> Performance evaluation in academia is tied to the ability to post X papers in well respected established publications with a high impact factor. This requirement is generally imposed by legislation and regulation.
"Legislation and regulation"? This is an astonishing claim. As far as I know, universities decide their own performance evaluation processes. How on earth did you get the impression that legislators passed laws dictating that academics publish in high impact factor journals?
> "Legislation and regulation"? This is an astonishing claim. As far as I know, universities decide their own performance evaluation processes.
Not necessarily. In some countries, public research institutions are governed by regulations that cover organization aspects, funding, and performance evaluation.
> How on earth did you get the impression that legislators passed laws dictating that academics publish in high impact factor journals?
By the fact that I spent close to a decade working as a research engineer and as a PhD candidate, and I had to learn how my research group was funded and evaluated in order to remain a research engineer.
> Not necessarily. In some countries, public research institutions are governed by regulations that cover organization aspects, funding, and performance evaluation.
This is part of the fleecing. It ends up in law the same way that "Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations" (NRSROs) ended up in law in the US, or anti-third party laws (like against "fusion.")
Those laws and regulations seem like great places to attack, seeing as against the vast majority of academics, the few juggernauts of academic publishing would be very much underdogs. The problem is the weird rationalization that these arbitrary brands serve a useful purpose simply through being labeled as brands that should be respected.
It's no wonder they do as little as possible and charge as much as possible. Their value lies not in the papers they publish, the quality of their peer reviews, or the composition of their boards (which could easily be transferred) but in their titles, as if they were royalty. The only way to transfer this value is to sell the name to a huge company that can realize economies of scale and monopoly power to bring costs down even farther.
Ok, I don't know about most countries, but in speaking with US and UK and EU academics I have never heard of such laws. I would question if the places where most meaningful research occurs have these laws.
I wouldn't be surprised if, say, China did, but China doesn't dictate the way research is done globally.
> Ok, I don't know about most countries, but in speaking with US and UK and EU academics I have never heard of such laws.
I suspect you didn't spoke to a lot of UK and EU academics then, because that's how things are ran in here. The EU has been, for the past two decades or so, reforming their research institutions to introduce performance-based funding, which include and are not limited to tracking relevant and meaninful research output in a competitive environment[1]. These include bibliometrical indicators, which takes into account "publication type and the rank or citation impact of the publication channel". At the member-state and and institutional level this involves whitelists of acceptable reference publications.
Can you name a UK government law or regulation that dictates to universities how an academic's publication record is to be interpreted in their performance evaluation?
Re: the EU materials you've added to the post, thank you, I didn't know about this and I can definitely appreciate that it would make defection from the established set of journals more difficult. That said, editorial board defections usually produce journals with similar impact factors to the originals, so it is far from an insuperable barrier.
At any rate, my original comments seem to apply to countries like the US and UK that dominate in research. Academics there have the power to stop serving paywall-and-overcharge academic publishing corporations. We know this, because they sometimes do, and those that do are often successful. But most choose not to.
Your chain of comments sounds naive and presumptuous to me. What does it exactly mean for the US and UK to "dominate" in research, and in which areas? How are only their research "meaningful" while the others aren't? How exactly do the academics "have the power" and what are the concrete instances where they are successful in doing so especially in non-CS fields? Feels like you're more talking out of vastly simplistic assumptions and imaginations than actual facts.
> At any rate, my original comments seem to apply to countries like the US and UK that dominate in research.
Not really, at least not anymore. Depending on which metrics you choose to look at[1], China currently leads research output, and by a long stretch, over the US.
Meanwhile, within the EU Germany outperforms the UK by a considerable margin, and both India and Japan outperform the UK as well.
The UK fares even worse in papers-per-capita, ranking between the Czech Republic and Portugal.
> Academics there have the power to stop serving paywall-and-overcharge academic publishing corporations. We know this, because they sometimes do, and those that do are often successful. But most choose not to.
Don't get me wrong, it's possible to overthrow the likes of Elsevier. The current push for public-access research is a significant step to eliminate the stranglehold these companies have on research output by abusing copyright laws. However, unlike the initial claim, this is no easy feat nor straight-forward.
China does produce some very interesting computing-related papers FWIW. The few times I've been able to get an english version (or to have one translated) I was not under the impression they were qualitatively significantly worse than from any other place. Arguably that isn't hard because most papers in the field are absolute garbage, but I don't go into a paper expecting that to be the case.
> Nobody who knows anything of the content of the research underlying those metrics takes this seriously.
To be very charitable in my interpretation, your personal assertion is simply presumptuous and outright wrong. China outright dominates research in some key fields[1], and in some fields it's outright impossible to search through topics without getting search hits from china.
"Legislation and regulation"? This is an astonishing claim. As far as I know, universities decide their own performance evaluation processes. How on earth did you get the impression that legislators passed laws dictating that academics publish in high impact factor journals?