The March 27 edition of Commonwealth Magazine carried a report about predatory academic journals, which charge academics to publish their articles without proper peer reviews, and predatory conferences, which operate along similar lines.
The report shows that the problem is particularly widespread in Taiwan, so it has sparked widespread discussion in academia and society at large.
Predatory journals and conferences are indeed a problem, but people need to go further by asking whose problem it is and who should be called upon to solve it.
Many say that the government should step in by imposing stronger control over academic journals and conferences, but this would have an adverse effect on university autonomy and academic freedom.
Wherever there is demand, there will be a market. In the case of predatory journals and conferences, the market for them has emerged in response to a demand for express publication of articles. This urgent demand in turn arises from people’s obsession with objectivity and quantification.
Because people only believe the language of numbers, the number of articles published by academics and the rankings of the journals that publish them have become the main standards for academic assessment.
Meanwhile, values that cannot be directly quantified, such as the content, foresight, long-term influence and style of research, are discounted.
The government and public’s pursuit of quantity — and their misplaced faith in it — have caused predatory journals to thrive, therefore, reinforcing ministries’ control over academia would only serve to reinforce the myth of numerical management.
An academic’s ability and sophistication should not only be determined by their number of published articles. It should also include academic style and critical thinking. Choosing a suitable journal in which to publish is of course one aspect of academic style and criticism.
The proliferation of predatory journals and conferences shows how poorly the nation’s system fosters the judgemental capacity of modern-day academics.
The reason for their poor judgemental capacity is that the government and public have long been demanding, in the name of objective management, that academia must produce immediately visible results in the form of published articles.
The solution to the problem is therefore not to impose greater control on academia, but, on the contrary, to give academics more time and greater freedom.
Peng Ming-te is a doctoral candidate at the University of London.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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