Marginal Notes, vol. 2

Apologies for the delay - I'm currently working on a funding proposal, and catching up on my Open University "Reading Classical Latin" course, so it's been a busy period for me. Still, without further ado, here's a collection of noteworthy links. I've organised them a little better this time, but expect these updates on a bi-weekly basis in future.

So to begin...

Higher Education
Thomas Benton argues that it's just not worth going to grad school anymore in his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He puts this down to "a shrinking percentage of positions in the humanities that offer job security, benefits, and a livable salary", but I can't help but wonder if the same applies to many professions in today's economic climate.

Speaking of the tough economic climate, the New York Times asserts that the Humanities must justify their worth as higher education institutions are faced with painful cuts - implying that the Humanities are somehow less valuable than other disciplines and therefore need to explain why they are still necessary in changing socioeconomic times.

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond the arts and humanities have seen a dramatic decrease in research funding following this week's announcement of how funding will be distributed as a result of the RAE (see the full tables for how much funding was allocated to each discipline here). Although it all seems pretty bleak, Anthony Grafton rightly points out that if we don't start posing the tough but necessary questions now, then "we will see another generation’s relationship [w]ith the university ruined by our refusal to face and discuss facts."

On the brighter side of all this, Geoffrey Rockwell reminds us that these next few years will present opportunities as well as challenges: "Let us build something that celebrates what we do together rather than begging apart", he says, and proposes some credible starting theses. He ends with a rousing call to arms:

"Do research not regrets and hold out your hand to those less fortunate as you would want a hand held out to you. Be liberal in your arts and humanity and the liberal arts will thrive"

Here here!

Digital Humanities
As I think about what sort of employment I'd like to take up when my PhD is all over, I do wonder about the possibility of doing work on digital research tools at some (fantastical) higher education institution someplace. Imagine it - to obtain funding to write code to create a programme to be used in the pursuit of humanistic learning, and then write papers on how these tools might be used for the benefit of teachers and researchers. Well, Caveat Lector has a similar vision, but implies that the odds are stacked against those like myself who see this as a credible employment option: "A very, very few digital humanists will run the entire vicious gauntlet and survive in regular humanities departments". At the same time, the University of Lethbridge is playing with the idea of establishing a course which provides "skills, knowledge, and experience a typical undergraduate ought to have if they were to be certified as being basically competent in contemporary web technologies alongside their core domain", indicating that these are necessary skills for graduates, and such skills are nurtured in certain (praiseworthy) institutions.

Speaking of web technologies, it's worth noting that Zotero 1.5b1 has just been released, and much is already being written about how we can use its new features together with other applications in meaningful ways.

Finally, in a lengthy but engaging piece posted last year, Kathleen Fitzpatrick proposes a new way forward for academic publishing in the digital age. Fitzpatrick's appropriation of scholarly terms within a digital framework ("scholars must consider how peer review might usefully transform into something more like peer-to-peer review”) reinforces the need for institutions to reassess their outdated modes of academic review and publication, just as the electronic publishing units should seek to adopt "a broader view of textual structures, seeking not just the replacement for print-on-paper but an updating of the codex for a networked environment". Well worth a read.

Website Focus
The Guardian has recently put together a list of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read, usefully broken down into categories including "Science fiction & fantasy", "War & travel", "State of the Nation" etc - thanks to bookn3rd for pointing it out. Also sourced via bookn3rd is a remarkable online exhibition called Making Visible Embryos; compiled by the University of Cambridge's Department of History and Philosophy of Science, the site illuminates key questions and concerns by "contextualizing images [of human embryos] that have become iconic or were especially widely distributed in their own time" - weird and wonderful stuff.


And Finally...

Hark! A Vagrant is a webcomic by Katie Moira featuring an array of famous (and indeed infamous) historical figures. Ever wondered how Mary Shelley felt in that remote Swiss villa with Lord Byron and her husband? Find out by clicking the image above!

Last week I finally received my copy of Eluvium's boxset, Life Through Bombardment. Eluvium, a.k.a Matthew Cooper, is an ambient electronic musician who incorporates a variety of instruments into his ethereal palette, and the boxset (containing all of his releases) was well worth the money and the wait. The artwork was drawn by Jeannie Paske, and I strongly urge you to visit her website to see more samples of it. If Elvium's work sounds like something you could get into, then why not try downloading the following track from his latest release, Copia (right-click and save): Prelude For Time Feelers

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More on OA, and the RAE results

This post is an extended non-response to Tim's comments to my previous post (December 2nd), which you may wish to look at before you go any further. It primarily focuses on a single benefit of OA - its impact on citations. The matter of financial gains and losses to institutions is beyond my capacity to address in great detail, but I will address it in my closing remarks.



First of all, a little background about how the quality of research is measured in UK universities. On Thursday (December 18th) the results of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) were announced (you can read plenty about it in the latest edition of the Time Higher Education. As a sidenote - the English department at Exeter, my university, is now established pretty firmly as one of the best, if not the best English department in the country for research).

You may know a little about the RAE but I'll just summarise it anyway. It's a peer-review system whose primary purpose is "to produce quality profiles for each submission of research activity made by institutions" (RAE homepage). These profiles, as THE notes, "show the percentage of research activity in each department judged to fall within each of four quality grades "in terms of originality, significance and rigour":

- 4* world-leading

- 3* internationally excellent ... "but which nonetheless falls short of the highest standards of excellence"

- 2* recognised internationally

- 1* recognised nationally

The English department at Exeter has 45% of its researchers working at the 4* level, the highest percentage in any such department in the country (excluding those who submitted only their best researchers to the exercise; Exeter as a whole submitted 95% of its academic staff); 90% of its research staff are working at an international level of excellence.

The RAE was last conducted in 2001, but back then the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) included "research intensity" as a metric in the results (the proportion of eligible researchers submitted by each institution, as opposed to simply the volume). Not so this time, meaning that the so-called HE research "league tables" (here's the Excel spreadsheet showing THE's league tables) favour those institutions which submitted only the researchers they believed would fall into the 3* and 4* categories exclusively, or, of course, the institutions specialising in a key area of research (which explains why The Institute of Cancer Research has been graded above Cambridge and Oxford). Ian Postlethwaite, the pro-vice-chancellor for research at the University of Leicester, has written more on this in The Guardian recently. Exeter comes 28th or so in most league tables based on this year's data, but had the research intensity been included as a factor (as it had in every other RAE), then we would have ranked about 13th.

I suppose that was a lot of unneccesary information but it's an interesting set of affairs nonetheless, and something I was keen to comment on. The point is that this time-consuming, cost-ineffective panel review system is being replaced from next year by what is known as the REF (Research Excellence Framework). According to Hefce's news release...

The REF will consist of a single unified framework for the funding and assessment of research across all subjects. It will make greater use of quantitative indicators in the assessment of research quality than the present system, while taking account of key differences between the different disciplines. Assessment will combine quantitative indicators - including bibliometric indicators wherever these are appropriate - and light-touch expert review. Which of these elements are employed, and the balance between them, will vary as appropriate to each subject.

Bibliometrics is, among other things, a measurement of citations - how often is your work being cited in other works? With the increased visibility offered to research papers through Open Access mandates, the benefits to bibliometric data cannot be overstressed. It is true that the effects of OA on citations has been questioned, but when one takes into account the role Institutional Repositories play in the tracking of "hits" to research material deposited in IR's such as the Exeter Research and Institutional Content (that's right, ERIC), it speaks volumes about the quality of data one can produce. Bibliometric indicators become entirely appropriate when these indicators can be tracked and when IR's across institutions and, indeed, disciplines can be quantified and compared - an effort made possible only where these systems are in place and a green OA mandate (note: PDF file) has been introduced.

This is just an initial discussion of the impact OA could have in increasing the value of the REF, an ongoing discussions still very much in its early stages. It also illustrates in a neat circular way why all this research should be freely available: funding councils dish out the cash for research conducted across the country (and elsewhere), who in turn receive their money from the government, who in turn get it from the taxpayer. This money is distributed based on the quality of research conducted at each institution, which will be measured from henceforth through the REF. The success of a key feature of that system - bibliometrics - relies, in my view, heavily upon the increased visibility of research papers and the ability to track how often they are viewed. Not only does OA offer significant advantages to research visibility (and this applies to established scholars and PhD students alike, whose dissertations can now be viewed online by anyone across the world as opposed to being lost in a dark corner of the university library), but it makes the results of tax-payer-funded research available to those who, however indirectly, paid for that research to be conducted in the first place.

Returning to Tim's primary argument, the financial impact of Open Access is a tricky one. Stevan Hanard, a promiment OA supporter based at the University of Southampton, states that:

The Green option allows the number of OA articles (not journals) to grow anarchically, article by article, rather than systematically, journal by journal. This allows TA journals to adjust gradually to any changes that might arise as the number of self-archived OA articles grows.

He goes on to argue that Green OA "allows both journals and institutions the time to prepare for a possible eventual transition (though not a necessary or certain one, as TA and OA might go on peacefully co-existing indefinitely) to Gold". In short, even if authors were to deposit their works to make them freely available, this doesn't necessarily constitute the end of academic subscription-based publishing. And, Hanard notes, even if it does:

...then TA journals can gradually adapt to it, first by cutting costs (by cutting out the features that are no longer essential) and then, perhaps (if it should ever become necessary) by converting to the OA journal cost-recovery model (with the institutions' annual windfall institutional TA subscription savings now available to cover their annual OA publication costs).

The availability of online material for newspapers does not signal the death of the newspaper industry, and I believe the same argument can applied to academic publishing. Where money can be made it will be, but financial gain should not negatively impact upon scholarship.

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As a footnote, I'd like to wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy new year! I have been developing some exciting ideas for my PhD thesis lately, and I'm hoping to share them in future posts - as much as I love talking about them, I don't want this blog to be dominated by OA and research software. See you in 2009!

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Footnotes

Two links here:

Peter Barry (author of the useful "Beginning Theory") writing in the Times Higher Education supplement on the conflicting demands on research grant applicants posed by the AHRC and the RAE, and how postgrads might be taught to bridge the divide.

A call for papers - Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture. I've been thinking a lot about the Digital Humanities recently, and this might be something for me to seriously look into.

That's all for now!

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