University Affairs

I received Statistics Canada’s Daily bulletin this morning, which included data on “salaries and salary scales of full-time teaching staff at Canadian universities, 2010/2011.” The release refers to “final” data, as opposed to “preliminary” data, which was released back in August 2011. However, in this instance, the data really is final as Statistics Canada also announced in this morning’s bulletin that it has discontinued the University and College Academic Staff System, or UCASS, from which the salary data is derived.

This is very disturbing news because UCASS kept track of much more than just faculty salaries. The annual survey collected more than 20 data points that gave governments, higher education institutions and policy analysts an intimate portrait of full-time faculty members in Canada. Among the data collected included gender, age, department, principal subject taught, salary and administrative stipends, sabbatical leave, unpaid leave, province or country of degrees earned, citizenship, and on and on (see the UCASS manual for survey respondents here). Much of the faculty chapter in Trends in Higher Education, published by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, is derived from UCASS data.

There is simply no other single, reliable source in Canada for this information. Individual institutions collect some of it, as do some provincial departments, but it would be no small feat to put it all together in anything resembling the UCASS survey. And I’m not even sure it would be possible, due to potential privacy issues, multiple jurisdictions, etc.

How will we know what’s happening with Canadian faculty from now on? Your guess is as good as mine – and a guess it will certainly be.

Update: I forgot to mention that Statistics Canada’s Education Matters publication, which offers “insights on education, learning and training in Canada,” has also been discontinued. The latest issue was released on May 1, and I suspect that was the last.

I flipped my favourite calendar over to May this morning, and this is what I saw. This lighthearted moment is brought to you by the 2012 Piled Higher and Deeper calendar by Jorge Cham. This particular comic is rated the 7th most popular of Jorge’s collection. See all the PhD comics and more at Jorge’s website.

Click on the image for a larger view.

Canadian social activist Judy Rebick, writing on her blog last month about Quebec’s student protests, said, “It is incredible that there has been almost no coverage of this extraordinary uprising of young people in Quebec in English Canada.” I don’t happen to share that view – I think the protests have been fairly well covered in the English media. Regardless, I would caution her and other supporters of the Quebec students to be careful of what they wish for. I have found that, generally, there has been a tone of skepticism, even incredulity, in the English-Canadian media about the student uprising.

At least 100,000 students take to the streets of Montreal on March 22 to protest tuition fee hikes. The banner reads, “March 22nd is only the beginning.” Photo: Samuel Kühn.

Up to 170,000 Quebec university and college students are currently boycotting their classes to protest against the Quebec government’s plan to increase tuition by $350 a year for five years starting this fall, a 75-percent hike. Some of these students have been on strike for 11 weeks now.

Many columnists and commentators in English Canada have been unsupportive. Paul Schniedereit, editorial writer for the Chronicle Herald, asked rhetorically, “What planet are these kids from?” and chided the students for thinking that education is free. “Too often,” he writes, “there’s a disconnect between what people want government to do and how they think government pays for what it does. One wonders whether such basic economic concepts were ever taught in school.”

A Calgary Herald editorial flunks the student protesters for their actions and calls the situation “a worrying lesson of what happens when entitlement trumps common sense and respect for the rights of others.” L. Ian MacDonald, in the Montreal Gazette, asks, “What is it about Quebec university students that, from one cohort to the next, they don’t know how good they have it?” and then posits, “At some level, the Western provinces are subsidizing cheap tuition in Quebec, while their own students pay twice as much. In terms of a united federation, the effects are potentially corrosive.”

An interesting side note to the protests in Quebec is that many commerce and science students, as well as those in professional programs, voted not to boycott their classes. The most support for a boycott has come generally from students in the arts, social sciences and humanities, prompting a Gazette reporter to speculate about “two different solitudes” within the Quebec student movement. That may be, but I think the more traditional, and important, two solitudes of language are also at play.

The students’ union at Bishop’s University, for instance, decided to stay out of the tuition fight. At the province’s two largest English-language universities, McGill and Concordia, there has been some support for the student actions and the occasional skirmish on campus, but generally classes and final exams have proceeded as planned with few students boycotting.

Most English media reports are quick to point out that, even after Quebec tuition fees rise as planned, Quebec students will still be paying among the lowest fees in the country (around $3,800 a year by 2017). Commentators have also pointed to studies that indicate that higher tuition does not seem to be a barrier for students from middle- and high-income families. Higher tuition may be a difficulty for students from lower-income families, but the government plans to increase bursaries for these students, with the net effect that they will be paying no more than they currently do for their degree.

But – and I think here’s where the two solitudes really kick in – many French commentators dismiss the whole premise of that argument. What many English Canadians may not realize is that, for at least some Quebecers, this debate has morphed from one about mere tuition hikes to a larger struggle about corporatization, “neo-liberalism” and what they believe is the threat to the Quebec “social consensus” on generous government-supported social programs.

I asked my father-in-law what he thought of the student protests. A retired high-school teacher in Sherbrooke, Quebec, he heartily endorsed them, likening them to the Occupy Wall Street movement and even the Arab Spring uprisings. (Some in Quebec have dubbed the student protests the Printemps Érable, or “maple spring.”)

Many Quebec university professors also support the students. An open letter signed by more than 500 Quebec professors, including some well-known Quebec intellectuals, praised the students. “Thanks to them,” they write, “a space for reflection has opened up, and crucial questions about teaching, culture, the economy and the role of the State are being debated in the public sphere.”

At the risk of overgeneralizing – there is, after all, no single monolithic English-Canadian point of view – I think many in the rest of Canada would be puzzled by such sentiments. Of course, there is no single monolithic French-Canadian point of view either. Le Soleil editorialist Brigitte Breton recently wrote: “It’s true that the extra effort demanded of students is significant. A 75-percent hike can make your teeth grind, but one also needs to keep in mind that, even with the increase, our tuition fees are still among the lowest in the country. Quebecers also enjoy a good system of student financial assistance. Not bad for a province that isn’t paved with gold and which has more generous social programs than the other [provinces].”

As well, surveys show that the majority of Quebecers support the tuition increases, and what support there is for the students has fallen since the eruption of vandalism and violence that rocked the protests late last week.

Thankfully, as I write this, Quebec Education Minister Line Beauchamp has been meeting with the student groups, who in turn have agreed to a 48-hour truce in their protests and the unrest the demonstrations have caused. I have no idea how the discussions will end up, but it’s a welcome start.

Postscript, April 26:

As anyone following this issue will likely have already heard, the talks between the students and the Quebec government broke down yesterday, leading to more protests. Good summaries can be found here and here. The Montreal Gazette also has extensive coverage here and here.

Doctoral students at Canada’s universities seem to be displaying quite a bit of angst lately, judging by the general response to a number of items on our website over the past several months.

Last fall, for example, I wrote a blog post and accompanying news story that questioned whether the country was producing too many PhDs. The articles also raised the issue of whether graduate students were being adequately prepared for careers outside academia, considering that perhaps only one in four or five graduates will eventually land a full-time academic position. Judging from the tweets and comments, the articles seemed to hit a nerve, with many readers nodding in the affirmative.

A recent opinion piece on times to completion in doctoral programs, by Dalhousie University associate dean of graduate studies Sunny Marche, also ramped up the angst meter. Dr. Marche observed that the longer it takes for students to complete their doctoral programs, the more detrimental it is to them and the greater the risk of them not finishing. He said his university is now taking a more proactive approach and at the five-year mark will “ring the bell” advising doctoral students to get a move on to complete their PhD program.

That column, too, uncovered much underlying anxiety, in this case about the pressures of family commitments, the quality of supervision, the adequacy of funding and other resources, and so on. “How is this discourse,” asked one commenter, “promoting a healthy atmosphere for PhD students who are constantly scrambling to do everything they are expected of and still complete in a timely fashion?”

But it was Melonie Fullick, our Speculative Diction blogger, who hit the mother lode of buried angst with two posts around the holidays on PhD students, depression and attrition (read them here and here). Melonie wrote that she felt that clinical depression, extreme anxiety and other mental health issues are becoming more common in graduate programs and that there is a curtain of “thickly oppressive silence” surrounding these issues. The first post received 67 comments and counting – a record for our site – with many of the commenters saying essentially (I’m paraphrasing) “thank you, thank you for expressing and legitimizing my exact feelings.”

There is a conundrum, however. I asked a higher-education policy analyst about these complaints and concerns of PhD students, and he seemed a bit perplexed. Studies consistently show, he responded, that graduate students are very satisfied with their programs. I asked for proof and was sent a PDF copy of the Canadian Graduate and Professional Student Survey.

