023 – Research and Academic Publications

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m Lucie Hazelgrove Planel, an anthropologist and social impact scientist, and I’m here today with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS. Hi, how are you doing today, David?

[00:00:21] David: I’m doing well, how are you?

[00:00:23] Lucie: Good. I’m glad you’ve taken the time to sit down with me today, because I wanted to talk about publications in research.

[00:00:32] David: Okay, that sounds good. I look forward to discussing that.

[00:00:36] Lucie: So, research publications, I think most people will automatically think of academic publications, but what does academic publications even mean?

[00:00:49] David: And there’s, there’s all sorts of complexity about this in different ways. Let’s say one of the big movements which happened recently is towards open, open access journals.

[00:01:01] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:01:02] David: And one of the really interesting things has been that that’s actually reduced publications coming from the Global South in different ways because actually of the costs associated with publishing in open access journals. Now you need to have the budget for that in different ways. There’s all sorts of interesting complications which would come in around academic publication. Why does academic publication matter so much? Well, In academic institutions, it’s a currency. This is how you determine your value as an academic, in many ways, is through academic publications.

[00:01:34] Lucie: In a very traditional sense. And also, we work a lot in francophone countries, and in many countries well, even in the UK, if you publish in a… non anglophone research journal, I think it doesn’t have as much value as if it’s in an anglophone research journal.

[00:01:51] David: Exactly, and this has all sorts of things around how you determine the value of different journals and different publications. So there’s all sorts of complexity in this, in a way which is somehow in contradiction with what I would have hoped academia would be about.

I mean, before I became an academic, and for many people who are not in academia, they sort of have academia on this pedestal of idealized equality. It’s all about the intellect and it’s all about the purity of thought and being able to sort of really argue out the ideas. Whereas actually the reality of it is really rather different. So academic publication is a very interesting and difficult topic.

[00:02:37] Lucie: Exactly, it actually explores the very questions of what it is to do research. Why we’re doing research. And what our aims are.

[00:02:45] David: And if the aims are to publish, then, well, one of the problems is that many academic journals, they publish things which they understand, but actually some of the best research I’ve seen has come from people who push the boundaries of what we understand.

And then, of course, they struggle to publish it because it doesn’t fit into the standard academic journal sort of context. There’s so much complexity around this. I guess, my first question is, wonderful topic, what is it you’re wanting to discuss? Because there’s so many directions we could take this discussion.

[00:03:17] Lucie: So my, my background being an anthropologist, I’m someone who is always more interested in people on the ground, so as in local communities, and people so I like these sort of theoretical discussions and I like them from time to time, but I’m also always interested in research which actually feeds back to the people who were involved in the research. I like that sort of, is it called a data circle?

[00:03:42] David: Data cycles. Well, I mean, there’s data cycles which definitely relate to this. So that would be an interesting data cycle, getting the data used back by the people, and I think this is one of the things which we discussed in other podcasts.

But actually thinking about how research can take different forms and some of the newer mechanisms of research which relate to there being just data available in different ways and how you can use that data in opportunistic ways to be able to have different sorts of studies. And there’s a real question about whether academic journals accept that as those methodologies, innovations in research methodologies.

Many academic journals are really slow at being able to recognise the value and accept research which comes from different or very innovative types of research methodology. So actually understanding the value in that. I guess, one of the areas which you’re touching on is this, bridge between what is conceptual, if you want, pure academic research and its value in academic publication, and maybe the idea of more action focused research and the value of that in publication.

[00:04:59] Lucie: Yeah, I mean , to me, it’s sort of an ethical question, even in terms of making research accessible.

[00:05:07] David: Well, it’s very interesting. I mean, research is so wide. My area of topic, when I was a PhD student was an area where making that accessible was impossible. There were five people in the world who understood it. So that’s different. That was very theoretical research. I valued the opportunity I had to work in such a niche area. And I think it is of importance to have such pure research, but actually forcing research to have application is not the answer either. Recognising the spectrum that’s needed is important, and valuing different types of research.

But in a competitive environment, and I’m afraid academia is extremely competitive, you need ways to be able to measure people, and compare and compete. And you’re not comparing like with like, when you’re really taking people in different disciplines with different interests, with different academic goals.

