of the grunt work (mixing feed, weighing animals, running lab equipment, writing all first drafts, etc. in my personal case) thus gaining valuable experience while a good advisor tutors you in the correct methodology for designing, conducting, and reporting scientific research. I can't think of a field where this is not how it works.

P.S. the Last Author = Advisor convention is what is used in Animal Science. The only time my Advisor took first author on a paper he did not write was when he had 2 grad students run the 2 trials included in the paper (i was the second) and a third actually write up the paper. The intellectual contributions of the grad students were roughly equal, so to head off an argument he pulled rank and took the first author position. Otherwise he's only ever taken first author when he actually wrote the paper.

Re:That'll work well.

[Jumperalex]

Speaking only as someone who had to do research for my thesis (optimization and search theory) I guess it comes down to this ... what is your answer to this question:

Would it have been helpful for me to find, during my literature search, that someone else had tried [insert brilliant idea here] and found that it didn't work as well as hoped ... and maybe even learn where they thought further research might have been worth the time had they had it?

That is why even publishing negative results is good. As someone else mentioned above, if not a full journal article then an abstract presented at a conference etc.

Re:That'll work well.

[crmarvin42]

How is that different from the "meaningful intellectual contributions" bar that I describe? If, as is the case with my advisor, someone does none of the hands on work but helps to hash out the protocol, analyze and interpret the results, and set the tone for the manuscript during the review process, then I believe that they've "performed work on the actual research to a great degree" even if they didn't weigh a single pig or analyze a single sample in the lab.

Re:That'll work well.

[Sir_Sri]

Not necessarily. Especially if you have graduate students who are not going on to academia (masters students) they may skip the publish a paper part because they don't care. Even though it's good work that warrants being published.

Also, it's a pretty standard academic contract (including tenured) to work out to 1 paper per year, maybe more if you have time, or lots of students. If you have 4, a couple of PhD and a couple of masters, plus yourself, less than one paper a year means you're not getting on with the business of writing papers.

I'm not specifically familiar with the University of Sydney, smaller schools (even just small departments) have to accept that publishing at a rate of 1/year is not possible. You don't have enough students, and you can't get enough grants to publish that much. They have something like 50K students, so it's a decent sized place, I'm not sure even what their turnover rate is for staff.

4 Papers in 3 years around here (ontario canada) would be about what we would require someone to do to get tenure. Once they have tenure it would be a bit less, and less again once they hit about 50. And yes, if you don't manage to get those papers/year you will not be offered tenure and your position filled by someone else. Other academic work (writing a book for example) counts against that. A typical contract here is something like 40/40/20. 40% teaching (4 courses per year, usually as 2 per term, with none in the summer), 40% research, and 20% administrative (committees and the like). If you can't, in 800 hours of work (including supervising grad students who are probably doing more than that) come up with 5-8 pages of work that can get published in a journal you might not be doing your job very well, and that includes begging for money to pay people who can publish.

Re:That'll work well.

[biodata]

Novel method papers only really get published if you can show an application though, and demonstrate some difference between the novel method and previous ones, at least in bio.

Re:That'll work well.

[FrangoAssado]

That's a really interesting question. I don't know about Mathematics, but in Physics, its pretty damn important to publish negative results. Feynman used to tell a story to show that (available here). Basically, the story goes something like this:

Robert Millikan, which was already a famous experimental physicist, published a (now famous) experiment that determined the charge of a single electron. This was the first time such a thing had been done, so it was a really big deal. A lot of other physicists replicated the experiment, with lots of papers published all around. The thing about experiments is that the value measured always has an uncertainty, and experimenters make mistakes, so it's very common for later experiments to correct previously-measured values. The strange thing about this case is that, if you plot the "known" value for the electron charge over time, you get a curve that gradually grows from the value measured in the first experiment to the value we now know is correct (because today we have many different ways to measure the value, so we're pretty sure of it).

So, why is the plot a gradual curve and not a straight jump to the correct answer? Why didn't the second experiment get the correct value right away? The answer is embarrassing. Since Millikan was so famous, subsequent experimenters didn't publish their results if the value they got was too far from the "currently accepted" value -- they thought of their results as "negative results", even though they probably had less error than the "currently accepted" value. The ones that got published were the ones with similar errors to the previous ones, or the ones that kept tweaking their setup (introducing all kinds of random errors) until they got a value that was closer to the original.

Nowadays, physicists are very careful not to make mistakes like this. Part of that care means that you don't pay too much attention to the "expected" result, so you really should publish negative results. Of course, that's just the theory -- no one likes to publish negative results, because most of the time, they're just a waste of time.

Re:That'll work well.

[hairyfeet]

Has anyone else noticed that the word "quality" has become almost a dirty word, a word one never utters unless its with nostalgia for when people and companies actually gave a shit? Now some of it you can blame on the government because getting rid of lead solder was just fucking stupid because the amount of waste being made from devices failing earlier is causing more pollution than the lead was, but as we see in TFA even universities are getting into the "We don't give a shit about quality, just crank that shit out" business.

Personally i think its sad how everything is becoming cheap and plastic and worthless, that's what it really is. Hell you can't even spend more and get quality as all you'll get is the same crap and if the company has a problem with the crap they'll just rig it so it'll last one day past the warranty and fuck you over, HP Nvidia laptop anyone? Maybe its just me but it seemed that people used to take pride in things, take pride in doing a good job, but not anymore. Now its get in, get out, get paid, fuck everything else. Now we are gonna see science and learning become yet more crap factories, just churning out endless piles of stupid useless shit to meet some stupid quota. Damned shame is what it is, just a damned shame.

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Key word: FORMER.

Re:That'll work well.

[Asic Eng]

Well of course that may happen, but I'm an engineer, and on top of my normal work my department wants me to publish about one paper per year. I don't really have a problem finding an interesting topic either. So while an arbitrary publication count may not necessarily be a good thing, 4 papers in three years is such a low threshold, that you really have to wonder what these people are doing.

Re:That'll work well.

[quacking duck]

Yep. About as stupid as managers evaluating developers based on the quantity of code they produce, rather than quality.

Re:That'll work well.

[mbkennel]

Princeton, not Oxford. And he had a day job and was teaching and publishing normal papers. He 'secretly' worked on Fermat on the weekends.

Re:That'll work well.

[HaZardman27]

Well everyone who was supposed to figure out a better metric to determine the quality of research were busy getting their research done so they could get published.

Re:That'll work well.

[Dahamma]

But at the same time, if a computer scientist paid to produce results hasn't come up with anything but less accurate image features and less effective scheduling algorithms for the last three years, maybe the *should* be fired or switch to a pure teaching position.

There are plenty of other young, motivated new PhDs ready to take their place if given the opportunity. At some level it seems like it wouldn't hurt to treat academia a bit more like most other professions. Of course, everyone can have a dry spell/bad luck, so maybe some system of limited time tenure based on past productivity?

Re:That'll work well.

[Rutulian]

That's true, and that's why grant progress reports let you send in preliminary data instead of strictly requiring published papers. But part of the skill of being a good researcher is knowing how to break a large project up into small and significant chuncks that can be published independently. In your example above, the fourth year result is the big Nature paper/Nobel Prize, but in the process of such a large project it is highly likely that something interesting is coming out of years two and three. It's not necessarily a big splash, and it may be a bit tangential to your primary aim, but it is something novel that can be published. See some of Craig Venter's stuff, for example. One of his big projects is to create "synthetic life." He only recently reached the first stage, but spent many years publishing papers on methodology his lab has developed in pursuit of this aim.

Also, most labs do more than one thing at once. So there may be a big project you are sitting on to make the big splash, but there likely are (should be) many other smaller projects going on at the same time that can be published sooner.

Re:That'll work well.

[TheRaven64]

You've never been in the academic world, have you?

You mean aside from a PhD and a postdoc? No.

Sometimes an experiment can take years just to set up. Sometimes it takes months and months of computer time to interpret the results.

And that is all that you're working on? You don't have any preliminary results that you can publish? Any small spin-off projects? Doesn't sound like any project I've ever worked on...

In a lot of fields, journals have an almost two year turnaround - so work you have done can get delayed enormously.

Latency is not the same as throughput. I've published papers in journals with an 18-month turn-around, but that doesn't mean that I only published one paper in 18 months. Papers that were submitted earlier are still trickling through the publication pipeline in the interim.

And publishing a "This doesn't work" paper? Wow, good luck finding a journal that will take that. They simply don't exist.

And yet some of the most interesting papers I've read recently have been exactly that format: we tried this, we discovered it didn't work because of these factors, we plan on trying this approach to address those issues.

Re:That'll work well.

[Dahamma]

I have always heard that (as well as stories of profs dumping their lectures on TAs, etc), but in the end that wasn't the experience I had. A lot of it depends on the priorities of the University/department when recruiting their faculty...

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution.
Less effective output researchers reproduce less, and in the long run will get extinguished.

Re:That'll work well.

[FrangoAssado]

I'm not sure what you mean... The obvious difference is that in the case of the "FTL Neutrinos", everything was published.

There's nothing wrong with comparing what you got with what was expected, as long as you publish it. The problem is discarding (and not telling anyone about) what you got just because it's not what you expected, which is what happened in the story of the measurement of the electron charge.

Re:That'll work well.

[gerddie]

Publications for most conferences are not even considered by certain funding agencies, e.g. for the Spanish organization Ciber BBN it has to be a paper published in the first quartile as rated by the infamous Impact Factor. Braindead of course, but that's the way it is.

Re:That'll work well.

[lahvak]

Exactly. In fact, actually proving that a particular method cannot work in certain situation is not a negative result. A negative result, at least in mathematics, would be "I tried this and I tried that and I think it should work but I wasn't able to make it work". There isn't really even an established format for publishing something like that. It may be suitable for a conference talk, in the case the topic is very interesting and the falure is generally unexpected and the difficulties surparising, or it may be attached as a note to an article which has number of positive results, something like "we also believe that a similar method could be used to extend this result to the case when ..., but so far we were not able to prove it". I have never seen an article where somebody would basically write "I tried this and it didn't work".

Re:That'll work well.

[lahvak]

If you can prove that the scheduling algorithm is less effective, that's not a negative result. If you cannot prove it, it may just mean that the algorithm in fact isn't less effective, you were just doing something wrong. Someone else could make it work with a fresh approach. It is true that the information about what you tried and how could be useful to somebody, but except in some very special circumstances, I don't think it would be enough for a separate paper. How would you even peer review something like that?

Re:That'll work well.

[madprof]

Thank you. This made me smile.

Re:That'll work well.

[lahvak]

But at the same time, if a computer scientist paid to produce results hasn't come up with anything but less accurate image features and less effective scheduling algorithms for the last three years, maybe the *should* be fired or switch to a pure teaching position.

Problem with that is that it will discourage people from tackling difficult problems. Say that a problem I am interested in has not been solved in over 50 years, most of the partial results that could be easily obtained has olready been done, and I think I have an idea that may give me some new insight and potentially lead to a solution. It would be great if I could solve it. On the other hand, the problem is obviously very hard, leading experts in the field has been trying to crack it for a long time, without a complete result. I may spend next 5 years trying only to discover that I simply cannot make it work. In the meantime, someone else will be solving one easy problem after another, putting out paper after paper.

Re:That'll work well.

[ceoyoyo]

That's nice, but we're not talking about the Spanish organization Ciber BBN.

Re:That'll work well.

[flyingsquid]

According to the CV on the Princeton website, Andrew Wiles published 24 papers from 1977 to 2008, which averages out to less than a paper a year. So it clearly is possible to be a highly respected, important, and influential academic while publishing relatively few papers, and obviously quantity of papers isn't the best way to measure things.

That being said, there seems to be this attitude that it's somehow inappropriate to even try to quantify academic output. But if you're a mathematician, why on earth would you be against quantifying things? Mathematicians even came up with a metric, the Erdos number, which quantifies how many publications it takes to tie you to legendary mathematician Paul Erdos, as a way of sticking a number on where you fit in the network of mathematicians. And if you're a scientist, you quantify your results and run statistical tests. Why is it expected to use numbers to describe fruit flies, dinosaur bones, or the red shift of distant galaxies... but god forbid, the university actually tries to stick a number on what you do?

