Speaking Truth to Power

A leading US biologist, Randy Schekman, who will receive his Nobel Prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, has just announced his lab will no longer submit journal articles to top tier journals. There is now so much emphasis in the academy on publishing 'impact factor', how many of us start the day by checking our 'factor'? If we stop writing from the joy of sharing and communicating our ideas, when the emphasis becomes on 'impact' rather than on the harder factors to measure such as orginality, creativity and contribution to knowledge, what happens to the way we generate knowlege. Are we even asking the right questions? As we recently published with our latest case study, You get what you measure. Measure the wrong thing and you get the wrong behaviours (Lingle), a potent argument for diverse and multiple ways of measuring.

Topic

CRC Comments