By BROTHERS OF THE COUNTRY*
The lack of quality criteria required in journal editorials will send researchers, without mercy, to a perverse underworld that already exists in academia: the world of competition, now subsidized by mercantile subjectivity.
The Foundation for the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, which goes by the name Capes, announced some time ago the new system for evaluating our bibliographic production, with the main measure being the end of the “Qualis” Periodicals system.
Positions are divided. Some praise the measure as a necessary adaptation to the new telematic times and centrality of communication, using the terms of “open science” as an alibi. Others, like us, claim not only to better understand the proposal but also view with reservations any uncritical submission to the world of the production of light-hearted, instantaneous, fleeting knowledge of social networks.
Film, TV and theater artists have systematically denounced the replacement of the criteria of “talent” and “experience” in hiring casts by the criterion of “number of followers” on social networks. This partly explains the deterioration in the quality of productions, especially those on broadcast TV. Now it’s our turn.
The shift from quantitative and qualitative assessment carried out by peers and the non-requirement of quality criteria in the editorial board of journals will send us, without mercy, to a perverse underworld that already exists in the academic environment, but which will be “worsened”, which is the world of competition, now subsidized by mercantile subjectivity.
When we have to fight for the achievement of “numbers of citations”, “downloads” and “mentions on social networks” and at the same time demonstrate “scientific contribution and theoretical relevance” we will be thrown into autophagy – I repeat: which already exists in the academic environment – but which was previously motivated by our inflated egos and desires for success and power as described by Thomas Hobbes in his presentation of human nature, but which will now be motivated by the need to survive in the scientific-teaching career: “the researcher is the wolf of the researcher”, the English philosopher would say.
We want further explanations and we fear some of the measures not because we are from the Humanities, as some colleagues from the hard sciences who consider the Humanities as pseudoscience, but rather because we have lost the battle against the commercialization of knowledge and scientific production that has transformed, in recent years, important journals into slot machines that have started to attribute maintenance costs to the authors, as demonstrated by Michel Goulart da Silva in his article “Qualis: the strange direction of scientific journals”, in addition to the proliferation of predatory journals.
The production of content for social networks or for the limitless world of website requires strategies that attract the attention of the target audience, making them not only “click on the arrow” to access the content, but also maintain their attention for as long as possible in that experience. This made the leads “never” reflect the actual content of what will be seen.
The headline, always sensationalist, aims to attract attention and mobilize emotions to attract and thus win the competition with other content that is swarming in the eyes. Now, let's imagine this transposed to our production of scientific articles.
As researchers and research advisors, we always tell our “apprentices” that the title or call for articles should reflect the content of the text as much as possible. In science, we do not deceive readers. This criterion is also used in the evaluation of articles that are submitted to journals, at least the most serious ones. Given the need to compete for the attention of an audience on social networks, we would have to make our articles spectacular. leads?
Another worrying fact is the size of the productions. In the internet universe, information is passed on quickly, the maximum time for a story on Instagram it's 60 seconds. That's what we're conditioned to consume. The new generations would get bored just by passing by an Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo with its 1.400 pages) or a Victor Hugo (Les Miserables with its 1.500 pages). Contemporary teachers are required to work with short, quick, objective texts that transmit in a maximum of three or four pages content that, to be properly understood, an average course of 360 hours would be insufficient.
This has a direct impact on organized productions, known as text collections. Collections are collective productions that bring together different authors who offer their reflections around a common theme. Above all, they have a conceptual, theoretical, political and/or methodological unity that demonstrates their validity as a unique “work”.
In the logic of Capes-clickbait, the chapters will have to be individualized, because the dissemination of the collection as a whole will not only not arouse the interest of the public looking for something precise, short and quick, but will also be more “heavy” for the reader. download and will take up more storage space (although there is a technological solution for this).
Perhaps this dynamic has an important side effect, which is the rescue of the publishing professional who has been losing ground to automation via artificial intelligence. That is, a chapter in a collection would need to be individualized in order to be published, however, all the information about the collection itself is necessary, so the chapters would be contained in a compilation where we could have, for example, the cover, back cover, summary, introductions and/or prefaces, cataloging cards and finally the individualized chapter.
In short, we still have many questions and few answers, but the fact is that we will resist attempts to become traveling salesmen of science, those who in my youth sold the encyclopedia. Barsa door-to-door. It's the same logic, except now the sale is online.
*Paula He is a professor of Social Work and Public Administration at the Federal University of Goiás (UFG) and of the Postgraduate Program in Social Work at PUC-GO.
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