The number of articles probably isn't the best metric. One article in a journal like Nature, Science, PLOS Biology, or the New England Journal of Medicine is usually worth a half dozen articles in a specialist journal. A metric like impact factor (average number of citations per article in that journal) helps take that into account. Eigenfactor takes it a step further by weighting the citations- citations coming from Nature or Science count more than citations from the Journal of Fish Biology or whatever. H-factor offers a way of ranking individual scientists- if you have one paper cited once you have an H-factor of one, two papers cited at least twice gives you an H-factor of 2, three papers cited three times gives you an H-factor of 3, etc. Admittedly it's field-specific. The sheer volume of papers in certain fields inevitably means those papers are cited more.

I think the University of Sydney is taking a simplistic approach to the problem, but I sympathize with their aims. You see really creative, productive researchers who are having trouble landing tenure-track jobs in this job market, while some tenured faculty sit back and coast. We need a way to get rid of people who aren't performing and replace them with people who will perform. And it's incredibly hypocritical of academics to say that you can't measure their success: academia measures applicants for college, grad school, med school and law school using test scores and grades. Why is it OK to examine student performance with grades and scores, but inappropriate to grade the teachers themselves? Why not figure out a way to keep the excellent academics and get rid of the bad ones, just like we weed out students? Yes, academic excellence is inherently hard to quantify, but academics are generally pretty creative when it comes to quantifying things that are hard to quantify... the idea that suddenly "oh, it's just too hard to measure!" strikes me as remarkably self-serving.

Re:That'll work well.

[ceoyoyo]

Presumably if you're using it for your awesome decade long project, it has a use. If it doesn't you might want to look carefully at just how awesome that project you're betting ten years of your career on is.

Re:That'll work well.

[Totenglocke]

Funny, I seem to remember professors being required to teach and that the reason students went to these Universities was to be taught. Silly me, it's really about just taking money from the students and giving them nothing in return.

Re:That'll work well.

[lahvak]

For me, publishing an observation that differs from an accepted theory is not a negative result. A negative result would be: I tried to solve this and this, I spent two years banging my head against the wall, tried this method and that method, and I just simply completely failed to come up with anything useful at all.

Re:That'll work well.

[RocketRabbit]

THe point of academic publishing is not to enhance human knowledge, it's to enhance your University's prestige so they get more government grants.

Re:That'll work well.

[lahvak]

Actually, you are wrong. Just because someone hates teaching does not mean they cannot teach. A motivated student interested in the topic could learn much more from a real expert that hates to teach than from an excellent teacher that does not know the subject as well.

Re:That'll work well.

[gstrickler]

Ah, but his proof was incorrect. Correctable, but incorrect. Of course, it took a notable team months to find the error, and months to correct it, but it doesn't change the fact that he was only "mostly correct". All that time and he still couldn't get it right. ;)

Re:That'll work well.

[LateArthurDent]

Almost worse is trying to publish research in computer science that ties up a lot of approaches into a more general prescription. Who will review your paper? Why, the people who have a stake in the approaches you are generalizing. Now why would they want to allow your paper to succeed their "seminal" work?

I don't know how it is in CS, but with my anectodal experience in EE, there tends to be zero problems with that. Those people are generally happy that you're citing their paper, and if you advanced their work forward, they'll be just as happy to just publish another paper building on YOUR work.

Negative results is still pretty much impossible to publish though.

Re:That'll work well.

[iamwahoo2]

It is not a quota! They are not instituting a policy saying "publish papers at a rate of X in the future". They need to reduce faculty costs right now. In this particular university and many others, the biggest losses are coming from high paid research faculty who are not bringing in external money to justify their existence. They chose to use papers already published as a metric for determining who stays, who goes, and who becomes instructors. That is no guarantee that they will use this same metric for any future workforce reductions and it is therefore not a quota. You can criticize the use of this metric, but keep in mind that in most other similar situations, the alternative would be to protect the faculty members who have been employed the longest and most likely toward the higher end in pay.

Re:That'll work well.

[martin-boundary]

Because university administrators don't care about Science, they care about parking fees and paying for buildings and maintaining the greens.

Re:That'll work well.

[Samantha Wright]

Close. A more likely explanation is that they're corrupt and receiving kickbacks for the construction project, but we can't be certain. It might very well be merely hubris and an unwillingness to give up on a major investment.

Re:That'll work well.

[martin-boundary]

Writting up negative results is just as important as writing up positive one.

IMHO it's not. In general, getting a positive result is hard, and advances Science. Getting negative results can be hard in some cases, but there's nothing that enforces difficulty, and the line into triviality is blurred.

So you find that doing X doesn't give Y. Well, doing X also doesn't give Z, or T, or U. There are millions of alternatives, all equally valid. By encouraging the publication of negative results, it becomes very difficult to ensure that worthwhile alternatives are explored. What makes Y more interesting than Z or T?

Because positive results actually solve problems, they remain hard and worthwhile over time. But while there have been spectacular examples of negative results in Science, if they became common, over time there would be a general devolution into triviality or irrelevance.

Re:That'll work well.

[Zebedeu]

You're obviously not an academic.
The point of publishing is to let the world know what you're investigating, and the avenues you're taking to do it.
This is done so that other researchers in your area don't duplicate your work unnecessarily, and can feed from your results, when they're available.

I've spent the better part of the last 5 years in academia and I published everything from the initial hypothesis, to testing, to results. My papers have always been well received in reputable international conferences, as they should be.

In fact, while I disagree with the metric being employed here, 3 papers in 4 years sounds like a somewhat low number. Of course it depends on the field of study and the nature of the research, but at least in my field, if you're conducting productive research, you'll easilly generate enough knowledge to publish at least two conference papers per year.

Re:That'll work well.

[martin-boundary]

If you don't publish, what prevents people from investing time in that less effective scheduling algorithm again and again?

That's not how it works. People (ought to) compare their homebrew less effective algorithm with the best one that's published in the literature. They'll know by doing those comparisons to not waste time on suboptimal methods. There's really no need at all to publish a paper saying "I just invented method X and it is less effective than well known method Y".

Re:That'll work well.

[Dahamma]

Maybe start with a few easier problems to prove you have the capacity to tackle the harder ones? So you can "build up" some credibility and "tenure" (or whatever you want to call it... "publish buffer"?).

Again it's not *that* different as in industry - most investors won't just randomly give a pile of money to unproven people who want to start up a company, but if you have succeeded before they will flock to you. At the very least, a solid proposal explaining *why* you think you know something that all the "leading experts" don't would seem reasonable.

If you do solve the problem, you are pretty much set for life academically, but if after 5+ years you didn't get anywhere, well, maybe your employer is justified in encouraging your to look elsewhere for employment, after all you just cost them a bunch of money that they could have given to someone else. Academia seems like such a risk-averse field sometimes...

Re:That'll work well.

[Pseudonym]

Just to be clear: We don't yet know how many of these academics are in Science. I can easily see how this rule might catch a historian who chose to write a book instead of publishing several papers in some year.

Re:That'll work well.

[Toam]

Books and book chapters will likely contribute to "research output"

Re:That'll work well.

[excelsior_gr]

You are right that publishing the "failures" can also be beneficial. This, however, would produce an overwhelming amount of papers and the "successes" would get lost in the crowd. I think we could use special journals for publishing the good, albeit unsuccessful attempts at problem-solving. Or, even better, each paper could have a special section, titled e.g. "preliminary work" (or something equally euphemistic), that would quickly go over the failed attempts before the authors proceed in describing what did work in the end.

Re:That'll work well.

[AaronLS]

It also lowers the quality of the teaching they provide. There are some professors who truly don't care about teaching effectively. Teaching is just a routine they go through to mix up the time they spend pulling down research grants. On top of that some of those research grants they might get paid $100/hour for that one hour/week they spend "meeting" with the team they "manage", which really is just the team telling them what they've been doing, and the professor interjecting senseless questions due to their distant knowledge of what is actually happening in the project. Basically being a hurdle and a money leach. Not sure how often this happens, but was my experience in a couple of cases where I was aware of the chunk of $ that professors were getting out of a project for essentially doing nothing but signing papers.

Re:That'll work well.

[AdamWill]

"In this particular university and many others, the biggest losses are coming from high paid research faculty who are not bringing in external money to justify their existence."

Universities are not supposed to be businesses, and faculty are not supposed to justify their existence by making money. They are meant to advance learning. Counting 'research outputs' like they were so many plastic beans seems like a spectacularly poor way to assess the quality of your intellectual output.

Re:That'll work well.

[meerling]

Of course, this will result in a large quantity of 'fluff' papers that were simply written to make their quota. You will even have some academics who will only do fluff since that's what their bosses are demanding. As to real work, it's rather rare that you can publish on a regular schedule like that for the simple fact that you don't have the facts.
A large number of research projects may take years to progress to the point where you have publishable material for two basic reasons.
First, you don't want to give the competing teams a leg up on the same project, unless you agree to a collaboration before hand. Yes, academics have been known to steal, incorporate, or be inspired by someone elses work, and the first to publish wins. (Articles that duplicate the same work are rarely published unless they can add something new and either important or interesting. Rule of thumb, there is no second place.)
Second, the publishers have standards. "What? How dare they!" Yes, that's right, you have to submit something that is complete, and sometimes more than complete. On RARE occasion they will allow something that is filled with question marks, but only when it's something that is fundamentally important and needs the attention of that field. An example of that would be the Neutrino issue that came up recently. The team that found it has no real answers, and it's completely confounded them. Their paper was a plea for help to the scientific community to either find out what what wrong, to find what weird circumstances allowed for apparent FTL travel of neutrinos, or get ready to toss your old physics books in the trash and write new ones.

If you only look at quantity, you end up with a large pile of junk.

Re:That'll work well.

[iamwahoo2]

I do not mean to be rude, but that is a naive point of view. In order to pursue those goals of educating students and performing cutting edge research, some amount of money and revenue is necessary. More to the point, research generally brings in more money than teaching classes (student tuition), especially in science and engineering. So Universities want their highest earning faculty to be supporting their salaries through external money.

Re:That'll work well.

[Pseudonym]

My point is just that a book requires more time and effort than a typical paper.

Re:That'll work well.

[ianmac47]

That is somewhat true. But these are people who are also responsible for teaching and probably administrative tasks associated with their departments. Sure, they could sit around publishing a whole lot but where does that really leave their students who they are suppose to be teaching. "Oh, sorry Johnny, I don't have time to give you feedback on your paper, I'm busy publishing my own."

The difference between having a class with a tenured faculty member and an adjunct post-doc desperately trying to find a tenure track position is that the professor with tenure actually has the time to be an expert and pass on that expertise to students and, well, teach. The period between finishing a dissertation and having meaningful, gainful employment has become increasingly long and dependent on a expansive CVs; those people are the worst make for the worst teachers in the classroom because they are persistently preoccupied with their own petty academic dramas.

Re:That'll work well.

[ianmac47]

The practical result of the faculty who want to keep their jobs will simply be to spend less time preparing for the classes they teach, less time grading papers, less time interacting with students, and less time being teachers to make up for the added time spent researching and writing.

Re:That'll work well.

[rtb61]

Important quote from the article "a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position". So Australian universities are cutting back on research position and focusing more on teaching.

Unless research positions are earning income for the income they are being abandoned.

So it seems they are focusing on education with research being tied students and providing education opportunities for them.

So it seems to be a split between teaching universities versus research universities. Universities in Australia come under a lot of pressure from TAFE, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafe, education facilities which have a tighter alignment with employment opportunities. With out research that doesn't generate income, thy are far more cost effective.

Re:That'll work well.

[sg_oneill]

Books and book chapters will likely contribute to "research output"

Haha no. University administrators dont care about books or papers or whatever. They care about grants, and you DONT get grants by writing books.

"Reasearch output" almost certainly means "satisfying a grant board".

Re:That'll work well.

[hairyfeet]

Dude WTF do you think the guys that are NOT sacked are gonna do? I'll tell ya what, they are gonna crank out as many papers as possible, shitty or not. Its not the ones that get sacked that crank out the poo, its those scared for their jobs that just seen old Bill which had been there 20 years get sacked.

Re:That'll work well.

[tehcyder]

My point is just that a book requires more time and effort than a typical paper.

Wouldn't a two hundred and fifty page book count the same as five fifty page papers?

Re:That'll work well.

