4 ms·

As a former academic in pure math, I was once given the advice that university hiring/promo committees care about two things with respect to publishing: 1. The

• bialsiednt3 5y ago
  As a tenured professor, I've sat on many promotion and tenure meetings. Your comment reminded me of one that's lingered in my memory, of a faculty member undergoing review. This person had as high an h index as any of the other persons at their level, but was committed to publishing in open access journals. I saw it as a reasonable or good thing to be doing, and believed their h index was proof it didn't really matter, but it started a debate as some of the senior faculty believed the journals weren't prestigious enough. They basically believed this faculty had been mismentored, and to prevent this from happening again, it was decided there should be a list of "approved" journals to be developed and circulated among the department. It's one of the most absurd things I've seen, all the more absurd because this faculty was clearly getting cited and doing fine (citation indices have their own problems, but what does the outlet matter if the articles are impactful? Especially if these are well-known open access journals?).