Performance, profit or productivity: Why do we publish?

Academic labour in any university occurs within three interlocking spheres: a scholarly community, a bureaucracy and a corporation.

In the 2021 article, ‘New Media, Ancient Signs Literacy, Modern Signs of Tracking’, that I wrote with Damien Tomaselli, our story traverses each of these sites in publishing in a new Chinese edited journal that is not yet accredited by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET).

New Techno-Humanities (NTH), edited from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and licensed to Elsevier, aims at offering transdisciplinary discussion of the interface between technology and humanities.

NTH is the English version of the pre-existing Chinese-language Journal of Philosophy and Social Sciences, a leading peer-reviewed journal indexed in CSSCI [Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index], the Chinese equivalent of the Web of Science.

Is it accredited?

On recruiting articles, as guest editors, for a special issue, one would have hoped for a more coherent response from South African scholars to a call for papers than: “Is NTH DHET-accredited?”

DHET accreditation is the backbone of the South African research economy in that the state pays a sizable research incentive to universities whose faculty and students publish in a prescribed list of publications indexed by Web of Science and Scopus, among others. NTH is too young to have been yet invited onto Scopus, also owned by Elsevier.

Non-accreditation meant that most South Africans we approached were disinterested. In South Africa, the bureaucracy wins over the broader scholarly community that may not yet be connected into the Western legitimation systems (the indexes).

New journals, even if published by multinational giants like Elsevier, are required to prove their bona fides over at least two years of multiple numbers before being considered for indexing.

Even when informed that the NTH would cover article processing charges and that the host university is one of the top 50 universities globally on the QS World University Rankings, the annual publication of university rankings by Quacquarelli Symonds, to which no African university comes close, disinterest was the response.

We argued, like the Chinese, that inaugural (South African) authors in NTH should take the long view, make their impact in a highly capitalised new journal, grow with it, become involved with it, and build their careers accordingly by hitching their stars to the next academic superpower. No dice.

Research ecosystems

DHET, as the surveillance mechanism gets in the way (for now, until the journal is ‘accredited’). Even then, our audit culture managed by a top-heavy bureaucracy will classify any authors publishing in it as a discrete production unit, rather than their joining a scholarly community and becoming part of the Chinese thousand talents. Of course, we acknowledge, that Chinese academy operates in the same way.

One of the outcomes of such accreditation parochialism, where the three sites – corporation, bureaucracy and scholarly community – converge in the internet age, is to organise the global academic world into different and largely incompatible research ecosystems:

• First, is the legacy journals’ subscription model (North America, British Commonwealth, Africa, parts of Asia). Within this group falls the more narrow South African publishing footprint with its DHET-funded ecosystem that recognises only South African journals, and journals indexed by the Web of Science, Scopus, ProQuest, Directory of Open Access Journals and the Norwegian List Level 2 (which is part of the Norwegian Scientific Index);

• Second, is the European Plan S open access silo (which promotes the publication of research in compliant open access journals;

• Third, is the Open Knowledge for Latin America and the Global South university-based communication infrastructure;

• And fourth, is China that is sponsoring English language journals contracted to Western publishing power houses across all disciplines as part of its, if inconsistent, ‘going abroad’ foreign policy.

The merits of that strategy are not our concern here. What is of concern for those of us publishing in English and in Chinese, in Chinese journals, is the lack of recognition in the DHET ecosystem of journals that are accredited by China’s own internal system.

For example, the reproduction by the journals of the Information Center for Social Sciences, Renmin University, is China’s main way of evaluating academic journals annually.

Selection by Renmin contributes to the impact factor calculation in CSSCI (Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index).

My first original paper published in Chinese translation was deemed to be one of the top papers published in China in 2017. But none of my South African colleagues seemed to appreciate the symbolic value of such an extraordinary achievement.

But, worse, is that these different ecosystems, all part of the world wide web, are not only alienating scholars trapped within their own separating host systems, but authors are being actively punished for crossing into other systems.

Administrative myopia?

In the context of university claims to internationalisation, to improve rankings and to position themselves as research institutions, is the administrative myopia that downplays research and publication that fall outside the approved accreditation lists and research ecosytems.

For instance, the continued emphasis on Western indexes disadvantages those of us now publishing in CSSCI (whether in English or Chinese)-indexed journals.

Furthermore, international ranking systems pay no attention at all to DHET. By over-emphasising DHET accreditation to the exclusion of those germinal publications that lie outside this list, we are also muting South African universities’ profiles within the global ranking indices that apply everywhere else.

A single chapter in a prestigious handbook, or a Chinese journal, for example, may be notionally ‘worth’ a hundred times more than an article in a local, un-indexed, but accredited, house journal.

If annual reports are scanned by the international ranking agencies, they might find the separation of ‘accredited’ publications from other peer review publications rather idiosyncratic, and fail to count the latter into their metrics.

This might have a depressing effect on the value of all publications, if listed uniformly in terms of international norms, and result in a lower ranking.

Ultimately, ranking and the DHET are all tracking and surveillance systems with both positive and negative externalities.

They measure both what is present, but also what is absent. For the subsistence hunter, the prey is not where the tracks are, but the goal is survival. That is an existential objective.

Tracking

In our NTH article, our prime metaphor is tracking: tracking of prey by the desert hunters for survival, requiring semiotic and life skills; and tracking in the age of globalism as a form of surveillance and productivity management by multiple bureaucracies.

Where the former hunting activity required tracking literacy for food acquisition and subsistence, bureaucracies induce compliance, consent and consumption.

However, for the academic bureaucracy, the goal has become a product, a performance unit.

For the corporation, the goal is ownership and profit rather than knowledge. For the scholarly community, subject to the corporation, the goal is to tick a productivity spreadsheet.

Hunters track and hunt to live, whereas, in the 4IR, tracking as hunting lives to control what we do, how we do it, and survival means how to keep one’s job.

To mischievously recast futurist Arthur C Clarke’s third law, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology [ie, tracking software as surveillance] is indistinguishable from magic’.

In academia, now, the magic is in the control by categories, numbers and bureaucrats, not necessarily in the expansion of knowledge, tracking as an existential experience.

Rather, we will literally track (monitor) ourselves to extinction in full knowledge that this is where we are headed.

This commentary was written by Keyan G Tomaselli, Distinguished Professor, dean’s office, faculty of humanities, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He also serves on the editorial board of New Techno-Humanities.