[fearofcarpet]

Chemistry has the opposite problem because most of the research involves cramming atoms together in new and unknown configurations as opposed to measuring that which already exists. Thus, negative results are vital, which is why there are a zillion "more specialized journals." For example, if I have an idea for a fancy new polymer that will revolutionize OLEDs, the first step is to comb the literature to make sure that no one has synthesized it before. The second step is to find related compounds to maximize the chance that my planned synthesis is viable. If the polymer works as intended, then I get to publish in a top tier journal, and write few ancillary papers about the synthesis/characterization and some tweaks to make it better. If the polymer is a complete failure, then I dutifully publish the synthesis and the poor results in a lower-tier journal and either tweak it or start over from scratch. Without that last step, chemists would spend most of their time re-hashing failed experiments. This pattern holds true in almost every area of Chemistry from materials to med chem.

The larger problem with Chemistry is that the rate of publication varies widely between sub-disciplines. Computational chemists crank out papers at a mind-boggling rate compared to synthetic chemists, for example, simply because synthesis is time consuming, but computing power is ever-expanding; the example above could easily consume an entire PhD thesis. The "mindset of targets" mentioned in TFA is then forced to consider other metrics, like H-index, or the average impact factor of the journals in which you publish. In any case, the result is the same--publish or perish--which for-profit publishers love.

Re:That'll work well.

[fearofcarpet]

summer courses being extra money in your pocket

...or the only money in your pocket; many (most?) universities in the US don't pay a summer salary--you have to cover it from your grants (which you get by publishing papers, of course!). And I'd like a show of hands of assistant professors that consider their teaching loads "part-time."

Re:That'll work well.

[fearofcarpet]

You would give someone co-authorship credit for getting the grant for the study and getting you a lab? You *can't* be serious.

Perhaps you are not aware--or that was meant as sarcasm--but in many fields the PI spends all of their time writing proposals, teaching, and supervising their students/postdocs. So, yes, their name goes on each and every paper that was funded by a grant proposal that they wrote, and in fact, that is the *only* way for them to continue to be employed as a professor. Your reward for doing the work, contributing your ideas, and doing some/most of the writing is first author; your PI is last and is the corresponding author.

Re:That'll work well.

[iamwahoo2]

There is no reward for cranking out excessive numbers of papers, and it is a one time reshaping of the workforce. And your are wrong about the others being scared for their jobs. They are jumping for joy that Bill is no longer leaching money off of their projects because Bill has a $150K salary but doesn't bring in shit because student tuition doesn't even come close to funding his position. In order to pay his salary, they have to "tax" all of the researchers that are out their working their butts off to bring in external funding. Hell, Universities are run by faculty and this particular University is reshaping its work force most likely because the majority of faculty want this to happen.

Re:That'll work well.

[mapkinase]

Oxford definitely would have been better off without him

Or. May be:

Wiles would have been better off without Oxford, who knows.

This does not prove anything. It's an example of the situation when I would finally hit a ball with a ballbase stick.

I am all for support of people like Wiles, but not at the government expense. Philantropy and industry should take care of people like Wiles. Worked pretty well in the past.

Re:That'll work well.

[iamwahoo2]

Important quote from the article "a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position". So Australian universities are cutting back on research position and focusing more on teaching.

Unless research positions are earning income for the income they are being abandoned.

So it seems they are focusing on education with research being tied students and providing education opportunities for them.

So it seems to be a split between teaching universities versus research universities. Universities in Australia come under a lot of pressure from TAFE, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafe, education facilities which have a tighter alignment with employment opportunities. With out research that doesn't generate income, thy are far more cost effective.

I think you are on the right track, but I do not agree that they are focusing more on teaching. Based on very close ties that I have with several universities and in depth knowledge of how salaries are usally funded, I can tell you this. Most faculty do not want to teach. Furthermore, teaching does not bring in enough money. Consider this example. An engineering prof may teach 6 classes per year. Those classes will have on average 20 students and the classes will be worth 4 credit hours. At my local public university it will cost $200 per credit hour. The teaching services he provides brings in roughly 6*20*4*200= $96000. Overhead for facilities, administration, etc will take at least 40% of that leaving $57600. That is not enough to pay a faculty member that probably makes over $100K. The departments need to make up for that deficit by either bringing in external money and "taxing" it, or by employing cheaper individuals (usually with the title of "lecturer") to teach classes. What this university is basically doing is identifying faculty who will not likely be bringing in much money and demoting them to lecturer positions that will pay less.

Re:That'll work well.

[iamwahoo2]

Andrew Wiles may be an exception. For every semi-celebrity prof like him that managed to do something notable, there are 100 highly paid tenured faculty that have more or less checked out. They make $150K, don't do research, and teach a handful of classes. They cause tuition prices to rise and require Universities to "tax" grant and external money at higher rates.

Re:That'll work well.

[LordNimon]

unless after years and years of study you publish a single earth shattering paper.

How hard can it be to publish a few interim papers while you're doing the research? Surely it can't be too difficult to find some grad student to work on a sub-project that can result in a co-authored paper.

Re:That'll work well.

[crmarvin42]

It's about avoiding wasted effort.

SCENARIO 1:
I come up with a "Brilliant" theory that I think will solve a problem. I do the research and discover that my idea was not as brilliant as I thought. I don't publish. Meanwhile, someone at another university comes up with the same "Brilliant" theory and needlessly duplicates my effort. If I'd published the research I did showing that the idea was not brilliant, then he would have been saved the wasted time and resources duplicating my work. This could in theory be happening at multiple universities over and over and over again. Resources being wasted all around.

SCENARIO 2:
I run the same test of the same idea with the same result and publish. Some other researcher comes up with the same idea, looks at my work and figures out why my idea was brilliant, but I was an idiot and designed the test wrong somehow (failing to account for a previously unknown confounding factor for example). He goes on, citing my work as how NOT to test the idea, and proves that the idea has merit. If I'd not have published the he might not have seen the flaw in my original work and needlessly duplicated the flawed study on the path to getting things right. Hell, he might have fixed my error on the first run, but made a completely different error that my work warned him to avoid.

In the end science is incrementally advanced by failures as much as by our successes. Thomas Edison famously stated: "I have not failed, not once. I've discovered ten thousand ways that don't work." when describing his research on the incandescent light bulb. By publishing failures I help others avoid wasting their time on dead ends.

Re:That'll work well.

[drissel]

Clark Kerr, chancellor Cal Berkeley a hundred years ago, said he had three jobs: football for the alumni, parking spaces for faculty and sex for students.

Re:That'll work well.

[j33px0r]

As a former academic at a research university, perhaps you might elaborate on your experience as to what the primary criteria are for pay and the tenure process. My experience shows that you are expected to hold roles in professional organizations but it is not typically a criteria for determining pay or tenure.

Re:That'll work well.

[j33px0r]

I teach two courses right now and it is only roughly 1/2 of my work expectations. Tenured and tenure-track faculty are expected to teach 4-5 courses per academic year. That means that tenured faculty who are not publishing and only teaching 2-3 courses are doing a part-time job. It would be hard to justify faculty salaries of 60-120k/year for only teaching 5 classes over the course of 32 weeks. People teaching 4-5 (8-10 per academic year) classes per semester hold the rank of non-tenured track assistant professor (or instructor) and are not held to any significant publishing requirements. They have little to do with this discussion as the universities are already considering them cheap labor. Courses taught during the summer time at my university pay based upon the number of credit hours taught, typically 3 hours per course. This is a basic guideline for US Universities and, if you have doubts, pick a major university and pull up the teacher contract.

As far as the only money in their pockets, if you are unfamiliar with the wages that faculty make or if you think that university faculty are underpaid, perhaps you should take a look at the chronicle's salary survey: http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/ and take a second look at a few university faculty contracts. Tenured track assistant professors that consider 2-3 classes a semester full-time work are probably confusing what their priorities are from the perspective of the university and may be in danger of not receiving tenure based upon time-management skills.

Re:That'll work well.

[martin-boundary]

I have to disagree.

SCENARIO 1. Being skeptical about one's own results is important. That's the best way of reducing wasted effort. With time and experience, researchers become aware that most ideas which seems brilliant at first are probably not. It's an important lesson to learn, as it gives perspective on time management. But it's no good publishing them. That leads to

1) information overload where the good stuff is hidden in a lot of mundane stuff, and there's only so much time a person can spend reading papers. As it is, the scientific literature is already too big for anyone to keep up to date on everything that could be relevant to their work.

2) human psychology is that if a researcher believes his idea is brilliant, he'll not be deterred by someone claiming the opposite. That other person could be wrong or sloppy or just missed a tiny detail that makes all the difference. And anyway, if you don't believe deep down that you are capable of solving things that others failed at, then you'll have a difficult time being a researcher.

SCENARIO 2 That's not an example of publishing negative results. It's publishing a positive, which turns out to be flawed or wrong. Publishing a negative result is when you say "well, I tried to do something, but I didn't succeed", whereas a positive result is "well, I did this, which gets us 10% of the way to something really hard to do"

Negative results shouldn't be published. But they can be good advice to put in textbooks or to talk about with colleagues. Of course that doesn't count as a publication in the same way.

Re:That'll work well.

[rtb61]

The important thing to still point out is that universities are coming under increasing competitive pressures from TAFE colleges. Where the qualification from the TAFE college is more competitive with employers than a university undergraduate degree.

The realistic solution might very well be to get a student to attend both, with TAFE providing practical and experience and university providing theory and research. This would necessarily only suit the sciences rather than the arts.

Re:That'll work well.

[crmarvin42]

Being skeptical about one's own results is important. That's the best way of reducing wasted effort. With time and experience, researchers become aware that most ideas which seems brilliant at first are probably not. It's an important lesson to learn, as it gives perspective on time management.

I completely agree in principle, but don't believe any of this negates the value of publishing negative results.

1) information overload where the good stuff is hidden in a lot of mundane stuff, and there's only so much time a person can spend reading papers. As it is, the scientific literature is already too big for anyone to keep up to date on everything that could be relevant to their work.

Which is why I suggested in an earlier post that it might be published in something less formal than a full blown manuscript, such as a poster at a meeting, with an abstract in the conference proceedings. This gets the results in print for others to find, but doesn't take much time to digest.

2) human psychology is that if a researcher believes his idea is brilliant, he'll not be deterred by someone claiming the opposite.

No, they shouldn't be turned off at first, but he shouldn't be so arrogant as to ignore a growing body of evidence. Below, I illustrate a real example where a large body of negative results were published in order to definitively show that Betaine cannot be used as a Methionine replacement. Negative results without which nutritionists would still be wasting their time and money on testing.

SCENARIO 2 That's not an example of publishing negative results

Yes it is. It's my hypothetical situation, and no where did I claim any sort of progress. At the time the decision is made whether or not to publish the results it is impossible to know whether it will ultimately fall into scenario 1 or 2. We only know because it is hypothetical and our perspective is 3rd person omniscient.

Here is a good example of scenario 1 that I came across during my PhD lit review. Methionine in addition to being an essential amino acid for protein synthesis, is also the primary methyl-donor. There exists a pathway for the conversion of betaine, which has a chemical structure similar to that of methionine, to methionine inside the liver. A lot of work was done to test whether or not nutritionally administered betaine could be used to meet part of the bodies methionine requirement (it is much cheaper as a feed ingredient). Turns out, no it can't, but a lot of negative results had to be published before we could be certain. I hadn't read any of that work yet, when that same idea occurred to me while I was putting together a map of relevant Methionine using pathways. A quick lit review showed that my "Brilliant Idea" was a dead end, but if previous researchers had all taken your view, I might have wasted my time re-inventing the square wheel as it were.

The obvious point that you seem to be missing is that I don't know whether or not my negative results fall into scenario 1 or scenario 2 until after the fact.

Re:That'll work well.

[Pseudonym]

In word length and effort, yes. In number of research outputs, no.

In academia, we don't say. . .

[MagusSlurpy]

. . ."publish or perish" just because we appreciate alliteration.

Re:In academia, we don't say. . .

[TheRaven64]

And for people outside academia, here's the obligatory SMBC...

Re:In academia, we don't say. . .

[Samantha Wright]

RTFAing for some extra discussion material, it looks like they were told even as recently as late last year that producing only four publications every five years would be acceptable. The University is guzzling funds in construction projects instead, at the cost of its academic integrity and ability to attract researchers. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like kickbacks are involved. Unfortunately, like here in Canada, Australia has no functioning critical apparatus and outing people for corruption is simply something that is not done, unlike in the US.

Re:In academia, we don't say. . .

