Productivity is – again – on the agenda everywhere, including when it comes to universities and their contributions in teaching and research.
One reason for this focus is that productivity is often seen as key to competitiveness, economic or otherwise. For example, within Australia, is has become commonplace to assert that Australian universities are ‘punching above their weight’ by international standards when it comes to their publication productivity, adjusted for the size of the national population. Underpinning this statement is the belief that the number of recognised research outputs produced constitutes a good measure to determine Australian universities’ international competitiveness, and that universities’ level of publication productivity constitutes a valid marker of their international research ‘excellence’.
In some ways at least, such focus on publication productivity can be seen as problematic and even damaging from a research policy perspective. To begin with, there is the issue that increases in research outputs can be achieved relatively easily by organisations and people through reducing the quality of said outputs. Australia is a particularly interesting and relatively well-studied case in this regard.
In the mid-1990s, the Australian Government introduced a performance-based research funding formula that financially-rewarded raw publication output by universities and their researchers.
Subsequent bibliometric studies conducted by Linda Butler and colleagues suggest that Australian researchers on the whole strategically responded to this incentive by publishing more papers while also increasingly targeting what, at the time, were less impactful and prestigious journals. In reference to Campbell’s Law, it can thus be concluded that within the Australian context, the financial incentivisation of publication productivity by the Australian Government corrupted such productivity’s validity as a measure of research performance.
The Australian Government, eventually in 2017, decided to remove the publication indicator from the research funding formula. However, at that stage, the associated incentives had become deeply ingrained into the institutional fabric of Australian universities, and they have remained a key point of reference in universities’ research management practices up to this day.
One key reason for this persistence is the rise of university rankings over roughly the last two decades, which quickly became a major point of reference for institutional strategy in Australia due to the perceived link with the international student market. Almost all major university rankings reward publication quantity to some extent at least, something which makes increasing publication numbers a key and relatively straightforward avenue for increasing a university’s ranking performance.
There are indications that this focus on publication output to improve ranking performance has had a range of undesirable consequences. For example, it has been repeatedly observed that Australian universities’ prioritisation of research productivity and performance and the associated investments have fuelled the casualisation of universities’ teaching workforce.
Similarly, within some Australian universities at least, academics’ teaching workload has become directly linked to their research productivity – the more papers academics publish, the less they have to teach.
Such workload arrangements signal to academic staff that the reward for being an active researcher is a reduction of their teaching responsibilities – thus framing the teaching of students as an activity that is inferior and secondary to research. In the broader picture, the message such internal prioritisation of research productivity sends is disastrous, as it fuels the perception that universities neglect their teaching – a perception which has been one key driver of current concerns about Australian universities’ ‘social licence’.
Last not least, there have been considerable changes to the academic publication system over recent decades that seriously trouble the narrative that publication productivity is a good thing per se. Two developments are of particular note here.
First, there is what has been referred to as the ‘the strain on academic publishing’ arising from the tremendous growth in the number of academic publications, and of journal articles in particular, that has occurred over the last decade or so. There are indications that some of this growth at least reflects a lowering of quality thresholds – with the growth of articles published in special issues and which receive lower rejection rates than standard articles being a case in point.
Second, and related to this, there is the ‘drain of scientific publishing’ reflecting the increasing costs, financial and otherwise, associated with sustaining the academic publishing system. One key driver of escalating financial costs has been the shift toward what is called (Gold) Open Access publishing where researchers or their institutions pay publishers to have their paper published in a way that it is freely accessible without any paywalls. Obviously, this shift has also provided a financial incentive to publishers to try to publish as many journal articles as possible, regardless of these articles’ potential contribution and quality.
While Open Access publishing was meant to provide free access to published knowledge, it also has imposed, via publishers’ article processing charges (APCs), immense costs onto researchers, their universities and, ultimately, the Australian taxpayer. One recent estimate puts the global costs of APCs alone over the period of 2019-2023 at $US 9 billion – roughly $12.5 billion Australian dollars. The exact figure for Australia alone is unknown, with estimates assuming APC-related costs of hundreds of millions of Australian dollars per annum. A lot could be achieved potentially if this money was invested directly into research and researchers, rather than spent on APCs.
These APC-related costs are absurd also, given the fact that in the academic publishing game – and in contrast to many other professions or industries – publishers generally do not compensate either authors or peer-reviewers for their contributions to the production of the articles published.
Taken together, all these developments and tensions suggests that high levels of publication output are not necessarily a reason to celebrate. Publications have long been an important and legitimate part of academic work and knowledge dissemination. In order for them to continue to do so, a radical departure from current productivity-focused models is urgently required, in Australia and internationally.
Associate Professor Peter Woelert researches HE policy and governance, working in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne.