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Unfortunately, the truth is much more unfunny than you think. In the past, you could get tenure at community or regional colleges just by teaching. If you were

Unfortunately, the truth is much more unfunny than you think. In the past, you could get tenure at community or regional colleges just by teaching. If you were interested you might from time to time publish an article in the institution's journal or maybe even in a real journal - as a botanist or astronomer you can do citizen science without much equipment. That's how it ought to be. But nowadays, administration has taken over, and everyone gets to fulfill the publication metric, or there won't be tenure. So you have predatory journals (I prefer the term "journal of convenience") that fulfill a genuine need. The only one who is worse off is the taxpayer or tuition-paying student because they get to pay the page charges. That is a problem, but everyone reacts to incentives. There are certain parallels to zero-tolerance policies at schools - in the past the popular kids got off lightly, consequentely because of real or perceived corruption the popular kids now get away with no punishment at all while everyone else has a 5-ton weight dropped on them, all in the name of fairness.

chrisseaton 6y ago
I don't understand this claim - because publishing in a 'journal of convenience' won't work for tenure because they don't just count your publications they look at what impact your publications have.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  "College" has a wide range of meanings in the US - Cornell is a college, but so is Yoknapatawpha County Community College in Mississippi, where 20 % of students are functionally illiterate. Of course they'll consider impact factor at Cornell, but at Yoknapatawpha they just count.
- QuesnayJr 6y ago
  There are "teaching schools", where teaching is your full-time job. Even these schools now require some publications, which is where the predatory journals come in. Schools where research is supposed to be part of your job will have a list of journals that count, and they may have a point system. Better schools have shorter lists. This is enforced at the dean level, since deans don't have the expertise to evaluate individual papers. Here predatory journals won't help you.
jventura 6y ago
> In the past, you could get tenure at community or regional colleges just by teaching. (...) But nowadays, administration has taken over, and everyone gets to fulfill the publication metric, or there won't be tenure. Completely true! I'm an adjunct teacher (meaning I have no tenure) at a non-US state college. Here, if we want tenure, we must go through a public panel when there are open vacancies, and the jury will validate certain criteria. At my last attempt (to get tenure), the criteria was 50% "scientific" (papers, journals, projects), 30% pedagogical (teaching experience, pedagogical materials) and 20% organizational. Although I fared well in the pedagogical components, I got behind in the "scientific" one, as I only published 4/5 papers (in decent venues), 1 book (in a predatory publisher) and 1 chapter of a book (in another predatory publisher).. The papers (which have almost no citations => no viewers) got more points than an ebook that I have about Python programming which has 3.1k stars on github (which got zero points). Just to say that teaching scores less than number of papers..
mcguire 6y ago
A quote from someone when I volunteered at the IEEE Southeast Regional Conference and wondered why almost none of the authors showed up: "They're students at schools that require a certain number of publications to graduate. We don't care as long as they pay the fee to register."

chrisseaton 6y ago

I don't understand this claim - because publishing in a 'journal of convenience' won't work for tenure because they don't just count your publications they look at what impact your publications have.

HarryHirsch 6y ago
"College" has a wide range of meanings in the US - Cornell is a college, but so is Yoknapatawpha County Community College in Mississippi, where 20 % of students are functionally illiterate. Of course they'll consider impact factor at Cornell, but at Yoknapatawpha they just count.
QuesnayJr 6y ago
There are "teaching schools", where teaching is your full-time job. Even these schools now require some publications, which is where the predatory journals come in. Schools where research is supposed to be part of your job will have a list of journals that count, and they may have a point system. Better schools have shorter lists. This is enforced at the dean level, since deans don't have the expertise to evaluate individual papers. Here predatory journals won't help you.

jventura 6y ago

> In the past, you could get tenure at community or regional colleges just by teaching. (...) But nowadays, administration has taken over, and everyone gets to fulfill the publication metric, or there won't be tenure. Completely true! I'm an adjunct teacher (meaning I have no tenure) at a non-US state college. Here, if we want tenure, we must go through a public panel when there are open vacancies, and the jury will validate certain criteria. At my last attempt (to get tenure), the criteria was 50% "scientific" (papers, journals, projects), 30% pedagogical (teaching experience, pedagogical materials) and 20% organizational. Although I fared well in the pedagogical components, I got behind in the "scientific" one, as I only published 4/5 papers (in decent venues), 1 book (in a predatory publisher) and 1 chapter of a book (in another predatory publisher).. The papers (which have almost no citations => no viewers) got more points than an ebook that I have about Python programming which has 3.1k stars on github (which got zero points). Just to say that teaching scores less than number of papers..

mcguire 6y ago

A quote from someone when I volunteered at the IEEE Southeast Regional Conference and wondered why almost none of the authors showed up: "They're students at schools that require a certain number of publications to graduate. We don't care as long as they pay the fee to register."