[Coryoth]

The dilemma with "publish or perish" is that the metric is stupid. Saying its "Do your job or get fired" is all well and good, but it is more akin to being a programmer and the sole measure of "doing your job" is "number of lines of code written (including comments)" -- it's frustrating because it encourages and rewards what most would consider "doing your job badly".

Re:In academia, we don't say. . .

[Theovon]

Bad analogy. What adacemics have to do is akin to writing more lines of code that are reviewed by 4 or 5 other distinguished academics. There are a few bad journals out there, but most venues work very hard to get good reviewers and accept the best papers. You can write all you want, but only the good papers get published. (There's a certain amount of randomness about which borderline papers get accepted, but the exceptional ones are not overlooked.) And not all venues count the same either.

Re:In academia, we don't say. . .

[Asic Eng]

It just seems like a very low threshold. Introducing methods like number of lines of code written are typically a bad idea. However if the metric is: "you need to write at least 500 lines of code per year" then well - it's really a bit strange if you can't even do that.

Re:In academia, we don't say. . .

[Theovon]

Besides the milking that some writer try to do, getting tons of papers out of one idea, it's actually not a terrible idea to try to break up a complex problem into some smaller steps, especially if each one is a pretty good discovery on its own.

Anyhow, I've had papers rejected because the reviewers clearly did not understand. So we rewrote it, taking into account many of the disconnects they obviously had, did a better job of explaining, and did a more thorough experimental analysis. Every such paper got accepted the next time around.

In fact, the only papers accepted the first time around were published in workshops, which accept most of their submissions anyhow. Every other one has been rejected at least the first time around. I always count on being reject the first time. It's unfortunate, but I also learn a lot every time and do a much better job the next time around. Of course, none of my work is so earth-shattering that it needs to be published RIGHT NOW, but some of it has been a bit time-sensitive, in relation to "competing" work.

Now that I think about it, there's this one paper, that I'm presenting at HPCA on Monday, which DID get accepted the first time around. Sortof. In 2010, we were going to submit it to another conference but decided to withdraw it at the last minute because we found serious flaws in our experimental analysis. Two years later, a fixed and revised version of the paper got accepted on the first pass. And we were surprised, because the reviews didn't look that positive. Not that we don't think it's a good idea. We just never expected it to catch all of the issues that the reviewers would raise. And it didn't. But we were fortunate, and we did address all their concerns in the camera-ready which is significantly improved from the original submission.

As I say, I don't know what it's like in other fields. Maybe it's common for reviewers to be assholes. But in my area, we get two kinds of reviewers. (a) Those who don't get it, and (b) those that have seriously legitimate criticisms. We learn a lot from both. The (a) group tells us where we didn't explain well, and the (b) group tells us where we just did things wrong. As long as you are open-minded and willing to take criticism, you can learn from it and improve your work. If you think you're above all that, as if you're better than the people reviewing your paper, then your arrogance will be your ruin.

Re:In academia, we don't say. . .

[PMuse]

count(papers_published)

does seems like a ridiculously primitive metric. Surely we could at least advance to some proxy for the importance of the work, such as

count(citations_received)

Sewage

[DarkXale]

I thought I smelled something awful.

in other news

[Anonymous Coward]

papers put forward by australians for the ignoble award are expected to increase rapidly

Game show?

[owenferguson]

Surely they could make this into some sort of a reality TV gameshow. "So you think you can publish!" People from the general public could read the various works, and vote by phone for who gets kicked out...

Good riddance

[SirBitBucket]

There are far too many in "accedemia" who just get tenure and do nothing. How about schools focus on TEACHING, specifically undergrads.... Universities these days just worry about publishing and other things that get them grants, but don't care too much about the students, especially the undergrads, which is all the degree most of them are going to get... Put people out in their field and they will learn far more in a week than in a semester of school.

Re:Good riddance

[mwvdlee]

There are far too many in "accedemia" [...] How about schools focus on TEACHING

Based on the evidence presented before me, I feel inclined to agree.

Re:Good riddance

[wisty]

You get what you pay for. Academics are paid to publish, and (to a lessor extent) get good student ratings.

Re:Good riddance

[blind biker]

Yeah, that's bullshit. For starters, a scientist can contribute to the scientific output of his laboratory/department even without having his name in the author's list. Secondly, experiments can fail - there is no guarantee associated with scientific experiments, and failure is comonplace, and part of scientific life. Thirdly, not all research takes the same amount of time to complete. Some takes longer, other takes less time, and the papers produced could be numerous or very few per unit time. Finally, forcing people into publishing or losing their jobs will achieve the unwanted result of having lots of mediocre papers, instead of a few good ones.

Re:Good riddance

[nine-times]

The purpose of modern universities is not to teach students. They are businesses which make money by providing a resort town to 20-somethings, runing minor-league professional sports teams, and doing scientific research. The whole "education" thing is just a method of attracting 20-somethings to their resort, and publishing attracts more students than good classes do.

Re:Good riddance

[Ihmhi]

Universities these days just worry about publishing and other things that get them grants, but don't care too much about the students, especially the undergrads, which is all the degree most of them are going to get...

Hint hint, it's because publishing gets grants. Grants get accolades. Accolades bring in donators. Donators + Grants = $$$$. How many universities actually care about teaching their students and how many care about meeting the bare minimum requirements in order to keep the gravy train rolling?/p.

Re:Good riddance

[ceoyoyo]

Universities aren't for teaching undergrads. They're for doing research and giving undergrads a chance to learn as part of that process. If you're an undergrad who doesn't intend to go to grad school and you want to be spoon fed, find a college with a good university transfer agreement.

Not that a good professor shouldn't be able to teach, but the primary function of a university is not to pour knowledge into undergraduate heads.

Re:Good riddance

[Creepy]

Sadly, the same thing happened at my university in the US. Here it seems to be school policy, at my school it was department policy. My favorite and most motivating teacher as an undergrad got canned under this policy. My second favorite teacher only survived because of his patents and pending patents were bringing in massive amounts of money, and the 4 worst teachers I ever had are still teaching today (I was going to say 6, but I just checked the department listing and #5 has since retired). If I had one thing to say to undergrads, it is AVOID RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS LIKE THE PLAGUE. They're probably fine for graduate and post-graduate work, but they really suck for undergraduate work. On the plus side, I only did about half of my undergrad work there, and most was before the purge.

Re:Good riddance

[robthebloke]

Ex-Lecturer here! There are two aspects to every university. On one hand you have the academics. On the other you have the financial and admin side. Most academics care a great deal for their students! They may appear a bit aloof, they may appear to be thinking about other things, they may appear somewhat dis-interested in students, but if you understand what happens behind closed doors, you'd understand why. Most meetings between academics and admin depts go like this:

Admin: We're doubling the intake of students next year, and we think you can do that with 25% less staff.
Academic: We can't double intake, reduce teaching, and still maintain the quality.
Admin: Sure you can, let me show you an excel spreadsheet.....
Academics: Those sums are complete nonsense, it's simply not possible, here's the proof.
Admin: Then let's take away your classrooms and computing equipment, and you can do all your lectures via skype.
Academics: That's not going to happen.
Admin: It is happening. Deal with it.
Academics: Then we'll find our own funding....

12 months later:
Admin: You've got the largest amount of funding in the university, we're going to distribute that out to other courses.
Academics: You can't. We're 100% funded by companies. You simply cannot take that money from us, the sponsors will not agree to it.
Admin: Tough. We need to even up the distribution of funds. By the way, cut teaching staff by 25%.
Sponsor: You've used the funding for things it was not intended, we're withdrawing all future funding
Academic: We're f*****d
Admin: No you aren't, simply go out and find more sponsors for the course. You did it last year, it should be easy to do again right?
Academic: I quit.

At least, that's why I no longer lecture anyway. It's a thankless task. You're constantly screwed over by admins trying to make a quick buck here and there. Your teaching suffers as a result, and the students end up thinking you're a lazy miserable so and so. If you concentrate entirely on teaching, your students get royally shafted. I've never met an academic who didn't have his/her students as their first priority. Most of what goes on behind the scenes is rarely, if ever, seen by the students..... so students often get the wrong idea about their lecturers.

Re:Good riddance

[littlebigbot]

When you have nothing to add to the conversation, point out grammatical errors.

Failing that, point out people pointing out grammatical errors.

Re:Good riddance

[St.Creed]

In a discussion about academic standards and education, basic spelling knowledge is actually part of the discussion.

Re:Good riddance

[gtall]

Yes, there are too many in academia that get tenure and then eat their brains. However, forcing academia to focus strictly on teaching means that new research fails to get done. Where will the new advances come from? Industry...yeah, right, Business School Product cannot put a dollar value on pure research so they axed that long ago. If it doesn't make it into the next product cycle, it gets no more funding.

So after you've rearranged the deck chairs on the good ship Research about as many ways as possible, what will you do for advancement? It isn't like the world doesn't have a slew of new and old problems that will sink us if we do not solve them.

How about we apply your focus to the people in the early 1900's who dreamed up quantum mechanics? Oooo....no quantum mechanics, they were too busy teaching. So, no lasers, no computers, no iPhones, etc. How about Evariste Galois and the others in abstract algebra and number theory. There goes your ability to order stuff from Amazon. In fact, there goes the whole modern financial piping because your money doesn't stay in your bank over night, it goes on wild ride around the planet all protected by math.

How about the people who worked on models of computation before there were computers to approximate them? Oooops, no computers, but damn they did a fine job teaching.

Err...how about Einstein and that silly theory of relativity? You know the one, its what make you GPS systems accurate. Should have made his sorry ass teach instead.

Re:Good riddance

[istartedi]

Everybody in macadamia is nuts!

Re:Good riddance

[biodata]

University is supposed to be big school where undergrads learn to learn; spoon-feeding is for little school. The faculty are supposed to be at the top of their game, whatever field they are in, so the students can get a sense of the cutting edge, not to tell students what to do or to care about them (although good teachers will provide a sense of support and being cared for obviously).

Re:Good riddance

[mcgrew]

You get what you pay for

Yeah? Buy a bottle of aleive and you're paying for pain relief. But you can get the exact same drug in a bottle of generic naproxin sodium for 1/3 the price. You didn't get what you paid for, the drug company got what you paid for.

The 89 cent can of generic green beans tastes identical to the buck fifty Green Giant.

Marketers have shoved this "you get what you pay for" fallacy down people's throats so long they actually believe that paying more always gets you more. It doesn't. You usually pay for what you get, but not always, and you very often don't get what you pay for.

Re:Good riddance

[wisty]

I usually phrase it "you don't get what you don't pay for".

Re:Good riddance

[mcgrew]

That's a lot more accurate, for sure.

Tenure

[Relayman]

That's why we have tenure in the United States. "Publish or perish" exists until the professor gets tenure and then it's not as much as an issue any more.

Re:Tenure

[SJHillman]

I thought we had tenure to better prevent students from learning from apathetic and burned out professors.

Re:Tenure

[drainbramage]

It Tenure what makes schools in the United States so affordable and so superior to those in other countries?
Or is it something more?

Re:Tenure

[O('_')O_Bush]

Or to prevent mixing whackos with experts breaking ground in radical directions. That is what tenure is supposed to grant, the freedom and protection to go iin new directions or challenge conventional paradigms without fear of being discarded for going against the status quo.

But just like many well intended benefits of track record and experience (see also social security), it became interpretted by many as the start of a good paying and low effort pension.

Re:Tenure

[Samantha Wright]

Yes; instead it ensures that they learn from apathetic and chronically absent professors. In some Canadian university departments we actually have a system of accountability for lecturers based on students' opinions; in the CS department where I'm doing my undergrad, a Scantron-based survey is incorporated into the decision to give raises. Even tenured bigshots who rake in huge multi-million dollar medical grants are prone. I've seen other departments also send out a round of automated e-mail when considering professors for tenure. The whole system works wonders for preventing the kinds of abuses and irregularities that might occur elsewhere.

Re:Tenure

[Samantha Wright]

No, that would be the incredibly well-funded sporting programmes. Obviously.

Re:Tenure

[sohmc]

I'm not an academic but my understanding of tenure is to allow the professor to publish topics that may be controversial. That way, the school can't dump the professor for publishing something that goes against the grain.

Of course, professors are still human and many of them abuse tenure but I'm sure there are professors that actually use the protection that tenure provides them to do extraordinary work that otherwise might have gotten them fired for not toeing the university line. (The easiest examples that comes to mind is global warming, creationism, etc.)