[00:06:05] Lucie: That’s true. And that’s where, in the UK at least, they’ve tried to include the impact, is it?

[00:06:10] David: Absolutely. In the Research Excellence Framework, the REF as they call it there is a growing importance of what they call the case studies, where you’re actually looking at the impact of research. And these have become actually more and more important for the funding aspect. Actually funding is allocated not just by research excellence, which is important and is still the main evaluating factor, but there is this additional component in the research excellence framework related to these impact case studies.

[00:06:46] Lucie: So that’s the UK system, but is that included also like our colleagues in Kenyan universities or in West African universities. I know academic publication has a role. Is it number? Is it quality?

[00:07:01] David: What’s very interesting is West Africa is very different to East Africa in this. The West African systems have a very centralized role, not even within a country, but across countries, which is of course so important because there aren’t actually huge academic communities within each country for different topic areas. Having a regional role in terms of determining promotion and academic progression, actually played a very important role in keeping standards very high in West Africa. In East Africa there’s a very different set of processes, and individual institutions manage their own promotions, and so there’s been a whole range of different things which have exploded out, and different institutions take different processes to be able to manage promotion and the rest of it.

And I’m not saying one system is better than the other, but I’m saying the two systems as I’ve described there have led to very different academic cultures, academic environments. What I find is across, particularly Francophone West Africa, you have quite a lot of consistency, and I wouldn’t say uniformity, but coherence across different countries, and the academic standards and the academic value which people place on their colleagues, and also the, connections between them. There tends to be an awareness of what others are doing within that context. Whereas in East Africa, things tend to be much more insular within institutions often. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have collaborators and work more extensively. It’s just that, as institutions, a lot of the decision making is within an institution.

And so actually, the progressions within institutions, some people build good external networks in all sorts of different ways, but that’s really an individual trait, rather than an institutional trait. Whereas in Francophone West Africa, but it’s not limited to Francophone West Africa, they have this very much in the institutional levels, at the regional institutional centres. I guess, if you look at those, the nature therefore of the publications which are coming out and what’s considered and how these are treated in those different contexts are very different.

I believe that international publishing systems do not serve either of them well.

[00:09:31] Lucie: Okay.

[00:09:32] David: And this is a really big problem in all sorts of different ways. If you take a university in the UK, and there’s lots of them, there’s not in the top 20, let’s say many, many institutions who would be not considered the elite of the elite in the UK. Most of them would have their objective to climb the university rankings. And the funding that that relatively low ranked UK university would have to put into research to be able to try and climb the university rankings is immeasurable compared to the funding that one of the top African universities might have at its disposition.

And so you create this system of exclusion really around funding of research, which means that I believe in many ways African institutions are undervalued. And not just African institutions, but institutions in lower resourced environments across the world.

[00:10:31] Lucie: Just to give an example, I think you’ve said that many of your old Kenyan colleagues, they’re teaching very much full time, if not, you know, over full time, and their only opportunities then to do research are in their holidays.

[00:10:42] David: Absolutely, and I suppose that’s not so different from academia in the UK. The difference is that in the UK, your teaching load is really manageable. So you can do some research alongside in semester. Actually, interestingly, Oxbridge, you know, who have very short terms, most of my colleagues in Oxford or Cambridge, they don’t do much research during the term time. They have very short terms and in that time they’re really rather intense on the interactions with their students and all the rest of it. And then in the time outside of term time, then they would be doing their research and they’d be going on academic visits and then they’d have sabbaticals and all sorts of other things to do their research and to stay research active in different ways.

[00:11:24] Lucie: I know some of the professors and lecturers that surrounded me, they would have to get, it might be because it’s anthropological, but they would have to get special time off from teaching in order to do research, partly because they needed to go somewhere rather than being in Scotland. They had to go to a different place…

[00:11:42] David: To actually have the community that they’re studying to actually be able to do the study.

[00:11:45] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:11:46] David: Absolutely. And I think this is the case in a lot of different contexts where different research environments and different research topics have different research needs.

[00:11:55] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:11:55] David: But what is universally the case is that if you’re in high resource environments, the money which is put into research and the money which is available to research to enable this to happen is just immeasurably more than you find in the low resource environments.

[00:12:10] Lucie: Definitely.

