But yes, as I’ve said before (and written here as well), I consider the academic publishing to be in a profound crisis which has largely arisen as a combination of defective business model (yes, where’s my money?) and the once-working peer-review system that has lost its edge.

An example from TLU (my second workplace; IT College almost does not do research at all): the semi-official policy is to publish one’s work in the ’1.1 category’ (as determined by the all-powerful ETIS or Estonian Science Information System). If I publish my work in 1.1, all is OK. If I publish exactly the same work as a conference publication, I’ll be ranked lower. And if I publish the same work in my native language to be understood and read by my compatriots, I’ll be nobody. The Cult of 1.1 has become the ruler of Estonian research. Granted, there is difference between publications and publishers, vanity press is not a place for serious research. But it has gone out of any sensible scale by far.

Another example – I started to supervise my first Ph.D student a year ago. Someplace in between, officials counted that I lack necessary number of ‘high-level’ publications and added an extra supervisor to her (the step was purely nominal, as the other supervisor did not interfere and I still did the de facto work). This year, I’ve racked up more than enough publications and the issue faded away immediately. The problem is that I wasn’t less qualified as a supervisor before, and I am not radically better now with publications – if anything, the need to publish distracted me somewhat from supervising (fortunately we could do some papers together).

On a different note: I’m moving over to Stockholm University starting from next month. Keep in touch!

(A good starting point for those who don’t grok what we’re talking about)

I haven’t even started writing again when there is already a reader.

Good to hear from you. I hope you are doing well over there (and have some time to practice extreme ironing as well).