‘Shift away from “publish or perish” puts the public back into publication‘, The Conversation, 4 December 2015
Article riffing off suggestions that governments will make research publication less important – and public engagement more important – in calculations of how much money universities receive. The author welcomes the move.
Those of us who work in the social sciences and humanities place a great value on the persuasiveness of our words. We can write; not perfectly, but better than most. New and genuinely public forms of publication, rather than the semi-private domain of journals and monographs, provide us with powerful platforms for our academic passions.
The author explores other areas needing change such as lecture-based learning, academic department websites, and online presence generally. This should not mean downgrading of research but rather balancing it with engagement through blogs, opinion pieces and media interviews. ‘It will seem like sacrilege to many, but perhaps re-tweets could become an academic metric that sits alongside citation rates?’