(You can link to the PDF document here; it is from the University of Calgary and shows data from 2007 for that institution but also the combined data for what was then the G-13 group of research-intensive universities, which account for the bulk of grad students. Nearly 70,000 students were asked to participate and more than 25,000 responded, for a response rate of 36.8 percent. Another iteration of the survey was conducted in 2010 and some individual institutions have posted their results online, but I can’t find combined data for all the responding institutions. However, looking at a few institutions and their 2010 data, the responses do not seem much different from 2007).

So what does the data show? Asked to rate their academic experience at their institution, 68 percent of respondents said either “excellent” or “very good,” with a further 22 percent saying merely “good.” That leaves under 10 percent rating their experience “fair” or “poor.” There were very similar results when asked to rate their overall experience at their university. Asked if they were to start their graduate or professional career again, would they select this same university, 33 percent said definitely and 39 percent said probably – a fairly strong endorsement. Asked if they would select the same field of study, 52 percent said definitely and 29 percent said probably.

Respondents also gave high or relatively high marks for the intellectual quality of the faculty, their teaching quality, the quality of their guidance, etc. The only areas where a majority or near majority responded “fair” or “poor” were in relation to advice and/or workshops for things such as “writing grant proposals,” “career options within academia,” “career options outside academia” and “about research positions.” OK, so there is some latent anxiety there, but overall the responses seem quite positive. What gives?

Well, for one thing, the survey involves both master’s students (58.4 percent) and doctoral students (41.6 percent). There is no breakdown provided by level of study, so it is possible that master’s students, with their shorter and more focused programs, have higher satisfaction levels than doctoral students with their longer, more demanding programs. Also, there is no direct question on the survey about anxiety and mental health issues specifically. However, students were asked about their “student life experience” and nearly half rated it as excellent or very good, with a further 32 percent saying good.

I would be interested to hear other potential explanations for the apparent discrepancy between doctoral students’ anecdotal reports of anxiety and dissatisfaction versus the relatively positive satisfaction levels found in the Canadian Graduate and Professional Student Survey.

It is sometimes assumed that junior (i.e., pre-tenure) professors work much harder and have lower levels of job satisfaction than their more senior, tenured peers. However, a new study of full-time Canadian university faculty published in the April 2012 edition of Higher Education Quarterly (vol. 66, no. 2) concludes that this assumption is incorrect. Junior and senior faculty report working approximately the same number of hours each week, and both groups report high levels of job satisfaction.

Combine these findings with other data indicating that Canadian faculty are well remunerated, particularly at the early stages of their career, and also enjoy a wide range of workplace benefits, and it would be reasonable to conclude that a junior faculty position at a Canadian university is currently a very good gig. Or, as the authors put it more moderately: “Generally speaking, the findings suggest that full-time early-career faculty in tenure stream positions are doing well.”

The study’s lead author is Glen Jones, who holds the Ontario Research Chair in Postsecondary Education Policy and Measurement and is a professor of higher education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. The other authors are Julian Weinrib of U of T, and Amy Scott Metcalfe, Don Fisher, Kjell Rubenson and Iain Snee at the University of British Columbia. The study is based on data from the Changing Academic Profession Survey, which involved the administration of a common survey to professors in 18 countries in 2007-2008. Over 1,100 faculty members responded to the Canadian component of the study.

(At the time I post this, Higher Education Quarterly has not yet placed its April edition online – I received a copy of the article in PDF format directly from Dr. Jones. However, you can download an earlier version of the manuscript here, which was presented at a conference in the U.K. in April 2011.)

Looking more closely at the numbers, over 70 percent of both junior and senior faculty in Canada report high or very high levels of job satisfaction. Parallel figures for young faculty at American, Australian and British universities were 61percent, 53 percent and 43 percent, respectively.

The authors did find some differences between junior and senior faculty. While both groups report working approximately 48 hours per week (during teaching terms), junior faculty spend slightly more time on teaching-related activities while senior faculty spend more time on administrative duties. During non-teaching terms, junior faculty report spending slightly more time on research activities and senior faculty report spending more time on administrative duties.

As well, junior faculty report higher levels of stress than senior faculty. Approximately 46 percent of junior faculty indicated that the job “is a source of considerable personal strain” compared with 35 percent of senior faculty. The authors say these findings “are interesting but not unexpected. … For those who have already attained the highest rank in Canadian universities, those at the full professor rank, it is not unreasonable to expect that the absence of promotional pressures and the attainment of the highest position in departmental hierarchies would lower overall stress levels and usher in a more favourable opinion of personal and professional circumstances.”

