Wprowadzenie. Wyzwania instytucjonalnej ewaluacji nauki

Wprowadzeni

Rethinking Open Science: The Role of Communication

The first version of this text was presented in the “Philosophy of Communication” section at the ECREA’s 5th European Communication Conference, “Communication for Empowerment,” in Lisbon in November 2014. I would like to thank the audience for the lively post-presentation discussion.The aim of this study is to present discourses on Open Science. My reconstruction emphasizes the role of communication in science. I use two models of communication for the analysis: the transmission model and the constitutive model. By reconstructing the main method of defining Open Science, I demonstrate that the role of communication in science has been reduced to the dissemination of the knowledge produced. Such theorizing is typical of the transmission model and ignores the stage of the social construction of knowledge. However, it is possible to consider this stage when the constitutive model of communication is used. My findings show that the constitutive understanding of communication is more useful in analyzing the Open Science phenomenon if we focus on the communicative dimension of scientific practices.This article was written as part of the project titled “A Contemporary Polish Humanities in the Face of the Challenges of Scientometrics,” which was financed by the National Programme for the Development of Humanities in Poland (decision number 0057/NPHR3/H11/82/2014)

Running for Points as a Strategy in the “Parametric Game” in Poland

W artykule stosuję pojęcie „gry parametrycznej”, aby opisać strategię pracy akademickiej pojawiającej się w Polsce jako efekt wprowadzenia polityk punktowego nagradzania dorobku naukowego. „Gra parametryczna” oznacza realizowanie badań i publikowanie ich wyników w taki sposób, aby spełniać wymagania danego systemu ewaluacji nauki. W grze tej badacze mogą używać dwóch strategii. Pierwszą jest „impactitis”, w ramach której tylko publikacje w czasopismach z wysokim Impact Factorem są uznawane w danej społeczności akademickiej. Drugą strategią jest „punktoza”. Polega ona na tym, że bardziej opłacalne jest opublikowanie kilku artykułów w czasopiśmie bez Impact Factora niż opublikowanie jednego artykułu w wysoko punktowanym czasopiśmie. Na podstawie polskiego systemu ewaluacji nauki (parametryzacji) pokazuję główne mechanizmy wytwarzania punktozy oraz takie, które mają ograniczać negatywne konsekwencje grania w parametryczną grę. Tekst kończy się dyskusją na temat rozwiązań polskiego systemu oraz rekomendacjami, jak system ten można ulepszyć i jakie lekcje należy wyciągnąć z obecnej sytuacji. Przedstawione konkluzje są istotne zarówno dla badaczy, jak i decydentów z obszaru polityki naukowej z innych krajów.The paper uses the concept of ‘parametric game’ to describe a strategy of academic work which has become wide-spread in Poland, due to the introduction of a particular policy of rewards. The ‘parametric game’ consists of doing research and publishing results in so as to enable fulfilling the requirements of a given research evaluation system. On the whole, researchers can use two main strategies in this game. The first strategy is ‘Impactitis,’ where only publications in journals with a high Impact Factor are acknowledged by a given scholarly community. The other strategy, whose definition and understanding are put forward in the present paper, is the so-called ‘running for points’ (the original Polish term being ‘punktoza’). In this strategy, the most ‘profitable’ choice is to publish several articles in journals without any Impact Factor rather than one paper in a toptier journal. On the basis of the Polish system, I present the main mechanisms that produce the running-for-points strategy and several mechanisms that make it possible to reduce the negative consequences of playing the parametric game in this way. The article concludes with a discussion of the Polish system. It suggests how the system can be improved and what lessons can be learnt from it. The conclusions are relevant for both scholars and policy makers in other countries

What share of researchers publish monographs?

This work was supported by the DIALOG Program (grant name “Research into Excellence Patterns in Science and Art”).In this study, we investigate what share of researchers publish monographs across fields, gender and seniority. We acquire data from the Polish current research information system, containing metadata about all publications by 67,415 Polish researchers, including 30,185 monographs and 638,779 articles from 2013-2016. The data are aggregated at the researcher level which allow us to shed new light on publication patterns in all fields, especially on monograph patterns which in previous studies have been investigated mostly in only the social sciences and humanities. The key finding of our study is twofold. Firstly, we show that scholars who publish monographs also publish journal articles at the same time. This pattern is observed in all dimensions, i.e. fields, gender and seniority. However, substantial differences between the fields are observed. Secondly, presenting the publication patterns at the researcher level allows us to argue that a monograph is the key publication channel for social sciences and humanities. The discussion summarizes our empirical findings and positions them in the light of other methods of data aggregation