[00:12:11] David: However, it is not all bad news for the low resource environment. When I went in and I worked, I worked for six years as a lecturer in Kenya on a local salary in the local environment and I was extremely successful at getting involved in research projects and getting involved in all sorts of different things that are outside my immediate area of expertise. I went in as a pure mathematician; wasn’t much funding or opportunity to do algebraic geometry related to string theory when I was based in Kenya.

But there was so much need and opportunity to do things related to data, to work on climate, to work with agriculture, to work with the chemists. And so I actually found that the need led to real opportunity to do things in education. So I found that actually the same environments where they don’t necessarily have the funds, what they do have is opportunities for research and not just any research, but impactful research.

I’ll just take a very simple example. One of my colleagues in Kenya who went out to the US for his PhD came back. We discussed for years how we would carry on with his mathematics research. And eventually I discussed the fact that if you’re going to stay in Kenya, you need to broaden out. And so he got involved in doing things related to education. And of course, rather quickly, he had classes of a thousand students.

The relative scale at which he could do interesting studies, where he’s able to get quite a lot of data on how people respond to educational innovation.

[00:13:45] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:13:45] David: He’s getting to the stage where he’s not yet got all the structures in place, but he’s getting to the stage where he can use his teaching to be able to be part of research into how to do education better at scale in these challenging environments where the heavy teaching load he’s got gets turned into a rather rapid output in terms of educational research. Because what would take years to get equivalent scale, maybe, or you’d have to set it up very carefully because an equivalent sized course in the US or the UK, you might have, you know, 10 or more, 15, 20 lecturers or maybe PhD students, postgraduates, involved in the teaching of that thousand students.

And so you’d have to get everyone on board with being part of the research process and so on. It would become a really big deal. He has a thousand students on his own, no teaching assistants, no nothing. I mean, this feels like an impossible task, but at the same time, it means that actually understanding, innovating in the way he teaches and trying to turn that into research to understand how can he give a better education under these difficult environments is something which is really opportunistic.

[00:14:59] Lucie: And that also ticks both of the boxes of, perhaps, you know, if you’re publishing it in academic journals, then it ticks the box of well, publishing in academic journals, which is sort of respected by other researchers, and by the university, but also then the impact side that we were also talking about.

[00:15:17] David: Yes and no.

[00:15:19] Lucie: Okay.

[00:15:19] David: The problem is to get to the stage where he could publish these in strong academic journals. He would have to adopt the same sort of approaches taken in the context where you would get paid a lot of money to do this research. And so actually the processes he has to go through to get his research protocols all set up in advance in a sensible way to be able to then get the ethics approval, to be able to do this as a formal study which can then go through and get all those things.

So he’s doing this as relatively informal research at the moment with the aim of actually getting education students involved to help him then formalize and go through these sorts of processes, because actually there’s a lot of overhead of being able to set up such a research study.

[00:16:08] Lucie: Sorry, that’s just raised a question for me, which is you’ve said that he would need to do all these protocols and do it sort of formally, but is that in terms of his own university’s requirements or is that in terms of publishing requirements? I’ve never seen a journal which wants to look at your ethics things.

[00:16:26] David: No, most would, and in education certainly, because you’ve got human subjects in different ways. These are the sort of things where actually you’d want to have these protocols all set out very well, especially good journals would often require this in different ways. And it’s good that they do.

[00:16:40] Lucie: Yes.

[00:16:40] David: A number of years ago, this would not have been required in the sense this is progress, this is required. But what isn’t always recognised is the barriers that that places in these low resource environments. Because even someone like my former student, like my colleague now, who does this sort of work, it’s just the time.

Where does he get that time from to do this? Because he’s busy teaching a class of a thousand students, and on top of that he’s trying to do educational research on this, and now he’s got all these other paperwork, bureaucratic barriers that are sort of slowing him down, and so actually what that means is quite often he’s not publishing as much, and people aren’t then able to read or hear about what he’s doing as much as they could otherwise.

And these are really interesting, so quite often he just presents at conferences on what he’s done, what he’s been able to learn, in ways where he doesn’t get the academic publications which would lead to his promotion, which would lead to his recognition internationally, in the same way. These are challenges which do relate to the publication, and I’m going to, I’m going to use this word, industry.

And part of the problem is that actually, who does control academic publication? And that’s a whole nother discussion. I don’t want to get sidetracked into that in this particular discussion, because I don’t feel that was exactly the direction you were interested in. But it’s a whole other podcast we could have, because it does really matter.

And there were some very interesting cases where people have tried different models for how publication can work. But the simple truth is, the big academic publishers are still in charge of most of the good journals. And with good reason. They are, in some sense, adding value, but they’re also extracting profit.

And they’re controlling the process in a way which maintains the status quo. And a lot of this does relate to strong international academic institutions and the status quo of that elite research. So, there’s all sorts of elements of the fact that recognising that there is a publishing, an academic publishing industry, and this academic publishing industry is deeply intertwined with elite academia and understanding those relationships and what those relationships mean to those who do not have the academic weight or the financial weight to influence the systems.

And that’s a big part of the world. And they’re often getting left behind because of the competition that comes in. As a young African university, you shouldn’t and can’t try to compete academically in terms of the publications and the international rankings because just too much money is needed.

And so it’s much better to find other metrics and measures where you can compete locally in different ways and you can actually do that. And this is what we’re seeing in many different places.

[00:19:44] Lucie: Yeah, like what?

[00:19:45] David: Ethiopia is incredible for this. I don’t fully understand what happens in Ethiopia, any sector. I’ve been privileged to be working in Ethiopia for many years and visiting fairly regularly, but I recognize how limited my understanding is.

But Ethiopia is one of those countries where I’ve been privileged to be the only outsider at a scientific conference. On a number of occasions, I just happened to be at a university visiting for something else and I’m told, oh, you know, we’re holding our annual science conference, could you give a talk? And so I turn up and I’m at the talk and everybody else is from Ethiopia, from all over the country, from all the other institutions, there’s good academic discussion happening. And it’s all internal. Now that’s not to say that there aren’t also events, which happen which are outward looking and which bring people from the outside in different ways, but I’ve been at events which are really looking at the institutions within the country.

I mean Ethiopia is the second most populous African nation after Nigeria, so it’s not surprising that they have the critical mass to do this. No, sorry, it is surprising they have the critical mass to do this. It’s still surprising that they have the critical mass to do this. And what you see in so many different ways is a culture which is developing, which is rather different.

It’s not just Africa where you see this, there’s other parts of the world, you know, Latin America in general has its own culture which has developed, which is very strong academically and often quite apart, but as you say, internationally maybe because it’s not in in English, that work is maybe not recognized as it should be.

[00:21:27] Lucie: Yes.

[00:21:28] David: And there’s other examples from all over the world. But I do think it’s very interesting to think that in this Ethiopian context, that dynamic which has been created in the universities and how they’re growing and what they’re doing, the education they’re offering, which has its problems, but is scaling in very interesting ways.

This is something where I wonder whether we will find in 20, 50 years time, new academic models emerging from these environments, which are actually leading to a different type of academia.

[00:22:07] Lucie: That would be exciting.

[00:22:08] David: I believe it will happen. I don’t know what it would look like, but I believe that the pressures that young African institutions are under to be able to serve their communities, and to be able to actually play a role which is of value in their community is something which I don’t see as much internationally and where I think the academia that could come out of this, which could thrive in those contexts where they cannot compete internationally, but they can add value locally, I wonder whether that will generate a different type of academia if it’s given the right environment. So that’s something which I’m personally deeply invested in and deeply interested in.

I believe that there is an opportunity for new models of academia to emerge from these sorts of environments. I think there’s a real risk that the elite academia does downplay and undervalue some of the innovation that could come out of these sorts of institutions. And I believe that’s a real risk. But I still believe in academia enough to believe that there’s potential for these parallel systems of publication, which is where we started, and academia in general to emerge without necessarily one needing to, how can I put it, well, undervalue the other.

[00:23:45] Lucie: Yeah, that’s an interesting idea and I guess my concern is similarly if these other organizations are aware enough and willing to take it on enough or willing to recognise the value of the other systems.

