A Researcher's Perspective:  What do Researchers Need? Challenges and Potentials for PURE

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Thomas Ryberg | Professor mso | Aalborg University | Aalborg, Denmark

A Researcher's Perspective:  What do Researchers Need? Challenges and Potential for Pureryberg@hum.aau.dk | @tryberg (twitter)

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Agenda• A critique of PURE reasoning• Some web trends – sociale media & web 2.0

- How can PURE become a researcher’s friend and ressource

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Disclaimer• Not necessarily a representative researcher

- From the humanities – but born into the publish-or-perish tradition (regime)

- Interested in technology- Research into creative use of social media- Want ownership over systems- Do my own PURE registrations and like PURE (actually…)- My role today: Provoke, inspire, have a dialogue – any critique is well

meant- Maybe I’m just a weirdo

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But how about you• How many are active researchers?• How many have been researchers?• How many are experiencing resistance from researchers in terms of

PURE?• How many are in contact and collaborate with researchers around

PURE?

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A CRITIQUE OF PURE REASONING

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PURE as public knowledge base

• ”Research database is publically available og delivers knowledge and gains to local enterprises and research activities”

• ”The database disseminates AAUs reseach to society and the individual citizen”

• How PURE was described once in AAU (and it was a genuine wish from our library)

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PURE as control and surveillance of the employees• Extreme control and overview of individual researcher’s

production• Instrumentalisation and quanitification• Counting machine – now used for hiring/firing and distribution

of money internally• 6 points to become associate professor – 75.000 DKK for a

level 2 paper (local rules) – bonus for particularly productive researchers

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Fear and insecurity

Thomas lacks 2.5 points to attain this year’s minimum quota

Efficiency to be increased by 145% to attain a professor mso

78% of the employees produce more than Thomas

Thomas’ income (based on BFI) for AAU is lousy 15.000 DKK

Thomas’ Publish-to-Perish-ratio is 0.25 (below 0.10 is perish)

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AAU: Redundancies (firing)• ForskerForum 10. October:

- ”Reason for firing people is that the dept doesn’t generate enough money, so there’s a deficit compared to number of staff. Managements criteria have been an assessment of the individual employee’s competence profilce and performance: Do you score publication points and grants? ” DJØF-union rep. Jesper Lindgaard Christensen. (my translation)

• So….

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• Clip from PURE at AAU

This should be ‘grants’ by the way….

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General sentiment (not saying this is how things are…but how many feel they are)• "Paradoxically, the more that politics insists on the importance of the

university, the more it actually drives the institution away from material realities and from democratic civil engagement... Management and control of knowledge has become more important than research, teaching or even thinking and living the good life together“ Thomas Docherty: "Universities at War“

• Increased “professionalisation” of management (hugely increased salaries, less contact with research and researchers, more managers)

• Increased political control, micro-management, research assessments, growth in numbers of employees in the administrative layer etc.

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That is not PURE’s fault?• No, but PURE and Elsevier important players in research policy as

well • PURE is not neutral but the material basis for research assessment

measures as Danish BFI and the like• Overview of the individual’s or departments ‘production’ – affects

distribution of funding and therefor also research practice• More work has been put into PURE as a counting and administrative

device than as a system benefitting and empowering researchers- This is the managements’ priorities – as always – focused on solving

problems of the administration itself rather than supporting core services…(said somewhat polemically )

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PURE 1.0• Rules for PURE:

- As researcher you need to spend time and enter correctly- It is important you enter a lot of data – less important whether the

data are useful for you- Data can be used against you based on opaque criteria outside

your own control- Only what the system and management deem relevant in relation

to your researcher identity may appear in the system – you are a number and a number of publications

- We take you data and we present them to you (or those we think it is relevant that you see)

• Prototype of an administrative system 1.0• What are the web trends

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WEB 2.0 AND SOCIAL MEDIA

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• Trends:- Personalisation and individualisations – yet inherently social

o The individualised collective- From consumer to producer – increased ownership and control for the

individual usero Crowdsourcing, collaboration, 2-way-communicationo Personal networks and streams of information & activities

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Web 2.0 typology – Dalsgaard & Sorensen• Dalsgaard, C., & Sorenson, E. (2008). A Typology for Web 2.0. In Proceedings of

ECEL 2008 (pp. 272–279). Presented at the ECEL 2008, Greece.

