(Although I’m guessing people here will just pretend they never read this and do nothing about it until 3 years later.)
[Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr] chastised the research community, saying: “There is clear and consistent evidence that the rankings were being deployed inappropriately within some quarters of the sector, in ways that could produce harmful outcomes, and based on a poor understanding of the actual role of the rankings.
“One common example was the setting of targets for publication in A and A* journals by institutional research managers.
“In light of these two factors — that ERA could work perfectly well without the rankings, and that their existence was focussing ill-informed undesirable behaviour in the management of research — I have made the decision to remove the rankings, based on the ARC’s expert advice.”
Australian Academy of Science Secretary for Science Policy Professor Bob Williamson has this to say:
“In our recent submission to the Australian Research Council, the Australian Academy of Science argued strongly that key areas such as interdisciplinary research and new research were seriously disadvantaged by journal ranking,” Professor Williamson said.
“This affected not only areas of science and technology, but also interactions between the sciences and the humanities.”
“It has been very distressing to see some universities using publications in highly ranked journals as the basis for funding, promotions, and even staff appointments.
“The ranking of a journal as A* does not mean every paper in it is first rate, and some very good papers may appear in smaller journals.
So how would the new ERA initiative include as changes? One proposed measure is to move more towards a peer review system. More comments from various experts here: interesting reads.
4 comments:
Malaysia in general will struggle a lot under "peer review" method of evaluation (let's say, for promotion purposes) since there are many research areas that we have very little or almost no expertise at all... which means, we need to get other people outside Malaysia to evaluate us, which is obviously time-consuming (and they prolly think that we are wasting their time asking their opinions on who should be promoted)
I think peer review is the right way to go, though. Only a panel of reviewers can determine the quality of your work subjectively, and not quantitatively, like how many journals you have, or how many A* conf. papers you have. Measuring quantities is self-defeating.
I think the Australian govt is trying to remove the dependency of targets in research institutions or academics on such journal ratings, because they often make people lose the real intentions of doing research. Quite often, these ratings translate into "KPI"s just like MMU and probably a few other local unis.
Like you said, it will take awhile for us to discard this point-based mentality. Or maybe some people would still prefer to hold on to this system...
Btw, I stumbled upon your blog when I was searching for Latex stuff. Keep it up!
Thanks for your comments Mr See. (You remember me right? :)
And yeah the LaTeX related blog is at http://latex-my.blogspot.com/, and my own site is at http://liantze.penguinattack.org/latextypesetting.html.
Haha, yeah I remember. By the way, I heard your supervisor, Bali would be leaving MMU soon? Where to? You gonna continue with Dr. Tang?
I'm actually into all these LaTeX stuff as well, but maybe I use it like a "tool", and definitely spend less time than you playing with it. But there are a lot of pressing compatibility issues with LaTeX, and even more if you use certain distributions. I JUST figured out how to make a conf paper IEEE-compliant, which most of the time LaTeX stupidly refuses to embed fonts for some reason...
@John I never had any problems with the IEEE classes (either the journal or the conference mode) and my fonts are always embedded. What distro are you using? The pdflatex binary and configs in MikTeX 2.9, TeXLive2010 and MacTeX 2010 all support PDF font embedding out of the box.
If you have further problems feel free to e-mail me with your problematic file.
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