[00:23:58] David: At the moment, not really. There was an interesting group in Germany that I was fortunate to be connected with that were looking to see whether a sort of a new academia was emerging in Africa. And they were bringing together scholars from across the continent and trying to do this in an interesting way. And they actually got, of course, German funding to be able to investigate this. Now, of course, there were elements of that group where it was interesting academic research in Germany, but this was deeply important research in Africa. And the group funding it, of course, were interested in the academic research, rather than the deeply important aspect in a way which I thought was sort of slightly unfortunate.

But as a whole, it’s important that such research is happening within the elite academic systems. There are efforts to do this and to integrate and to build some of these bridges and to recognize the value created. What I don’t believe there is much at the moment, and I think, I hope this will emerge in the years to come, is I, I don’t believe there’s enough opportunity, finance, available to support and enable the innovations which are happening within these low resource environments. To actually recognise and support some of the innovation to enable them to emerge with a sense of identity. I think that is something where I hope there could be elements of recognition which really helps in the years to come.

As I say, it comes back to the fact that if you actually take the value of academia coming from publications, one of the problems is the barriers to publications in these low resource environments are just too high. And removing those barriers in a systematic way is not possible, partly because if you do, then too many people can access it.

If too many people access it, you no longer have elite. When you’re really looking to try and get an elite, well you have to be exclusive, and academia is inherently exclusive. The question is, who are you excluding and how are you excluding them? Who could you be including? Those are really difficult. Academic publication will always have to be exclusive in some way, but who is excluded, how and why? Those are questions which we can and we should always be asking ourselves and I hope there’s going to be interesting innovations which come in and which emerge from these, I believe, really exciting environments where the need and the potential for impact is so high that good research can be happening at a very large scale.

[00:26:51] Lucie: I didn’t know what direction we would go in, but we’ve ended somewhere where I didn’t expect to go, and it’s been really interesting. And I am going to need to think about it a lot more.

[00:27:01] David: Maybe just before we finish, do you want to get me back on track a little bit more to a direction that you were thinking we might head in?

[00:27:08] Lucie: No, not really.

[00:27:09] David: Okay, fine. Maybe it’s a good place to end then.

I do want to just, you know, I am an academic at heart. I believe in academic excellence. I believe in the value of that. I believe in the value of academia as a whole. Our current academia, I believe the academia of my father, my father was an academic. What I observed growing up watching him as an academic is something I would have loved to experience myself and I haven’t. Academia, I believe, has changed. And I think internationally, I don’t think it’s been changing for the better in general.

This is the thing which is of course so ironic. When my father was a young academic, he fought for the recognition of applied statistics and the value of that, and they won those battles in so many different cases. And yet it’s strange that the same battles are being fought in different ways, in different contexts, and somehow… Academia has taken a path internationally, which I think is difficult. And a lot of this does come down to funding and how things are funded and in the UK certainly the core funding that used to be there created opportunities which now people could only dream of.

[00:28:28] Lucie: Exactly, yeah, yeah, definitely.

[00:28:30] David: The lack of core funding is a really big problem in most academic institutions in the UK that I’ve interacted with. There’s so much. Research, there’s so much directed funding as opposed to the sort of core funding to enable institutions to grow and to thrive. I think that is an issue. But there’s advantages to that as well. There’s always advantages and disadvantages. I do believe that there is a better way for publications to serve academia than what I have experienced recently.

[00:29:07] Lucie: There’s also just so many publications out there which aren’t very good, or worth reading.

[00:29:14] David: It’s worse than that. There was a wonderful article not so long ago, I believe it was in Nature, which studied only good publications in good journals, and found that at least 50 percent had made mistakes in their statistical interpretation.

[00:29:30] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:29:31] David: Even good publications, you know, there’s actually research methods issues which are so deeply embedded in our academic systems, in our publication systems, in many publications. And I come back to a point I made earlier, which is maybe a better place to finish, which is, if we really want to take advantage of the way the world is changing, the way data is becoming available, we need to be able to innovate in terms of the research methodologies.

[00:30:02] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:30:03] David: And to do that, we need publications to be able to accept a wider range of research methodologies in a positive way. This idea that there is a gold standard of research methods is a really big problem outside of areas like medical research, where you need to have a very fixed process to be able to get you know, drugs approved, that sort of thing.

There you absolutely want to have that rigorous process. But it does not mean that that rigorous process is leading to better learning than another process. And so if your end goal of research is learning, then that rigorous process, which you need to have drugs being approved or whatever it is, is not what you are wanting to set up.