The authors conclude that there exists a “relatively stable and healthy professional environment for both junior and senior faculty in Canadian universities.”

There is the elephant in the room, however, not directly addressed by the paper: what about the burgeoning ranks of PhD graduates toiling away as part-time, sessional instructors? The authors do acknowledge that “there is evidence that the global shift towards more contingent labour is also occurring in Canada.” However, reliable data are lamentably scarce. Anecdotally, I have heard estimates that perhaps half of all courses are taught by contingent faculty, but that can’t be verified. “The implications of these broad changes in the balance of academic professionals in these quite different employment categories require further study,” the authors write.

No cellphones allowed

There has been much discussion about the “distraction” of students using laptops in the classroom (University Affairs has a least a couple of articles on the topic, here and here). But, interestingly, I’ve seen relatively less discussion on the use of the equally ubiquitous cellphone in the classroom setting. I was therefore intrigued by a recent survey by two psychology professors at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania on the “use and abuse” of cellphones by students, published in the journal College Teaching. A good summary of the research can be found in March 2012 issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter, which I’ve cribbed from for this post.

The professors, Deborah Tindell and Robert Bohlander, surveyed 269 university students – from first year to fourth year – in 36 different courses. The students answered 26 questions about their use of cellphones as well as their observations regarding the cellphone use of their peers.

Nearly all students (99 percent) reported having a cellphone and 95 percent reported that they brought their phones to class every day; 92 percent admitted that they had sent or received a text message during class and 30 percent reported that they sent and received messages in class every day. As well, 97 percent said they had seen texting being done by other students in the classroom. I doubt many professors would be surprised by these findings.

Interestingly, the students felt that their instructors did not know they were texting – almost half “indicated that it is easy to text in class without the instructor being aware.” Of greater interest, 10 percent of students said they had sent or received a text message during an exam, with nine percent saying it was easy to do so. However, suspiciously, 33 percent of students chose not to answer this question. The authors write, “Failure to answer could be seen as a reflection of the respondents’ desire to either not risk self-incrimination, or to not reveal to faculty that texting during an exam is a possibility.”

When asked about cellphone policies that they might suggest, the students had little to offer beyond being allowed to use them so long as they don’t disturb others. According to The Teaching Professor summary, faculty policies described in the article include confiscating any phones that are being used for texting; or if a student is observed texting, some professors count that student as absent for the day.

Professors, what would you do in a similar situation? Do you tolerate cellphone use in class?

The article by Drs. Tindell and Bohlander includes references to several studies documenting how texting interferes with and compromises learning.

Photo: Kunal Shah, Flickr.com

There can be no doubt that yesterday’s student protests in Quebec – which included a crowd estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 in downtown Montreal – were an enormous success for student organizers and for the students who participated (see some photos here). The protests were essentially peaceful and, well, huge. Many commentators have observed that the reason tuition fees in Quebec remain far below the Canadian average is precisely because each time the government plans to raise them, students hit the streets en masse.

For those not up to speed on the current debate, the Quebec government announced last year, and confirmed recently in its budget speech, that it will proceed this fall to raise tuition fees by $325 a year for the next five years. As a result, tuition fees in Quebec will reach about $3,800 a year by 2017. That is still about 30 percent below the current national average.

The student protests – I won’t call them a “strike,” since technically the students aren’t withholding their labour – present a tricky situation for Quebec’s universities. The Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities, or CREPUQ, supports the tuition hikes in principle.

Three of Montreal’s four universities (Université de Montréal, Université du Québec à Montréal and Concordia University) cancelled all classes yesterday (March 22, the day of the protests). Both Concordia and UQAM also shut down their campuses “for security reasons.” However, Concordia remarked on its website, “This closure is not an endorsement of student protest action regarding planned increases in tuition fees.” Similarly, U de Montréal noted that it “in no way endorses the protestors’ claims or their actions” (my translation). McGill University was the only one of the four to hold classes as scheduled.

