I was at an information meeting about the new system for financing research the other day. Argue as we may, the system’s going through, and that means: Norwegian new media researchers, we need to work together. The new system for measuring research depends on your “publication channel” (i.e. journal, website, publisher) being on a master list of approved peer-reviewed “channels”. The list is updated yearly according to recommendations from each discipline’s nasjonalt fagrÂd. Not many of the journals in our field are on the list yet, but many clearly qualify if we simply get one of the national committees to nominate them. The deadline for the national committee to send in their recommendations is August 22, and that list will be what is used to assess anything published in 2005.
I suggest we compile a list here – add comments! – and send it to the national committee in plenty of time for it to go through. I’ve written to Bj¯rn S¯rensen, who runs the committee and is an excellent guy and a new media researcher too. To be included, a journal must be peer-reviewed. If you publish research in a “channel” that’s not peer-reviewed, it counts as formidling, or popularisation, not as research.
The idea is that you get one point for anything published in any journal on the list. If you get something published in a journal on the “level 2” list, you get five points. Level 2 journals are supposed to account for about 20% of the publications in each discipline, so some disciplines will have one big journal in level 2 while others will have lots of very small ones. How those points translate into money and whether the individual research, the department or the university at large gets the money isn’t clear yet and will in most cases be decided on a local level, apparently.
There might be a good reason for this, in a way. See, international evaluations of Norwegian research have found that our research is excellent, but that we’re not ambitious enough about the quality of the journals we submit our stuff too. Part of the point of this reform is to encourage us to be more daring in where we send stuff, which in theory will then disseminate Norwegian research more and we’ll all do better. Also, they’re working on a system to also give credit to formidling, which would cover publication in non-scholarly outlets and, I assume, weblogging.
OK: the list is in a huge Excel file over at the UHR website; I copied it into plain HTML here. The level 2 list is here, in HTML. In principle any peer-reviewed scholarly journal can be on the list. Ones I’d like added include: Game Studies, Journal of Digital Information (it’s already in), Rhizomes, m/c, Fibreculture (list to be continued)
There’s also a level 2 list, which is supposed to represent more or less the best publication channels, where about 1/5 of articles are published. If you publish in these, you get 5 points, while the regular list only gets you one. Journals I could conceivably send something to include World Literature Today, which interestingly wants “essays for a broad audience” rather than dense scholarship (maybe something on electronic literature, eh?), American Literature, (will be added to as I see places)
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noah
Leonardo, electronic book review, Dichtung Digital, Technoetic Arts, Digital Creativity, Postmodern Culture, PAJ, TDR?
Elin
How about TEKKA?
Jill
I don’t think TEKKA is peer-reviewed, is it? Neither is the Electronic Book Review, unfortunately for me, and I don’t *think* Dichtung Digital is either.
I guess we’ll just have to count articles in TEKKA, EBR and Dichtung Digital as popularisation, which is aparently supposed to be beefed up and get more money, and to include things like discussions with experts who aren’t academics. Not always a particularly fruitful division, I must say, but right now I’m thinking figure out the system and change it from inside…
Thanks for the other tips, Noah, I’ll check that they’re all peer-reviewed and submit em if they are. I know some are but I’m not familiar with all of them.
Jill
Leonardo, Postmodern Culture and Dichtung Digital are all already on the list. I’m impressed at Dichtung Digital being on it, that’s excellent! So is JoDI (Journal of Digital Information), Digital Creativity. PAJ (A Journal of Performance and Art) is on the top journals list, the ones that get five times as much money. They have new media stuff? I’m not familiar with that journal!
I’ll check out Technoetic Arts, but what is TDR?
torill
Gamestudies.net!
Jill
Definitely!
Mark Bernstein
For research in new media and software development, TEKKA *is* peer reviewed by the Australian standards.
noah
TDR is the The Drama Review. I know the editor has said that he’d like to publish more digital media material, as it intersects with performance.
PAJ actually published the long piece that Brion Moss and I wrote about The Impermanence Agent (http://impermanenceagent.com/agent/essay2) before it was revised and expanded for the Cybertext Yearbook. By the way, do your folks consider the Cybertext Yearbook a journal or book series?
I think there are also quite a few others that we should be considering. For example, haven’t Hayles, Joyce, Moulthrop and others published about elit in a wide variety of places?
Jill
I hadn’t thought of publishing in performance and drama journals. The Drama Review is actually on the top level, so worth five times as much as most journals. Interesting.
Stuart Moulthrop has published on hypertext fiction in Style, Modern Fiction Studies and Mosaic, which are all on the top level. Kate Hayles has published in Modern Fiction Studies and Contemporary Literature (top level), Sub-Stance, Cultural Critique and some fantasy and scifi journals (standard level). I couldn’t find scholarly publications for Joyce, or Janet Murray. So all these have published in conventional literature journals. No reason not to submit a few papers to such journals, really – except it takes ages for them to read em, doesn’t it?
Weirdly, I can’t find a more specific definition of “peer review” in the report than
They do say that “scholarly publication is
That is:
Point 3 has caused a lot of fuss, because it drastically discourages most Norwegian researchers from publishing in their own mother tongue.
“Peer review” is defined rather vaguely, because the definition is different in different disciplines and this model is supposed to work for all disciplines, which is a huge challenge.
that is
Interestingly enough there’s a section discussing the difficulty of differentiating between scholarly and non-scholarly publication channels in the humanities, and they decide to differentiate by whether or not the journal or similar is mostly Norwegian or not, assuming that scholars publishing internationally are not going to be publishing popular stuff. I guess for most that’s probably true.
noah
What do they think of conference proceedings like SIGGRAPH, Hypertext, DAC, DiGRA, GDC, etc?
Jill
I think a conference proceeding might count as a book in a scholarly series. I don’t know, I’ll have to ask someone, I think.
torill
Sorry, conference proceedings does not count as books. Actually, the conference proceedings thing is one of the BIG holes in this new standard.
Jill
Actually there’s something complicated in the report about how conference proceedings that are officially a series and where hte conference doesn’t also publish selections of hte best papers and in group B or something they might count. Not sure whether they then count as journals or books. A paper published in an anthology only counts for 0.7 (in a regular journal 1, in a top level journal 5, a whole book at a regular published 5, a book with a top publisher 8) which doesn’t work well for the humanities. Lots of compromises in this system.
Anyway, if you want to understand the proceedings thing, searching for “konferanse” in the report‘ll get you what’s there, but it doesn’t seem conclusive.
Eric
fyi, ebr is now peer reviewed. for more info, see the guidelines: