Visualising, Violating, and Humanizing Scholarship
Three weeks ago, COPE published new guidance for how to handle retractions of published articles - highlighting just how pressing the problem is becoming.
Governments award money (take), research is produced (make), which - unless a patent facilitates private ownership for a short time - becomes part of the scientific commons (waste).
Kidnapping Scholarship: Reckoning, Regulating, and Reimagining Plagiarism
“All over the country, meanwhile, students were and still are being upbraided, reprimanded, given F’s on papers, flunked in courses, and expelled from universities for doing this plagiarism thing, this indefinable thing.”
In discussing the extent to which science has met our curiosity about the university, we must remember that different minds are curious about different things.
“The job of the scholar is to contribute to society, and if they are not doing so, they are not successful.” And here, we will agree but with one vital amendment.
The Scholar's Dilemma: single-use AI, reading less, and poor pay
The job was advertised in Nature and required an honours degree - meaning research experience proven by a thesis - and a minimum of 2 years experience for an annual salary of £155 (roughly equivalent to £8,778.18 or $11,658 in today’s money).
And yet, this framing of quality science has rarely been taken up in earnest, particularly in how science is evaluated or valued in broader society. The dominant understanding of “quality” science – especially in public and policy discourse – is
“A paper that does not have references is like a child without an escort walking in the night in a big city it does not know: isolated, lost, anything may happen to it”
On Research Performativity, Agreeing Disagreeably, and Degree Inflation
The same paper would be rejected by two more top journals before, as an act of desperation, Mojica submitted it to, and it was accepted in, a smaller Q2 ranked journal.
They are a mode of academic conversation – a practice of exchanging ideas and reflections – but they enjoy the benefit of being unbounded by the constraints of the academic journal article.