If your aim is to get deeper understanding, deeper learning for society and so on, knowledge creation, which is the broad aim of academia.

[00:31:08] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:31:08] David: Then we need to be open to a wider range of research methods to be able to generate knowledge in different ways and to then scrutinize and critique it. Academic criticism is one of the most powerful and valuable tools in the world.

[00:31:27] Lucie: But scary as well. As the person being criticised?

[00:31:32] David: No, on the contrary. If you get good academic criticism, it is nothing but valuable.

[00:31:40] Lucie: Yes, but it is also very personal, it feels personal, I think.

[00:31:47] David: Well, people interpret it as feeling personal. Some people make it personal, but it should not be. Good academic criticism and discourse is not personal. It should be about the ideas. Now, of course, it does depend on your topic area. It does depend on a lot of different things. But really good academic criticism shouldn’t feel personal. It should be taken as an opportunity to evaluate it, and to be able to judge. It should be always received positively.

[00:32:23] Lucie: That’s the theory.

[00:32:24] David: Well, it’s not just the theory, it’s one of the things, you know, if you can take it always positively and appreciate it, your fiercest critics can become your future allies. The whole point, if you can go up to someone who’s criticised your work and really taken it and torn it to shreds and say thank you, chances are they’ll be happy to work with you in the future. That’s the power of academia. Actually, you shouldn’t be shying away from criticism.

If you only talk to people who agree with you, you don’t learn much. If you have someone who’s willing to criticize you and say, have you considered this? Have you thought about that? I haven’t seen how you’re thinking about this. I haven’t understood why, how you’ve considered that. And this is why the peer review process within publications is so valuable when it’s done right.

[00:33:21] Lucie: Yeah, I agree with that, but I still, not only personally, I know other people also who find it difficult not to take it personally.

[00:33:31] David: Yes, academia is a difficult discipline, It’s a difficult life choice.

[00:33:36] Lucie: Well, it is a life choice. That sounds about right.

[00:33:41] David: I want to come back maybe to finish where we started, which is on open access. I fell in love with open access as a concept very early on. And it’s really broken my heart how…

[00:33:56] Lucie: The impact.

[00:33:57] David: …the impact hasn’t had the positive effect that I envisaged. The idea of open access, of how this can and should open it to people from all over the world, from everywhere. And whereas what I’ve actually seen is most of the time what open access has actually done is it’s changed the nature of who publishes.

And it’s actually removed people who would have published before from low resource environments and now taken that ability to publish and get their work out there out of their hands. And that to me, as an unintended consequence, nobody I know who was part of the open access movement ever intended that consequence.

[00:34:40] Lucie: No, no.

[00:34:41] David: This element of recognising the difference between the ideal of the academia we would, some of us would envisage, and the reality of the industry of publishing, academic publishing, which we actually live in, if you think about that as an industry, it’s a commercial enterprise, which is what it is. It’s absolutely obvious that the money’s got to come from somewhere. And it’s all about the money. If you’re not paying to read, to access, then you’ve got to pay to publish. And therefore, the implications of that are huge.

[00:35:20] Lucie: And do you think there’s a future direction then? Where do you think open access publishing is going to go?

[00:35:26] David: Don’t get me wrong, I still think open access publishing is the right way forward and I think there’s always going to be ways to improve it by, you know, being careful about how you include people who would otherwise be excluded and all sorts of other things.

And I think that will improve over time. But I don’t have a silver bullet solution to this, no.

[00:35:44] Lucie: No, okay.

[00:35:46] David: It’s incredibly complicated. There are groups considering open access publications, in different ways and different approaches. And I’m interested in what they’re trying to do. There are people trying to solve these problems. I’m certainly not alone in recognizing this, I’m relatively ignorant compared to many others who are much more deeply aware of these issues, some of the potential solutions. So no, I don’t have answers to this. I have seen people trying to find answers and I’m afraid I’m still sitting on the fence and looking to see how they do because I would love it if they succeed but I don’t know.

[00:36:23] Lucie: Right, so watch this space.

[00:36:28] David: Well, not this space, watch that space. Whatever that space may be!

[00:36:35] Lucie: Well, thank you, David. I look forward to more conversations.