Re:Tenure

[charon69]

Here's what I don't understand: Why is tenure necessary? What is different about academia such that teachers require "protection"?

And if someone does choose to respond to my post, please keep the vitriol down. Both of my parents were high school teachers. I've been around teachers for an extremely long time. I understand that they work much longer hours than just regular school hours. I understand that they take money out of their own pockets for school supplies. I know all the hardships. That's fine.

So, I repeat: What is different about teaching such that it requires tenure?

I live in a "Right to Work" state, i.e. a "we can fire you for any reason and, as long as we don't tell you that reason, you have no legal recourse" state. Everybody I know functions in this *absolutely no protection* environment, and we all do fine. Sure, sometimes somebody gets screwed over by the system. But in general, skilled labor is required to fill most positions such as engineering, software development, etc. Businesses don't just go off and clear out their entire staff on a whim, even though they can, because it would be disastrous for the business.

How is the same thing not true for teaching? You keep the good teachers. You fire the bad teachers. You get on with life.

You can even feel the tone of the original submitter. How there is an implicit denunciation of the firing of academics. But if you switched out the profession and said, "100 software developers were fired for not meeting coding deadlines", would anybody here even bat an eye?

I just don't get it. And, seriously, if I'm missing something, please explain it to me.

Re:Tenure

[Lehk228]

the purpose of tenure is to protect professors who do research into controversial and unpopular topics and ideas, it's a counterweight against groupthink and peer pressure

like any other program or institution it can be abused by some, however measures to counter such abuse need to be in proportion to the prevalence of said abuse and ideally would not introduce excessive complexity, as complexity usually just leaves more room for abuse

Re:Tenure

[jrumney]

...extraordinary work that otherwise might have gotten them fired for not toeing the university line. (The easiest examples that comes to mind is global warming, creationism, etc.)

You seem to be using the word "extraordinary" to mean abnormal. In regular usage, the word usually has a different meaning, which would suggest something positive comes out of this.

Re:Tenure

[garaged]

That would have the same results in Mexico than the autralian way of evaluating, a lot of people being fired

Re:Tenure

[garaged]

From what I know about it for having been graduate student a few year ago, this is an elite, seriously, in a bad way if you want it too, but it is.

People spend a lot of time and effort to join a little group that know a lot of something and can keep digging further about it. That means they also want to be treated special, most of them will never be rich, but at least will make enough money to secure a good living for them and their kids.

Kids, that is another interesting story, divorce ratings are really high in academia, so parents want to compensate, and also might feel guilty because of the problems their kids have ( a lot, believe me), and most of the money they are getting is not from wage, but from bonuses, so a good effort needs to be done so they can keep up.

I can go on with this, but you get the idea.

Re:Tenure

[Samantha Wright]

The simple answer is that academia is powered by a completely different mindset, one where—at least officially and romantically—the importance of ideas exceeds the importance of an individual or organization. As sohmc said, the point is to protect intellectuals from being fired because their ideas are radical or unfashionable. Tenure gives professors a chance to go off the beaten path without fear of reprisal, and it's delayed to make sure that they're worth their salt and can contribute in a socially accepted way as well.

If you want to get right down to it, the "right to work" model you outlined simply does not scale to universities, because their core business is obtaining the truth, and that really is a matter of resolving many conflicting and shady theories until they are all completely disentangled and the right answer is found. Teaching is ancillary, a service offered to the general public through which society is benefited by their work. Publishing is only an indirect measure. It's not business or economically sensible (unlike high school teaching); it's a post-scarcity blue-skies fantasy that gained protected status as a result of trial, error, and a lot of rich people very long ago who were convinced that it was a good idea.

What you expected to find is much closer to private sector R&D, where every paycheque comes from the lifeblood of the company and must hence be carefully weighed against each researcher's profitability. Despite the harsh reality of grant-seeking and paper-publishing, academia at its core is still imagined to be about doing the right thing, and any professor worth his or her education knows this.

Re:Tenure

[crmarvin42]

I don't think it's teaching that requires tenure, but research that encourages its use, and at least 3 reasons stick out in my mind.

1. Research can be an 80hr a week job, especially for a new professor who is encouraged to forget the definition of the word 'No' for the next 6 to 7 years. Say yes to every research project, every committee, every teaching or presenting opportunity, etc. At the end of the tenure tract many professors can be a little singed around the edges and looking to dial back a little bit. In this case, tenure is supposed to prevent Universities from using up and spitting out researchers once they've passed their peak productive output. It is the academic equivalent to union protections.

2. As other's have pointed out, there is also the concept of academic freedom to consider. Many times researchers will develop politically unpopular opinions on topics related to their field. Tenure grants them the protection against politically motivated attacks on their job security for presenting their professional opinion. This may not be relevant in all fields, but I've seen some of it in play in mine.

3. There is a belief that the greatest people to learn from are the pioneers in the field. This ignores the fact that most trained researchers are NOT trained educators, but there is some merit to this idea. Those top researchers probably have insights that students would benefit from being exposed to. In this situation, tenure allows for the researchers to gradually transition from a research focus in their early career, to an education focus in their later careers. In my experience, older tenured professors teach a disproportionate amount of the undergraduate course work. This enables them to dial back the amount of research they do while still contributing greatly to the success of their department. At my current university, our department receives more than 60% of it's total budget from undergraduate tuition. That is despite several nationally recognized and very well funded research labs in our department.

Re:Tenure

[Samantha Wright]

Nothing's perfect—that's why they're only one component of the decision. I imagine a particularly solid system would progress into auditing if a professor is consistently given bad reports, though. Personally I would rather the students have too much power than none at all, especially since there are various other ways to mitigate bad surveys (such as asking the right questions, conducting the surveys at the right time, and having the professor in question teach a mixture of introductory and advanced courses to weed out some of the entertainment-seekers.)

Re:Tenure

[KramberryKoncerto]

Do you know of the basic responsibilities of a university professor? Ever heard of the word "research"? Looked in a dictionary about it? I'm sure the first search page at Google would give you plenty of answers. How could you be so condescending when you say you don't know something and apparently haven't used the search engine? If I'm missing something, please explain it to me.

Re:Tenure

[Samantha Wright]

Fortunately as an interim measure there are always sites like RateMyProfessors.com, which is mostly oriented around comments. With that system, students can get what they ask for simply by reading the messages others have left. It's definitely a Good Thing on the crowdsourcing scale. (Why do I get the horrible feeling I'll regret saying that some day?) If they go after entertainment value, then great; they're welcome to wash out in first year with the rest of their colleagues when they fail to actually absorb anything that's on the final because they were too busy laughing at Professor Tutti-Fruitti's pantomime of the Great Walloping Fruit Snipe of San Seriffe. When you think about it really hard, entertaining lecturers seem like an excellent way of driving away bad students early...

Re:Tenure

[Fancia]

Traditionally, and still often the case, a lot of universities' cash comes from patrons. Prior to 1900 a lot of patrons expected control over the universities' curriculum as a result, so it wasn't uncommon for patrons to demand that a professor be fired if they were performing research the patrons considered counter to their interests; tenure was introduced as a policy to ensure that no patrons would expect to have that kind of control.

It's still a business

[bigbangnet]

Sorry but a university still act like a business. Even if they receive funds from the government, you'd be pretty stupid to think they only like on that type of funds. If they can't make money in any way, they will have to do something about it. So a school today is just like a business. As we all know businesses needs funds, cash and a lot more...just like a business. It also needs public attention which helps with all the above.

on the bright side, there not the only one doing this so this news...is not new after all lol.

Dare I say...

[buddyglass]

Good? If you're not teaching full-time then you'd better be publishing. If you're not teaching or publishing, what the hell are you doing? A hard quota on papers-per-time-period seems like a terrible idea, but sacking guys who legitimately aren't producing (or moving them to full-time teaching) seems like a no-brainer. Unless, of course, you have some Nobel laureate on staff and want to keep him around just to beef up your department's "cred".

Re:Dare I say...

[betterunixthanunix]

Except that the demand for publishing lots of papers results in:

1. Researchers chasing low-hanging fruit and ignoring hard problems.
2. Researchers taking one good result and publishing lots of tiny variations on that result, essentially publishing the same paper over and over again.
3. Lack of cooperation and secrecy among researchers

Research is not about the quantity of results that are published, it is about the quality and importance of those results.

Re:Dare I say...

[buddyglass]

Which is why I said a hard quota seems like a terrible idea. Come up with some pseudo-objective way to evaluate your staff's research output and take action on the ones that aren't producing with respect to that metric. Are you arguing for ignoring productivity altogether and basically letting them do whatever they want? Even if, for a few, that ends up being "pretty much nothing at all"?

Re:Dare I say...

[gardyloo]

If you're not teaching or publishing, what the hell are you doing?

Actually doing the research which the publications should be based upon, and which will be taught in 30 years. Editing or writing textbooks. Pulling in grants which will pay for research equipment, laboratory space, materials and expendables, travel, publication costs, and incidentally feed, house, and clothe you, your students, and the higher-ups. Serving on administrative councils which are necessary evils, but massive time-sinks. Writing and running necessary simulations so that future research projects can be green- or red-lighted before these time-sinks are encountered again.

If you think that time researching in a University is spent either in the classroom, or at one's desk pumping out papers left and right, you're sorely mistaken.

Re:Dare I say...

[Phydidus]

Except that the demand for publishing lots of papers

It's 4 papers over 3 years. That's hardly lots. That's not nothing to be sure, but it's easily manageable. Besides, it has to be any 'research output', so intermediate steps probably count. Might not be the best approach, but it is better than let people sit around and do naught.

Re:Dare I say...

[betterunixthanunix]

Are you arguing for ignoring productivity altogether and basically letting them do whatever they want?

That is the idea behind tenure: you work hard, publish lots of papers, and so forth to get tenure, and then you are free to work on whatever problems you want. Unfortunately, yes, that means that some professors basically do nothing, but it also allows professors to spend ten years working on a hard problem and not have to worry about being fired for not publishing anything during that period of time. It is also unfortunate in that it basically forces young researchers to chase easy problems before they can really devote much energy to hard problems, and may make young researchers nervous about collaborating or even discussing their work with anyone else (the classic, "Don't tell so-and-so about what we are working on, he is working on something similar and we want to publish first!").

I agree, we need a better way to evaluate research. We need to weigh things -- weigh the number of papers, the number of citations the papers are getting (one paper that is cited hundreds of times is probably better than a hundred papers that are each cited once), what sort of things a research is currently doing that have not been published (if someone is running a 30 year experiment in biology, that should count, it should not count against them), etc.

Re:Dare I say...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a academic who recently saw the light and left for industry, I can tell you exactly what they're doing (at least in the U.S.): activities related to grantsmanship and serving on committees! Getting a grant is a mixed blessing. First, you have to figure out how exactly to spend the money, including hiring people to actually do the work (e.g. graduate students, post docs, etc). Then, you need to write regular progress reports and keep track of the time and effort for people working on the project (accountability). Finally, you need to publish - which can be a very time consuming process since most graduate students and post docs now are not native English speakers. This all assumes that the experiments work. Keep in mind that during all this, you need to keep writing more grants so that the people you just hired are funded past 2 years. Depending on the source, the probability of being funded ranges from 3-20%, so most grant proposals written are a waste of time.

After obtaining tenure, one is also expected to start performing more administrative-level functions. This includes spending countless hours serving on departmental, college, and university-level committees for all sorts of things. This is a huge use of your time but a necessary evil since your needs may not be met if you don't participate.

On top of all this, you need to keep on top of what is happening in your field and current pedagogy, teach, and deal with all of the issues students have - and there are many.

Academia at research-oriented universities has become a mad scramble for money and the students are the ones who suffer. The typically academic with a research appointment works many more hours per week than someone in industry and usually for 50-70% of the pay. Yes there are lazy ones, but after spending years doing that job I feel that it is partially earned!

Re:Dare I say...

[darkstar949]

Depends upon the field that you are working in. In some fields you can get by with publishing a paper every six months or so where as other fields you might do a couple years of work before you have something that is publishable. Granted you may have other projects going on at the same time, but not all work is publishable.

Re:Dare I say...

[ceoyoyo]

An incredibly low threshold like this one is a fair starting place. Usually there is a review process where, if you fail the threshold you're evaluated to see whether your two pubs are both in nature, your wife is an incredible researcher the university might lose if they fire you, etc.

Don't forget that grad students and post docs are the ones actually writing the papers and their careers suffer immensely if the professor is unable or unwilling to break big projects into frequently publishable chunks.