Most of the regional universities that make up the Université du Quebec network also cancelled classes. The rector of Université du Québec à Rimouski, Michel Ringuet, called for mediation between the Quebec government and the student unions, but the government flatly rejected the idea. “We’re not in a process of negotiation or mediation,” said a spokesperson for the education minister, Line Beauchamp. “The government will proceed with the tuition fee hikes, with the aim of improving the quality of our universities” (my translation).

The big question is what universities will do if students continue to boycott their classes. All universities plan to continue with regularly scheduled classes and exams starting today or Monday. Will universities make arrangements for student boycotters to make up their missed classes sometime later, or will they let them fail? It definitely puts the universities in a bind.

There is also the open question of how much support the students have among the general public. Judging from the comments sections of the Quebec media, the public is generally not in a generous mood towards the students. A poll published in today’s Journal de Montreal shows 49 percent of respondents feel the tuition hikes are appropriate while 40 percent say they’re too high (eight percent said the tuition hikes aren’t high enough). As well, 53 percent of respondents say they are “more favourable” to the government’s position, against 39 percent who say they’re more favourable to the students’ position.

Another poll, this one commissioned by the student group Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec, found that 78 percent of respondents want the government to negotiate with the students. Nevertheless, the poll also found a slim majority (51 percent) in favour of the tuition hikes.

My own thoughts? Well, as many student leaders have said, it’s a choix de société – meaning it’s up to Quebecers to decide. My observation is that Quebec has the highest per capita debt in Canada and the highest personal taxes. Money is tight. If the tuition hikes don’t go ahead and universities require additional funding from the government, what other sector will have to do with less? Health care? K-12 education? Daycares? Seniors’ assistance? Public transit?

It’s their choice.

I have often thought that it is a bit confusing how, in the U.S., Americans tend to use the word “college” and “university” interchangeably. In Canada, I would think to myself, the two are distinctly different institutions and we know what distinguishes one from the other. But, I really need to start questioning that assertion as the differences between universities and colleges in Canada are far from straightforward.

Type into Google, “What’s the difference between a university and college in Canada?” and you’d be surprised by the large number of answers. The College Alberta website even has helpfully compiled a long list of responses from external sources. A few examples:

“Universities focus on academic and professional programs. Colleges focus more on career training and trades.” – (settlement.org)

“In Canada, a University is an education institution that can grant degrees (BA, BSc, MA, PHd, etc). Colleges can grant certificates or diplomas, but not degrees.” – (answers.com)

“In Canada, and many other parts of the world, colleges are vocational institutions where you can learn a trade or a two year Associate degree in Arts or Science. Many students will complete the first two years of their Bachelor’s degree at a college and finish the last 2 years at a university. Colleges have some advantages over universities: they generally have smaller class sizes and the professors are more focused on student successes and less focused on research related endeavors.” (wereyouwondering.com)

I also found this definition, not included on the College Alberta site:

In the Canadian higher education system there is a clear distinction between “colleges” and “universities”.  A Canadian college is for individuals seeking applied careers, such as a payroll administrator, medical office assistant, graphic designer or legal administrative assistant, whereas a Canadian university is for individuals seeking more academic or professional careers.

Parts of these answers have a ring of truth. If you are seeking a professional degree in areas like law, medicine and engineering – along with graduate studies – then a university is your only choice. And, certainly, university professors generally are more focused on research than their college counterparts – although some universities have implemented “teaching stream” faculty positions where professors have little or no research responsibilities, while colleges are becoming more involved in research and are now eligible for some federal research funding.

The claim that colleges focus more on career/vocational training is also true, up to a point. As Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates noted in a blog post, only 16 percent of students in diploma and certificate programs at Canadian colleges are in technical and trades-related programs. Over 60 percent of college students are studying in areas that have considerable overlap with university programs – for example, business and administration, fine arts, social sciences and humanities, and sciences.

There is also, institutionally, the slow but steady creep of some colleges towards university status. In B.C. over the years, a handful of colleges became “university colleges” and then finally full universities. Mount Royal and Grant MacEwan in Alberta, originally colleges, are also now full-fledged universities. And, in Ontario, many community colleges now offer four-year “applied” degrees and one of its members, Sheridan College, recently announced it too wants to become a full university. As Mr. Usher concluded, “There simply isn’t a sharp dividing line between colleges and universities anymore.”

There is much more to be said on this topic, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

Oh, sure, evidence is important in forming public policy, but it represents “no more than 50 percent of the game,” said Harvey Weingarten in a presentation this past Monday at the 2012 Symposium of the Ontario Research Chairs in Public Policy, hosted by York University on behalf of the Council of Ontario Universities.