• But these happen across different levels of scale from individual to collective

Web

Organizing communicative processes

Networking and awareness-making

Text forumsChatVideo phone

Person-centred social networking sitesNetworked weblogsMicro-blogging

WeblogsPodcastsWikisApplication sharing services

Object-centred social networking sitesSocial bookmarking

Creating SharingDialoging

Organizing resources

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Sociale konstellationer – nye arkitekturer for læring• Group

- Well known members, strong ties, mutual dependency

• Network- Looser constellation of people, come-and-

go • Collectives

- Tag-clouds, Google Search Rank, aggregations of activities

• Researcher in middle – creation of transparency between the levelsPicture taken from: (Andersson, 2008)

http://terrya.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/networks-versus-groups-in-higher-education/

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Challenge (the center does not hold)

Collective

Network

Group

Individual

• ICT enables multiple interactions across levels of scale – and horisontally

• New arenas for finding and contributing knowledge

• Supporting people in making sense of the bits and pieces

• But important to support the continuous traversing of scale

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Creation of Personal Learning Network• Individual in the center of self-generated personal networks –

connections to groups, networks and collectives• Streams of information and activities come from the networked

collective• Content depends on the network composition – whom are you

connected to• Facebook News-feed, Diigo, Twitter, Researchgate, Academia.edu

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Delicious.com, Diigo.com or Mendeley

• Online representation of bookmarks / favourites

• Share, connect to and explore others’ bookmarks

• Easily monitor what your network bookmarks – or see what’s popular, or browse particular ‘tags’

• Creating streams of potentially relevant material

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Lifestreaming – microblogging - Twitter.com

• Microblogging tool - 140 chars tweets (status updates)

• Follow people – but not necessarily both ways – Lance Armstrong, Howard Rheingold etc.

• Create focused streams around hashtag (e.g. #openaccess #iranelection)

• Use: Keep updated through creation of professional network

• Focused streams for events #ThisorThatEvent?

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PURE: IS JUST A FRIEND YOU HAVEN’T MET

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Characteristics of social media• Ownership– own profile – strong personal or professional’presence’• User as co-producer• Privatisation & collectivisation• Play, creativity– mix of formal and informal• From ’smaller’ communities to networks and collectives• Structure and connections are created through aggregation of uncoordinated

actions- Sharing of own and other’s content (music, pictures, data-sets, papers, bookmarks,

tweets) - Co-ownership in terms of relevance – collective as editor (folksonomi)- Very individual as well as collective- Social filtrering through a network (good bookmarks, paper recommendations, videoes)- Direct and automated recommendation from the collective

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Challenges and potentials for PURE

• The fundamental problem: - PURE a system decided top-down and fundamentally adopted for surveillance and

control …the very anti-thesis to web 2.0 (sort of….) – but it has become better • Increased attention to:

- Researcher focus – what do researcher need and how can you empower them- How can PURE make life easier (good existing examples: publications connected

to projects, RSS-feeds on publications)- Autonomy, ownership, co-producer, opportunities for import/export- Visualisation of networks and relations, connecting to others- Handle streams of information and activities from other networks and collectives- (new) connections between between people and between people and content –

recommendations, ’awareness’ of other’s activies

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Resarchgate.net & Academia.edu

• Competition to PURE and to institutional repositories at large – spurious business model (but so are publishers business models)

• I don’t use them very actively – still I am logged in several times a week…

• Connections to other researchers – streams of information (papers, questions, potential connection)

• Satisfying academic vanity – mail-updates, statistics – So many have downloadet, read, interacted with your research or searched for you on Bing, Google etc.

• Problem – partial and somewhat haphazard network (yet international)

• Heavily focused on the needs of researchers over those of the institution or the administration

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PURE 2.0• I can connect to other researchers that I work with or I’d like to follow• I have greater ownership of profile and the information on the page and

I can export/import to e.g. linkedin or the liket• I can integrate content from elsewhere (Slideshare, delicious,

bibsonomy, Zotero, wordpress) – blog posts, tweet-stream• I can ‘favorite’/’read later’ a colleagues paper, so I can maintain my own

to-read list (which others can see)• I can click tags/keywords and find similar papers – across institutions

even• I get a message when there are new papers within my area (I have

created my own ifttt alert for PBL)• I get suggestions for publications and persons I might find interesting• Most importantly: I get the feeling that PURE is a system for me, and

not that I am there for the system – a cog in the machine

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www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence

Thank you!