Re:Dare I say...

[betterunixthanunix]

I agree that the number of citations per year should be a factor, but not the only one. Some fields have long-running experiments that might not yield publishing results for several years, and researchers should not be punished for that sort of work.

Re:Dare I say...

[scamper_22]

Well you can research on your own dime.

The parent is absolutely right in saying... if you're not onto something productive in terms of research... and thus publishing... then you should be teaching.

I'm sorry, the waiter and warehouse worker doesn't work 10 hour days for minimum wage to pay taxes, so that some academic can sit around and think.

I certainly don't grind away at my engineering job dealing with deadlines, customers... so that some academic can sit around and think.

Hey, I'd like to sit around and think and ponder as well. I'm just not that greedy and immoral to think the rest of society should pay for me to do it.

We need more old school researchers who don't think they should be entitled to free money. People like Thomas Edison who worked the night shift at a regular job and then pursued their research and interests during their spare time.

Re:Dare I say...

[buddyglass]

Guess I'm against tenure then. At least, a tenure system that allows one to sit around doing jack squat after rendering one's self un-fire-able.

Re:Dare I say...

[betterunixthanunix]

Not unlike sitting around and doing jack squat after building a fortune. At the very least, one can say that tenured professors contribute more to society than, say, trust fund babies -- at least one has to put in some amount of work to get tenure. It is also pretty rare for a tenured professor to stop working entirely; even those whose output is diminished frequently serve as advisers to graduate students and undergrads, publish textbooks, etc.

Is it perfect? No, of course not. Yet if professors did not get tenure, their research would be at the mercy of the institution they work at, which might decide that their work is a waste of time, that it does not align with the school's politics or public image, etc. Tenure provides some protection for researchers whose work might not be approved of by their employers, which is an important aspect of academic freedom.

Re:Dare I say...

[betterunixthanunix]

I'm sorry, the waiter and warehouse worker doesn't work 10 hour days for minimum wage to pay taxes, so that some academic can sit around and think.

Nor do we turn to waiters and warehouse workers when we need answers to hard problems.

I certainly don't grind away at my engineering job dealing with deadlines, customers... so that some academic can sit around and think.

Yet if academics had not sat around and thought about things, there would be no engineering discipline. What do you think mathematicians did, so that you could use mathematics with confidence in your work? What do you think physicists spent their time doing, so that you could apply models of physical phenomena in your work? Society needs people to think, just like it needs people to design useful things or to pack useful things in boxes.

Well you can research on your own dime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan

Wait, let me guess -- you make special exceptions for mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, etc., because their work is useful to what you do for your own day to day job?

Re:Dare I say...

[betterunixthanunix]

An incredibly low threshold

That really depends on the field you are talking about. 4 papers in 3 years is nothing for computer science, but that might be a lot for a field like biology, where experiments may take several years to run to completion.

Don't forget that grad students and post docs are the ones actually writing the papers and their careers suffer immensely if the professor is unable or unwilling to break big projects into frequently publishable chunks.

Grad students and postdocs are at the mercy of the PI. If a professor is under pressure to get more papers published, his students and postdocs will be under pressure to get more papers published, and they will do what they have to: they will seek easy problems that generate papers. The PI might ask them to "tweak" their work while a paper is in submission, so that they can publish "new work" elsewhere.

Re:Dare I say...

[buddyglass]

Actually I think it's very unlike doing jack squat after you've built a fortune. Since I'm paying the researcher to sit around and do nothing. Consider that most tenure programs already allow for termination in cases of gross violation of policy. If a laureate is documented to have engineered a "sex for grades" scheme, he gets sacked regardless of how great his research is. "Sitting around doing nothing" seems like a pretty obvious violation of the terms of one's employment.

Re:Dare I say...

[ceoyoyo]

"4 papers in 3 years is nothing for computer science, but that might be a lot for a field like biology, where experiments may take several years to run to completion."

The article doesn't say papers. It says "research outputs," which sounds like it includes conference abstracts. If you can't put together four conference abstracts in a few years you need to seriously reconsider your research methodology. If you're working on long term experiments, fine, but you need to be doing some other things as well. Biologists are frequently writing papers about interim results, methods, optimization runs, etc.

Three years is also more than enough time to ruin a masters student and seriously damage a PhD student. In biology, since you mention it, most departments and granting institutions I've been involved with (in Canada) suggest grad students should be going to at least one peer reviewed conference a year. Even if the professor only has one student, that's the quota covered.

"Grad students and postdocs are at the mercy of the PI. If a professor is under pressure to get more papers published, his students and postdocs will be under pressure to get more papers published, and they will do what they have to: they will seek easy problems that generate papers."

Good. As a grad student or a post doc, there's nothing worse than coming to the end of your term and not having a decent publication record to show for it. I know post docs who have material for several decent papers (never mind abstracts) but can't publish it because their supervisors only publish "Nature quality work." They finish their contracts and nobody will hire them because they have giant holes in their publication record and no output from their last post doc. Big, hard projects are great, but they MUST be broken down into smaller, publishable, grad student project sized chunks, and planning big picture projects that way is one of the primary functions of the supervisor. It's also good for science. Developing a bunch of techniques, getting everything perfect, THEN publishing after half a decade or more is BAD. Good science is collaborative. Conferences, and even journals, are not places only to publish final, big picture work. They're also about sharing interesting things you've learned or discovered along the way so others can benefit now, not in 5+ years.

This will drive up publication quality!

[gweihir]

Or rather not. Counting publications is a completely useless metric. In most fields you can publish things just a little different than what you published before, i.e. basically worthless. There are conferences as well that basically take everything. The only thing this does is waste money and time. Stupid.

Re:This will drive up publication quality!

[gweihir]

I agree with you on sacking people that are unproductive. Unfortunately, this metric does not even measure quantity of research done. You can have one paper from a reasonable researcher that is worth more than 50 papers from bad ones. And it is very easy to game this metric, which is the death of any metric.

I think who should be fired first is the people that came up with this metric. Then look at what the researchers actually published and judge quality. Yes, that is hard and expensive, but the only thing that works.

Re:publish shit!

[ArieKremen]

Already Exists: The Journal of Irreproducible Results (http://www.jir.com/)

Doesn't make sense.

[langelgjm]

So, how exactly will firing professors for not publishing "enough" encourage professors to care more about students and teaching, and less about publishing?

Re:Doesn't make sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't. Clearly. But you are missing the point.

The whole publish or perish paradigm is set up because publishing professors typically have a stronger ability to get grants, which then help fund the university (which typically takes a portion of the grant money into a more general fund). Grant givers almost always look at the publication record of the applicants, and those who are publishing more are MUCH more likely to get the grant. And yes, this is even in cases where supposedly the grants are given 'blind'. Well-known authors in any field develop a distinct style and those who are familiar with the field are likely to recognize that style. Thus grants are given to people who are already productive.

In the end, science research as funded via universities is a bit of a circular situation and it's all a bit self-congratulatory for the people at the top of their field. Which is of course why anyone wanting to do research in a field needs to attach themselves to one of the top researchers during under-grad/graduate years, so that they get the chance to be 2nd (or 3rd or 5th) author on a number of papers published by the BIGNAME. Then after they do that for a while, they get to be first author and BIGNAME moves to last author, but their names become strongly associated, and eventually the rising star gets to move into their own celebrity status, while the BIGNAME just keeps getting more recognition.

If I sound bitter, it may be because this is system is hardly designed to foster innovation, and is hardly conducive to outsiders being brought in. The real rule is conformity to the status quo. If you start out trying to make your own name, or trying to publish things that go against the grain, then you will get quietly ignored by the publishers. Personally, I'm no longer in research, and I'm just as well off gone from that particular insanity.

I have a good friend who has a PhD in astrophysics, but because all he really wants to do is teach, no one will ever know much about him. Will he ever make some great discovery about astrophysics? LIkely not, even though he's as intelligent as any person you'll likely meet. But because he has a passion for passing on the knowledge he has to new students of physics rather than spend years fiddling around with galactic simulations, he'll likely always have lower pay than most professors, and he'll likely never get mentioned as an important figure in astrophysics. And let's be honest, saying, "I inspired thousands of students to continue learning about physics" sounds trite and boring, but saying "I figured out why some stars go supernova and others don't" sounds much more 'important'. Honestly though, the professors that teach the rising students the basic grounding in a subject so that *the new students* of a subject can go on and make important discoveries are the ones that deserve a lot of credit. The professors that ignore students that aren't actively doing research *with them* are often (not always) doing little more than polishing an already sparkly name. Yes, they bring in money for the universities. Yes, the research they do is *often* important, and yes, we need people who are willing to do real research. Yet, at the end of the day, if we don't have people who are competent at actually *teaching*, then we are going to eventually get ourselves into trouble when all the students decide to go get an MBA so they can actually make a decent living.

Re:Doesn't make sense.

[Theovon]

I have to agree with you on the issue of teaching. Some professors are brilliant at teaching, but they're looked down upon because they've taught at the expense of research.

As for getting papers published, I don't know how it is in your area, but I'm in Computer Architecture, and I haven't seen any problems with bias towards big names. My advisor's former advisor is on the boards of some conferenes. But how can anyone tell when all of the submissions are double-blind? We actually try to figure out who some of our reviewers are based on the writing style of their comments, and perhaps some of that is done by reviewers looking at papers. But my papers are far more my own writing style (me being a nobody) than my advisor's, so they're unlikely to make the connection.

For those who gripe about being rejected based on bias, I think the main problem is that they haven't done enough reviewing themselves. If you did, you'd understand what a reviewer goes through. They get a stack of papers to review from multiple conferences, and based on experience, they know that all but MAYBE one of them is going to be truly awful. Since they don't know which one, they're going to read every one of them with the assumption that it's going to suck. If you can empathize with that attitude, then you can get a better handle on how to succeed at publishing.

You can't publish without doing good science. I've had papers rejected where the reviewers said the writing quality and organization were fantastic, but our work was just too incremental or the experimentation wasn't thorough enough, leaving too many unanswered questions. However, even if you do good science, if you don't package it well, it's going to get overlooked. The truly successful authors are the ones who not only do interesting work but also know how to present it clearly in a way that grabs the readers attention and tells them exactly what they want to know. The number one thing you have to get right is your abstract. A lot of reviewers jump from there to the conclusions. Some MAY read the intro. Then they look at the experimental evaluation. If that tells them something interesting, they'll go back and look at the meat of the paper that explains the innovation that lead to the results. One of the "tricks" is to spoon-feed the reader what kinds of conclusions you want them to draw. If you're being accurate, then they'll appreciate that. If you're full of crap, they'll figure it out and give you a terrible review.

I've heard two sides of the "jargon" argument, regarding obfuscating terminology and background knowledge. On the one hand, scientists want to be concise, so they use big words and refer to concepts that "everyone" in their area "should know." But when a networking paper gets reviewed by a top expert in GPUs, those kinds of shortcuts aren't going to work. If you can manage to lay out your paper so an undergrad can understand it, then you're going to get better reviews, because the BIGNAME reviewers in fields tangent to your own will understand what you wrote and be able to appreciate what your contribution is.

To put it another way, a publication is 10% science and 90% conveying to others what that science is. If you recognize that the paper is almost entirely about good writing, then you'll be a lot more successful.

Re:Doesn't make sense.

[Asic Eng]

Well, they want to move 64 academics to "teaching-only" positions, so that should help.

Of course the question is why they offered this to them. Are they good teachers who just don't have the time to work on research due to their course load? That would make sense, but then their course load could only be increased marginally, and they might be demotivated by now not being able to do research anymore. Or are they bad researchers who just can't get anything accomplished and also don't spend a lot of time teaching? They might be better off teaching then, but that casts doubt on the idea that they might be good teachers ...

Re:Doesn't make sense.

[excelsior_gr]

How can someone be interested only in passing on the knowledge without having an inherit interest on finding new knowledge? Heck, even during the teaching process, it is highly likely that the students will ask some question for which you don't have an answer. (like, to use your example: "Why do some stars go supernova and others don't, sir?"). I'd be damned if I didn't start looking into the matter right after leaving the classroom. So, a passion for teaching and a passion for research are certainly not mutually exclusive, but even complementary, in my opinion.

Don't you have that backwards?