Publication counting methods for a national research evaluation exercise

This work was supported by the DIALOG Program (Grant name “Research into Excellence Patterns in Science and Art”) financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland.In this paper, we investigate the effects of using four methods of publication counting (complete, whole, fractional, square root fractional) and limiting the number of publications (at researcher and institution levels) on the results of a national research evaluation exercise across fields using Polish data. We use bibliographic information on 0.58 million publications from the 2013–2016 period. Our analysis reveals that the largest effects are in those fields within which a variety publication and cooperation patterns can be observed (e.g. in Physical sciences or History and archeology). We argue that selecting the publication counting method for national evaluation purposes needs to take into account the current situation in the given country in terms of the excellence of research outcomes, level of internal, external and international collaboration, and publication patterns in the various fields of sciences. Our findings show that the social sciences and humanities are not significantly influenced by the different publication counting methods and limiting the number of publications included in the evaluation, as publication patterns in these fields are quite different from those observed in the so-called hard sciences. When discussing the goals of any national research evaluation system, we should be aware that the ways of achieving these goals are closely related to the publication counting method, which can serve as incentives for certain publication practices

Examining how country-level science policy shapes publication patterns: The case of Poland

This work was supported by the DIALOG Programme [Grant name ‘Research into Excellence Patterns in Science and Art’].This country case study describes how science policy instruments are designed to shape publication patterns and identifies the changes in researchers’ productivity that can be observed over the period 2009–2016 in Poland by analysing data on 452,277 publications submitted to the country’s national research evaluation system. Our analysis reveals that policy instruments used in the country’s national research evaluation system, academic promotion procedures and competitive grants have increased the number of articles with an impact factor without compromising publication quality, as measured by a bibliometric indicator. Our findings highlight that only clear and stable incentives have influenced researchers’ publications. Therefore, patterns in scholarly book publications—for which regulations were not clear and stable—have not been significantly shaped by science policy

Researchers publishing monographs are more productive and more local‑oriented

This work was supported by the DIALOG Program (grant name “Research into Excellence Patterns in Science and Art”) financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland. (Grant no: 0093/DLG/2017/10).In this study, we investigate what share of researchers publish monographs across fields, gender and seniority. We acquired data from the Polish current research information system (POL-on) containing metadata of about 1,031,141 peer-reviewed publications from 67,415 Polish researchers, including 30,185 monographs from 2013 to 2016. The data are aggregated at the researcher level, which allows us to shed new light on publication patterns in all fields. We show that scholars who publish monographs also publish journal articles at the same time. This pattern is observed in all dimensions, i.e. research fields, gender and seniority. However, substantial differences between the fields are observed. Moreover, we show that researchers who publish monographs are also more productive in terms of the number of publications than researchers who did not publish any monographs. This result is independent of the publication counting method, i.e. fractional or whole counting. At the same time, scholars who publish monographs are more local-oriented in terms of the publication channels they choose

Ocena humanistyki w świetle wyzwań Narodowego Programu Rozwoju Humanistyki

Za lekturę i uwagi do pierwszej wersji tekstu dziękuję Anecie Drabek i Ewie Rozkosz.The article discusses the challenges of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education’s programme in Poland, i.e. the National Programme for the Development of Humanities. It describes the regulations on the basis of which the programme has been conducted in 2015. In accord with the current form of the programme, the paper presents three issues that result from the research policy in Poland: (1) how disciplines in the humanities and in the social sciences can be differentiated, (2) how the output of the Principal Investigator in the humanities can be evaluated, and (3) how the term ‘national’ in the name of programme can be interpreted. The article concludes with a discussion of the consequences of financing research in the form of research projects rather than in the form of scholarships for research.W artykule omówione są wyzwania stojące przed realizacją programu Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego, czyli Narodowego Programu Rozwoju Humanistyki. Prezentowane zagadnienia odnoszą się do aktualnej edycji realizowanej w 2015 roku. Artykuł prezentuje trzy problematyczne kwestie, które wynikają z polityki naukowej realizowanej w Polsce: (1) sposób odróżniania dyscyplin humanistycznych od dyscyplin z nauk społecznych; (2) sposób oceny dorobku kierownika projektu w naukach humanistycznych oraz (3) interpretowanie terminu „narodowy” w nazwie ministerialnego programu. Zakończenie artykułu omawia konsekwencje polityki naukowej koncentrującej się na finansowaniu projektów a nie na finansowaniu długoletnich badań.Artykuł powstał w ramach prac grupy badawczej Scientometrics. Polish Research Group (http://scientometrics.amu.edu.pl) realizującej projekt pt. „Współczesna polska humanistyka wobec wyzwań naukometrii” finansowany ze środków Narodowego Programu Rozwoju Humanistyki, numer decyzji 0057/NPHR3/H11/82/2014

Zasady oceny czasopism humanistycznych i ich rola w parametryzacji jednostek naukowych

The article considers a problem of evaluating the humanities and a parametric evaluation of scientific journals. It concentrates on the three parts (A, B, C) of the list of scientific journals published by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland. In this article, I demon- strate a specific character of publishing practices in the humanities. The argument is divided into six sections. In the first one, I introduce the research problem and define the purpose of the article. In the second section, I distinguish two functions of the parametric evaluation of re- search (the declared and the unintentional one). In the third section, I show what is the diffe- rence between the citation culture in the science and in the humanities. Using these findings, I then present the rules of the list of scientific journals published by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in this article in section four. The section number five provides suggestions and improvements for the construction rules of the scientific journals list. In the final section, I take into consideration the findings of the previous sections and show how they can be used for further evaluation of research in Poland