In a frank, no-nonsense talk, Dr. Weingarten reminded audience members – many of whom are engaged in some way in public policy research – that public policies are based on “stories, anecdotes, stereotypes, intuition, ideologies, personal experiences as much as they are on evidence.” Some people may think that is terrible, he said, “but everything we know from cognitive psychology reminds us that this is the way that everyone makes decisions. It’s nothing special about the government.”

Dr. Weingarten is president of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. Prior to that, he spent more than 30 years in academia, initially as a psychology professor and then working his way up the administrative ladder – first at McMaster University, where he rose to the rank of vice-president, academic, and then the University of Calgary, where he served for nine years as president.

Continuing with his refreshingly blunt remarks, Dr. Weingarten said that even when “the best research” is done and presents a “compelling evidentiary base for moving in a particular direction,” that research and that evidence still need to be packaged and communicated in a manner that is accessible to people in government and in a way that they find palatable and can work with.

“That skill set of making research and evidence accessible to government is a very different skill set than that of actually doing the research,” he said, “and we don’t pay enough attention to it.” This other skill set is largely the domain of marketers and communicators, “and we need more of them to help us out.”

Another of Dr. Weingarten’s principles of public policy is the glaringly self-evident one that governments make policies based on political considerations. “That’s why they’re called politicians, and to expect a politician not to make a political decision is like asking a physicist to violate the laws of thermodynamics. It just doesn’t happen.”

This tendency to make political decisions is exacerbated, he said, by the growing centralization of decision-making in the prime minister’s or the premier’s office and away from bureaucrats.

“I actually have some sympathy for politicians making politically driven decisions. Politicians do something very difficult – every three to five years they stand up in front of a group of people and ask, do you want me to keep my job?” As a thought experiment, he said, “Ask yourself how the behaviour of professors would change if they did not have tenure and their continued appointment at a university was based on a vote of their students every three to five years?”

Having said all that, Dr. Weingarten noted that the situation for those trying to influence public policy is “not terrible. Our job as researchers is how to figure out how to incorporate our evidence and research findings into the political dynamic that exists. That’s not going away. To suggest otherwise is naive. Some people will regard this as a sellout. It’s not a sellout; it’s smart, realistic and strategic.”

A third principle is that public policies have long gestation periods – “you don’t get policy made quickly.” But, on the other hand, he said, “you should actually be quite fearful of policies that are made quickly in government, because governments make policies quickly either when there is insufficient consultation or they’re in the middle of an election frenzy. Neither of those situations necessarily leads to the best outcomes.”

A final principle is that governments today can’t make bold or innovative policy, as much as they would like to. “To be bold, to be innovative, to experiment, necessarily means that there will be some failures. And the political process today is highly intolerant of any failure – the auditor general’s all over you, the opposition is all over you, the media are all over you. So governments necessarily have to take small, increment steps in a particular direction.”

So, Dr. Weingarten asked, how do researchers and institutions of public higher education behave in an environment like this, “given that our task is to take the good research we do, and the findings we make, and to feed them into a government so they can make the best policies they can?”

He listed five lessons:

1. Governments are thinking about themselves. So if you want to influence government, “use their language, solve their problems, write things in ways that they can understand.” Because “if they don’t see themselves, their problems, their challenges in your research, they have other things to worry about.” As a corollary to that, Dr. Weingarten suggests that postsecondary education institutions should “get some of the people in our sector to work in government and vice versa.”
2. Consistency of message at both the institutional and the system level is critical. “When governments hear different messages from the same people, they learn quickly to either totally ignore you or to do what they do very well: divide and conquer. They cherry-pick what they want and don’t listen to the things they don’t want.”
3. As important as the research community is, “governments tend to form policy based on what the [college and university] presidents tell them. … It’s not that researchers don’t talk to politicians and people in the civil service, but the people who carry the message about public higher education to governments are the presidents.” If the presidents aren’t talking about what you’re talking about, he counseled, “it’s not going to go anywhere. You are as well advised to try to indoctrinate the president into the right message as you are to indoctrinate the politicians.”
4. You can’t rely on the media to deliver the message to government. “You have to deliver the message. Influencing the government is all about the relationships you have with them – very human relationships with individuals – and it is a full-contact sport.” And finally:
5. If you want to influence government on policy, you have to have some “skin” in the game. “The reason for that is quite simple: when you leave that room, there are 25 other people standing in line asking for something from that minister. What differentiates you from those other 25 people is the fact that you may have shown a sufficient commitment to something that you already have taken the heat to reallocate some of your resources or finances in advance of the government. In my experience, putting skin in the game is one of the most influential things you can do influence government.”

Dutch publishing giant Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers in the world, appears to have been the first to blink in its standoff with frustrated researchers. Since Jan. 22, researchers from around the world have been signing their names to a boycott called the Cost of Knowledge, vowing not to publish their work in any Elsevier journal. As of yesterday, more than 7,500 researchers had signed on, including some from Canada.

Elsevier owns 2,000 journals and publishes roughly 250,000 articles a year in a wide variety of fields, and its archive contains seven million publications. In 2010, the company made $1.6 billion and had an operating profit margin of 36 percent.

UC Berkeley biologist and open-science proponent, Michael Eisen, designed this image, inspired by the Elsevier logo.

The boycott was a response to a call to action posted a few days earlier by Tim Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University. Dr. Gowers had had enough and declared, “I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly. I am by no means the first person to do this, but the more of us there are, the more socially acceptable it becomes.”

Among the many reasons Dr. Gowers listed for his boycott of Elsevier was the company’s support of efforts that “attempt to stop the move to open access publishing,” including Elsevier’s support of the Research Works Act. The proposed U.S. legislation, introduced to the House of Representatives last December, contained provisions to prohibit open access mandates for federally funded research. These provisions would have effectively undone the Public Access Policy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds (i.e., taxpayer-supported research) to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication. The Canadian Institutes for Health Research introduced similar requirements back in 2007 that all research papers generated from the projects they fund are freely accessible through the publisher’s website or an online repository within six months of publication.

But, on Monday, Elsevier withdrew its support of the Research Works Act and said in a statement that it hopes this move “will address some of the concerns expressed and help create a less heated and more productive climate for our ongoing discussions with research funders.” Hours later, the sponsors of the legislation declared the bill dead.

It seems unlikely Elsevier’s change of heart will resolve the central issue of concern to many researchers, which is really the current controlled-access model of knowledge dissemination through journal publishing. As Mike Taylor, an earth scientist at University of Bristol, put it:

At this point, it seems clear that the old publishers aren’t going to change … . To fix the academic publishing mess, researchers need to stop sending their work to barrier-based journals. And for that to happen, we need funding bodies and job-search committees to judge candidates on the quality of their work, not on which brand name it’s associated with.

Happily, there are signs of movement in this direction: for example, The Wellcome Trust says “it is the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work is published, that should be considered in making funding decisions.” We need more funding and hiring bodies to make such declarations. Only then will researchers will be free of the need (real or apparent) to prop up parasitic publishers by sending their best work to big-name, barrier-based journals.

So will the boycott hold, and even spread? University of British Columbia mathematician and blogger Nassif Ghoussoub notes that in 2001, more than 30,000 scientists signed an open letter in which they pledged to exclusively publish in, review for and serve as editors of journals that placed their contents in the then newly launched PubMed Central with no more than a six-month delay. However, “publishers did not respond to the call, and the campaign fizzled away as very few followed through on their pledge.”

Will this time be different? I think it could be. I share the view of an online commenter to a CBC story, who had this to say:

The entire scientific publishing system is past due for a complete overhaul. Fifty – even twenty-five – years ago, the journals served an important function in the dissemination of research. For that service, institutions and libraries paid subscription fees and researchers proudly gave up their work for free, or even used part of their grant money to pay the publishing costs through page fees.

Today, any researcher can publish their own work online for anyone to read. The only thing that keeps the journals in business is the perception that only “peer-reviewed studies” published in journals are authoritative. But the truth is that a researcher’s blog posting is open to more extensive (and constructive) peer review by other people in their field — who can follow along with work in progress and offer suggestions along the way — than the journals’ process of sending out a final manuscript for comment by two or three reviewers. In fact, the biggest obstacle to free discussion of research-in-process is the journals’ refusal to publish research results that have been previously published elsewhere, or discussed in the news media pre-publication.

Incidentally, University Affairs has a feature story on open peer review in its upcoming April print edition, which will be posted online on March 5 – and freely accessible to all.