[pavon]

The professors who follow your advice and focus on teaching rather than publishing make up the bulk of the people being fired here (plus a few slackers who neither teach well nor publish). The ones being kept are the ones who can get grants and crank out papers like printing press, and most likely treat students as a low priority.

Re:Don't you have that backwards?

[garaged]

You've been a Graduate student, aren't you?

Re:Don't you have that backwards?

[Phydidus]

The professors who follow your advice and focus on teaching rather than publishing make up the bulk of the people being fired here

Which is exactly what the parent comment is complaining about. Sacking people who probably focus on teching and don't bother publishing. However, I do agree that if a professor wants focus solely on teaching, he should get a teaching only position, which the University on the post seems to be offering for a few of them.

Re:Don't you have that backwards?

[mx b]

Indeed. I recently interviewed for professor positions. I often seem to get blank/unimpressed expressions when I describe that my interest is teaching, making a good connection with students, and researching teaching methods to make my work more effective and beneficial to students. Personally, I love it. Fun job, and while my students don't believe me, I often learn as much as they do. It's wonderful to view subjects with fresh eyes, vicariously through my students. It also forces me to re-evaluate my own understanding when answering questions. I find it much more satisfying profession that research or industry work.

The come back to this statement is usually "Well what research did you do for your doctorate, what research are you in now? What papers do you have published? Do you have industry experience?". I usually tell them the relevant info, followed by "...but that's not my primary interest, I enjoy working with students better than working in a lab".

That never seems to go over well so far, but I feel like I need to stick to my guns on this subject. Universities and colleges should be focused on the students. This doesn't mean you can't do research part of the time, but students are what pay the bills, and ultimately I want enough students to come after me to continue any work I start long after I'm gone. What's the point of all of our hard work in research if we do not have a next generation to pass it to? If the next generation cannot understand it or further the research? In any case, I definitely feel like its harder to get in the door if you aren't obsessively focused on research.

Quick Anecdote: I remember during graduate school, most of the professors that were "well-known" effectively ignored me and did their best not to give me time and answer questions or help in any manner. They just gave commandments about what to do in lab for them so they could publish more papers and get their name thrown around more; if you're lucky, they might include you as a co-author. My favorite professors, the ones I actually sat and had conversation with and learned what I know now from, were the ones that spent a lot of time on teaching, but in conversation I found out they constantly had to justify their existence to the bean-counters in the administration office; being a teacher or even doing teaching research wasn't enough. They had to come up with all sorts of things -- faculty sponsor of club/organization, etc. -- to prevent themselves from ending up on the chopping block. And now i find myself in the same situation. It's a sad state of affairs, really. Why can't we be allowed to do our job without side project interference?

Re:Don't you have that backwards?

[ceoyoyo]

Bull. If you're focusing on teaching you probably have a teaching position and aren't expected to publish. If you've got a research position you're supposed to be doing research, i.e. supervising grad students. If you do a good job, they'll write papers, which is good for them and good for you.

There are too many professors who are poor supervisors and their students aren't productive. Not publishing hurts a professor, but it hurts his students more.

Re:Don't you have that backwards?

[mx b]

Wasn't intentional trolling. I meant teaching-focused positions, and threw the word "professor" around a bit casually. What I was saying is that even the teaching-focused jobs seem to have a large emphasis on what research you will bring. It was very hard to get anyone to talk about the academics and curriculum and what I would be expected to teach, for example. Instead, lots of statements like "Well we have lots of researchers in topology here, how would you fit in that?".

Re:Don't you have that backwards?

[mx b]

I feel I should also point out that the smaller community colleges were happy to interview and accept me. It was bigger universities that gave me that treatment, even for teaching-position applications. I guess the assumption is that even if you teach, you will still work hard on research to give the university a good name. I can see their point to some degree, but this goes back to my original complaint: even in teaching-focused jobs, they're losing sight of the students.

Re:Don't you have that backwards?

[Mana Mana]

I always wonder/ed?

* Why can't we have teacher-professors?

AND

*Why can't we have research-professors?

College tuition is astronomically high, so don't tell me with a straight face that money is an issue in implementing this. Disrupting the vested status quo is the root cause. I hated freshman level physics lectures. I might as well read the textbook on my own, gather all teaching aids onto me, take tutoring (where even a graduate level tutor did not understand the end of chapter problems!), and promote to get a cut in my tuition by campaigning to get the costs of the university lowered by having my physics teacher fired---why not? I/we never understood a cryptic word he said anyway. At the time I was so young, I thought that "It has to be me, maybe I am not concentrating hard enough. These hard-science, freshman level Lecture teachers oops professors can't be as bad as I think they are!"

Re:publish shit!

[Samantha Wright]

You may want to call it something more subtle than that so that the board doesn't get immediately suspicious—how about the Journal of Applied Numerology?

Skeptical

[aaaaaaargh!]

As an academic early in his "career" (postdoc) I'm skeptical about absolute publication quotas. While it is true that in Southern Europe, where I live, many academics are lazy, it is my impression that in certain domains, especially in the humanities, many of the people that publish a lot are mediocre to say the least. The peer reviewing system in the humanities already gives a huge advantage to people publishing intellectually modest to plain stupid papers, as it is much easier to get an uncontroversial paper that only makes minor points past the reviewers than a controversial paper with new ideas. (This is probably not such a problem in natural sciences, because they have better evaluation criteria.)

Sure, the top people in the field almost always publish a lot -- 4 or more papers a year is quite common -- but I claim that in the middle field this measure does not work. Too much publication pressure primarily encourages people not to strife for substantial results, but in the end its these rare gems that drive research.

That being said, 4 papers in 3 years is a very low demand, as long as we're not talking about indexed papers in A-tier journals. At least people should be able to demonstrate that they have written something even if they don't get all of it published in time. But perhaps there should also be an upper limit---no more than 3 papers a year.

Re:Skeptical

[PlatyPaul]

Varies field-to-field. Publishing 5 times in a year is not a big deal in computer science, but publishing 5 times in a year in economics is (from what I hear) impossible even for the cream of the crop.

Re:Skeptical

[ceoyoyo]

Remember we're talking about professors here, not post docs. The prof counts all of his students' pubs. To have your lab not publish more than four things (sounds like abstracts are acceptable too) in three years sounds to me like a major issue.

Re:Does not seem unfair

[Samantha Wright]

The key here is that they were told less than six months ago that producing four papers every five years (0.8 papers/year) was acceptable. In that time I expect a number of researchers could have produced enough legitimate papers to stay afloat.

Let's do the same on Slashdot....

[DomHawken]

First Post! Oh - wait... Darn.

Seems fairly reasonable

[MikeRT]

Another 64 academics were told they had a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position, he said

If the teaching-only position is an option for most of them, then that seems to be a reasonable compromise. The West simply doesn't have the money anymore to throw at professors who are neither prolific researchers nor teachers. There are plenty of students who work very hard for the university who could benefit from having their stipends increased by cannibalizing the salaries of "researchers" who don't really publish much of anything.

I think this quote might hint at who is really being targeted:

“The mood is bloody,” agreed Jake Lynch, Director of the university’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. “The union accurately reflects the frustration of many researchers.”

There are a lot of humanities, liberal arts and social sciences professors who claim to be "researchers" but aren't productive in any sense that the sciences or engineering disciplines would recognize. Based on the friends I had in the sciences and engineering, I can't believe that most of the professors overseeing the researcher graduate students aren't regarded as highly productive by their universities because they put in solid time and effort every year at the very least guiding the researchers doing the grunt work. Admittedly, that's an American experience, but I have a feeling that their College of Arts and Letters, not Science and Engineering, is what is starting to feel the bean counters' medusa-like gaze...

While student enrollments are increasing...

[bigsexyjoe]

The professors' union has a good point. Enrollment is increasing and management miscalculated the student fees they would need to take in. So now the professors have to:
a) publish more
b) teach more
leaving little time for:
c) publish papers that are risky and innovative (the kind that actually move human knowledge forward)

You have wonder how we can encourage the best and the brightest to be academics. We work them to death making them earn a degree, we work them to death making them actually get hired, then they have to still build their reputation. And know they are saying that they'll get fired for not publishing more when they are already teaching more.

Screw that.

[GauteL]

It is my experience that many academics these days are pushed into "pork" activities, that is industry oriented work that brings in money for the university, but has little or no academic value.

In the UK it is particularly common that research fellows are hired for specific pork-based projects on short-term contracts, and also has to cover teaching due to a shortage or unwillingness of staff on higher pay-grades. Actual research you're meant to do on your spare time.

Well screw that. These days an academic career gives you less pay, longer work hours and less job security than an industry job. You're much more likely to get a permanent job in industry. In academia you have to go through 4-5 short term contracts before you're likely to get a permanent job.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the sacked academics has been pressurised into pork work for years and then get let go when the bacon runs out, because they've been too deep in pig fat to publish.

Re:moderately competent researcher

[TaoPhoenix]

(Checks the Article hoping to avoid a blunder)

Did anyone else catch the irony that in an article about "not publishing enough research", they ... didn't do any research? Unless I'm missing something on the confidentiality side, someone has the list of letters sent, right? So then that's column 1 on the spreadsheet. So then you go to the Faculty Listing, and ... wait for it... it becomes clear which fields the academics worked in, right?

So then do I get to write my Paper in the Psychology of Deliberately Obfuscating Data or in Journalism/Economics of Speed of News vs Quality of News? So there's my Paper, so I get to Keep My Job, right?

Sigh: And we wonder why we can never get people to pay for content.

Publish Failures!

[GiantRobotMonster]

We need a lot more people publishing "We tried X to do Y, but it didn't work because of Z."
They may not be exciting and sexy, but they are good data points to have.

Are there a whole lot of academics out there who aren't writing anything at all?
Are they writing absolute crap, that journals are rightly refusing to publish?
Are they perhaps keeping all of their research secret, so that they can commercialise it themselves and diddle their institutions at the same time?

Enquiring minds want to know.

Yet again pushing quantity over quality

[geogob]

Although I agree that some people deserve the boot, such a policy - like most academic policies nowadays - only encourage production of large quantities of low-quality material. (That just a polite way of saying "huge piles of shit").

Going through published material is really depressing. Most of it is either republished stuff (à la "the same article few months ago : now with a new figure") or stuff that wouldn't even find its way into a textbooks due to lack of interest.

The groups I've been working with are on the top of our field. These groups published very little (maybe a paper or two per year, for the whole group), but always groundbreaking content or content of high interest for the community - and thus hold very high reputation in the community. I like it that way. Rather than wasting my time writing worthless papers (because writing a good paper takes time if you are not writing it with 3 keyboard keys - ctrl, c and v), I rather do actual work and publish it when it's mature enough.

Sadly, this view is not very common and I believe we get through with our way only because we are closer to engineering than to what people refer to as scientific research.

Re:Yet again pushing quantity over quality

[exa]

I think people like you should advocate building a "quality review" mechanism.

Most of the papers published in even top engineering/science journals are completely worthless I think. So the number of publications must not be a pressing concern. And the number of citations isn't so reliable either.

We need to have a much better evaluation system of merits. I've thought about a solution for some time, but of course nobody's going to listen to me.

Re:Yet again pushing quantity over quality

[geogob]

In theory, such a quality review mechanism already exists. It's called peer review. But the system fell victim of policies like these and, although it worked at some point, is now totally useless. Lets face it, the marketing departments took over control of academic research.

This push for papers has nothing to do with science. It's nothing more than policies to generate publicity. Cheap publicity - and the pseudo impact scale of journals is a nice illustration of this. Why would a good paper published in a smaller, well aimed journal - thus reaching exactly the right community - be any less worth than a paper published in Nature or what ever other hyped journal? Science is not about impact. Marketing on the other hand is.

We expect professors to do both

[sirwired]

Professors are supposed to be teaching AND researching. If the focus was on teaching (especially undergrads) we wouldn't need professors for that kind of work; any post-doc would do, and do it for cheap.

While turning professors into publication factories would indeed be a BAD idea, four "research outputs" over three years is not exactly a high bar to cross.

Tiny Variations

[mx b]

Researchers taking one good result and publishing lots of tiny variations on that result, essentially publishing the same paper over and over again.

This drives me absolutely nuts. I find a list of papers thinking "oh wow, this will be great to find more about the topic!", only to discover none of the papers actually describe the method, but are simply a dozen papers on slight variations of the same problem with no real insight into how the method actually works. Just "Here's another result using my method from 1985, this time I set a=3 instead of a=2!". It never really seems worth publishing, but I guess the reviewers are in the same situation so there's pressure to approve each others' work.

