Dan Brändström, appointed by the Swedish Government to suggest a revised system for allocation of resources to Swedish universities, presented his official report the 2nd of November. Part of the resources for research will be exposed to competition between the presumptive receiving universities. As expected, one of the suggested quality criteria will be citation in scientific journals or more specifically “field-normalized citations of international scientific production”. Our question concerns how this will constitute an appropriate criteria when more and more of the scientific knowledge production is published and discussed in open access and open per review scientific journals. The academy is a very slow moving body but not its innovative inhabitants.
thank you for this,
i guess it depends on what is (being) constituted as a field, and what, hence, might count as “field-normalized” as regards citation practices - however the effects of citations can contribute to an assessment of quality
? where is this being discussed in Sweden - and by whom?
my take on this is: if for technoscience we keep going fast enough (encouraging others to join in), we’re getting there on time
Thanks for your comment and quite right so “what is being constituted as a field”. I could not find any further clarifications in the commented document. I suppose this will be still another issue for the discussion in the Swedish official and informal university debate. One of many places to further this discussion would be at the National Secretariat of Gender Research (www.genus.se), which has a mandate to keep the research political discussion strong for the sake of feminist research.
You could also see the overconfidence in the traditional journal as a holdback for the development of healthier communication processes in the research community.