Thank you, Management Consultantman!

[Rogerborg]

You've bungied in and saved academia with the power of Metrics! Now that you've determined the method to use to judge people whose work you can't even begin to comprehend, you can bag your non-performance-related flat fee and sproiiiing off to your next lucrative challenge!

I've got tenure, suckers!

[in10se]

One of my favorite Futurama scenes:

Mayor Poopenmayer: Professor Wernstrom, can you save my city?
Professor Wernstrom: Of course, but it'll cost you. First, I'll need tenure.
Mayor Poopenmayer: Done.
Professor Wernstrom: And a big research grant.
Mayor Poopenmayer: You got it.
Professor Wernstrom: Also, access to a lab, and five graduate students, at least three of them Chinese.
Mayor Poopenmayer: All right, done. What's your plan?
Professor Wernstrom: What plan? I'm set for life. Au revoir, suckers!
Leela: That rat! Do something!
Mayor Poopenmayer: I wish I could, but he's got tenure.

Contradiction.

[mark-t]

Compare

...they will lose their jobs for not publishing frequently enough.

and

The move is part of a wider cost-cutting plans designed to pay for new buildings and refurbishment to the university.

So what is the real reason? Are they being fired for not doing their job properly, or are they being laid off as a cost-saving measure? There is a world of difference between these two, since in some jurisdictions the former reason may cause delays in unemployment benefits while an investigation confirms that they were not discharged for ethical misconduct (which could make them ineligible for any unemployment benefits), while the latter simply means that the university will not be hiring replacements anytime soon (and they can receive unemployment benefits normally).

If you ask me, this really smells like somebody at the university was wanting to lay them off anyways for purposes of cutting back costs, and felt like they needed a less selfish-sounding reason or something.

Regardless, however... it's still very strange that both such reasons are mentioned.

Publications bad measuring tool for productivity

[Reverse Gear]

I know from my brother who is working on a university in mathematics research that 4 publications in 3 years is extremely many in his subject, he has worked extremely hard for 3 years to make 2 publications in topology.
I have been told it is a common problem for mathematicians that they don't make as many publications as in other fields of science, in geophysics working as researcher (which I don't I work in the private) it would be a reasonable demand with 4 publications on 3 years.

Re:publish shit!

[scruffy]

Publish any shit you can! That's the best way! unfortunately, that's how academica works.

That is going to be the result of this kind of policy. I know in Computer Science, there are lots of bad conferences and journals that are easy to publish in.

"Academics"...really?

[argStyopa]

I understand the 'publish or perish' thing, but when the PRIMARY measure of their performance is their production of texts...doesn't that make them AUTHORS, not academics?

I mean, good luck going to your board of regents (or state funding authority) telling them that instead of 4000 teachers on the payroll, you actually have 4000 authors who also teach....I'm going to guess that the "sell" for that funding is going to be a little bit harder to justify.

Good

[roman_mir]

Good.

That's what I have to say on this. The less money that government takes away from actual people and businesses to do things it wants to do, the better. It allows the actual individuals and businesses to command their money as they see fit and that's the way to create real innovation. That's why industrialisation created the environment for best education and most scientific discoveries and engineering innovations, while creating most goods and wealth ever.

More Than You Think

[mx b]

If it was the only thing you had to do, sure. But a full-time course load (with all of the prep, grading, office hours that come with it), plus advising students on their own research projects or helping recruit students, plus attending the mandatory weekly faculty meetings (I hate those teaching in-service seminars they make us attend, there goes an afternoon) and all of the paperwork involved, etc., really strain your time. You end up maybe having one good day a week to work on something research oriented. It can take a while to find a topic, then to work it, then draft a manuscript, then wait for it to be reviewed, to make changes, etc., all in between your other duties. It's not a terrible requirement, but I do believe it's more than most realize if you are not a teacher.

This is why effectively, you can be a good researcher or a good teacher, but usually not both.

Millikan was faced with this

[pacc]

http://www.aip.org/history/gap/Millikan/Millikan.html
After 10 years of teaching he knew that he had to publish something great or give up research and becoming a professor.

This proves that you only need one paper, if it also give you the Nobel prize.

Journal of Applied Numerology

[Kupfernigk]

Doesn't that invade the territory of about 90%* of economics or political journals?

-

*I made that statistic up. Does that make me an economist?

Re:Journal of Applied Numerology

[Samantha Wright]

Yes and yes. I was considering coming up with a more direct jab, but couldn't think of a field that would be a sufficiently acceptable target. Besides engineering theory, applied economics, post-structuralist philosophy, behavioural psychology, or string theory, I mean.

Re:Does not seem unfair

[mx b]

0.8 of a year is about 10 months. So they were told less than 6 months ago to publish more, and now they are upset they haven't when their own guidelines suggested it should take about 10 months on average to get something done? I am confused by your statement.

Re:publish shit!

[Mithent]

Yep. Why spend time trying to polish your paper and get it into a top-tier journal if it means your job is on the line? Just find the least publishable unit and get it out there somewhere.

Re:Does not seem unfair

[Samantha Wright]

No, they were told less than 6 months ago that 0.8 was acceptable. Now they are being harried for not producing at a rate of 1.33. Groups that previously believed they had 15 months (your math is backward; 1.25 years per paper was expected) to turn out their next work are suddenly being told they should have produced papers every 9 months. In a world where grant deadlines determine the availability of funding on an annual basis, that's a very hard timespan to turn around in.

Why is publishing a measure of productivity?

[hsthompson69]

Should the measure of productivity be how many students they teach weighted by how much the students actually learn?

Academics should be teaching. They can do their writing on their own time during sabbaticals.

Re:Why is publishing a measure of productivity?

[KramberryKoncerto]

As subtle as it might seem, in many cases good university-level teaching also relies on the constant intake of information via a continued effort on research. Stuff could get old really quickly these days. Professors have to learn before they teach, and it is the thorough, rigorous investigation in some topic that gives them sufficient insight to keep their authority. If it's not done by themselves, it was already done by others. It is especially true for courses that deal with cutting-edge technology, or when courses have to be designed to educate students to meet new academic or industrial demands.

Re:Publications bad measuring tool for productivit

[KramberryKoncerto]

At somewhere I worked previously, a mathematician was refused professorship. Some people on the committee were chosen from the design school and the business school, and they unanimously blamed the mathematician for his low cumulative impact factor, comparing him to themselves, which was actually a significant cause of his rejection. All evaluation was based on metrics and simple rules such as "number of papers in a top X journal in the past Y years". Just like the case with frat traditions, people who survive this stupid system feel justified to stick to it. It was not long ago that the department of mathematics was at the edge of collapse

Obligatory quote...

[athlon02]

A quote comes to mind...

"Doctor... Venkman. The purpose of science is to serve mankind. You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge... or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable! You are a poor scientist, Dr. Venkman!" -- Dr. Yeager

Re:Does not seem unfair

[mx b]

That's what I get for trying to compose a comment while thinking of something else. I agree with what you said and was attempting the same statement, but something crossed backwards in my mind. Call it a fit of dyslexia, sorry about what the previous comment.

Solution...

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

Write one paper and split it into four journals to submit over a 3 year period. j/k

Re:In general, negative is good.

[b4dc0d3r]

I think this even appeared on slashdot a while back.Negative results need to be published.

http://www.arjournals.com/ojs/
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7332/full/470039a.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20110203

In fact, just google "publishing negative results" and you get piles of stuff that says it's good.

Sounds reasonable actually

[zenyu]

When I first read this my thought was, "OMG this is as bad as counting LoC for evaluations." But then I thought, "If a programmer was fired after producing less than 300 LoC in 4 years I would not be shocked."

The number of papers expected this isn't really so bad. When I was in graduate school I published 0.75 paper per year. Professors each had at 3-6 graduate students.. It would be really hard not to make those numbers. There were some professors who had only one graduate student, but those students published more often. In my field at least, my advisor's name was always on that paper and deservedly so.

I do feel bad for the people let go, I think this type of metric should be given up front. I can envision someone working hard on something for three years and not publishing anything because the results are very surprising and require more verification before they put their reputation on the line, but they should still be writing technical reports. This also obviously shouldn't apply to teaching faculty, but then at my University their salary was in the $10k/yr - $150k/yr range vs. $300k/yr - $1.5M/yr for the research faculty.

All research now short term

[kawabago]

No one will take on a project that runs more than 3 years so difficult, time consuming work will not get done. 'One rule to ring them all' tends not to work, the real world has too many exceptions.

Universities should not be for teaching undergrads

[gwolf]

Not primarly, I mean.

The job of a university is to create and disseminate knowledge. And yes, teaching undergrads is an important part of it - But the university cannot be devoted to that. Universities is where leading research is conducted.

In my country, there are many universities, public and private. The (public) university I work at is singlehandedly responsible for over 50% of the academic research in the country. Most universities are only teaching houses (specially most private ones). I refuse to call them universities — They work for knowledge dissemination only. They are schools.

The hidden reason

[betterunixthanunix]

Here is an overview of academic funding:

1. Researcher applies for a grant, specifying the goals of the project, previous work in the field, students who will be funded, equipment costs, and various other things.
2. If the funding agency likes the line of work -- and this is usually a politically motivated decision -- the researcher gets the grant.
3. The university gets a large chunk of that grant money just because the researcher is working at the university.
4. The researcher then publishes lots of papers, which can be referenced during the next grant application.

That, in a nutshell, is what this is all about. Researchers whose work is difficult, not mainstream, or hard to publish for any reason are not bringing in any money. Universities have no time for researchers who do not bring large sums of grant money in, and these universities are working to get rid of such professors. The result will be even more politically motivated research, more researchers grabbing the easy, low hanging fruit, and less innovative, groundbreaking research.

Re:Does not seem unfair

[Samantha Wright]

It happens to everyone, fear not. (Although I suspect it was more likely a fit of dyscalculia. Fun science fact.)

Easy solution

[bizitch]

Just need to modify the SCIgen Automatic CS Paper Generator a bit and voila! Instant publishing ;)

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

How is that a car analogy?

[turing_m]

The car in this car analogy is in the parking lot. This is the Caterham 7 of car analogies, it's about the most bare bones as you can get.

99% failure, 1% success!!

[snemiro]

Research is basically about failure, not success. Banging the head against the wall... Is like walking blindfolded into a theoretical barn, looking for THE needle. There is no 100% successful researcher. That's BS. I think "Forcing" to publish goes against serious research.

The other way around

[migloo]

I would rather fire those academics publishing more that five papers per year.
They are just wasting valuable readers' time.

The real reason: Edifice Complex

[Chemware]

The real reason that these researchers are being sacked is that someone high in the administration has what I term an "Edifice Complex". A common affliction in Australia, it consists of building something akin to the pyramids as a memorial to the wonderful wisdom, forsight, leadership, etc, etc, etc of the person at the top of the "pyramid". The edifice in question is called the "Centre for Obesity, Diabetes and Cardiovascular Disease".

Blaming the funding problems on falling student numbers, or routine maintenance, is incorrect.

If you are interested, read the gory details at http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3822688.html

They don't care about teaching.

[durdur]

Professors who get research grants bring money into the university (the university always retains some of it, for "administration"). On the other hand, the university does not get an extra dime for having professors who teach well. So guess what their priority is?

may work differently in Arts.

[Goonie]

As I understand it, a number of the academics in the firing line for this work outside science and engineering. I wouldn't proclaim to know what a reasonable minimum output of a history or music theory academic is.

Pack of bludgers.. mostly

[Niobe]

A definite bias in the comments towards supporting academics. My views, based on firsthand experience, are the opposite. Firstly universities are places where the fruitless, unproductive and unrealistic go to wallow in low-demand jobs. Most academics have little experience of the private sector and are not even aware of this concept of personal productivity (yes even in Economics departments!). However universities ARE a massive and sometimes useful pyramid scheme where you take a bunch of students, incline them towards doing Phds, employ most of them, and hope that a handful of them earn your university some respect, and even that one or two may win a Nobel or and bring actual prestige. This is the real cycle of the university business - promote itself, buy in productive academics, publish more (not better) papers, grow funding, get more students, review rankings and repeat. Good "science" (not an all encompassing term for the areas of research at universities) is as rare as good government. A thorough de-weeding once in a while can only be a good thing, and a handy wake up call for those that remain. Good riddance. No one any good will be losing their jobs - not a one.