[Taxacom] Fwd: Zootaxa taken off of JCR

[Roland Bergman-Sun]

Here in China, you normally need to explicitly write into your
proposals how many manuscripts you expect to publish in journals with
an IF of 1 or more every year for the duration of the grant period, as
well as the total number expected. This is then evaluated sometimes on
a yearly basis, and sometimes on a grant-period basis. Thankfully, I
am just at the start of my latest grant and can still submit all the
manuscripts I have "promised" (because an expectation turns into a
promise when it is time for evaluation...) to other journals, but if I
had been at the end of a grant and was being evaluated, I would have
to do what so many people here do: cheat. The standard method seems to
be to ask your colleagues to put your name on their almost-finished
publications, even if these publications have nothing to do with your
grant project. This thus inflates a person's number of publications,
for no good reason.

I publish a lot in Zootaxa, as my taxon group (Phthiraptera) has an
extremely good editor. If this had happened in a few years time, I
would probably have been in exactly the position Mike describes. The
repercussions might very well be future lack of funding as I didn't
fulfill my "promises", which may lead to a end to my contract, on
which my work permit in China depends. No doubt, given how many people
in China publish in Zootaxa, this exact scenario will play out many
times.

(As an aside: publishing bonuses in China are also tied to IF of the
journals you publish in. You can say what you want about the whole
system of publishing bonuses, but the fact is that the salaries for
undergraduates and graduate students are so low here, that they depend
on it. When my student hopefully gets her manuscript published in Mol
Phyl Evol, that means she gets roughly a year's salary in bonus. That
may be the difference between her staying on and doing a PhD with us,
and her parents deciding that she's done enough of this research stuff
and she needs to move back to her home village, get married and become
a teacher. So yes, for beginning researchers outside the west,
removing IF from journals without first changing the system can
definitely be career breaking. There are of course other journals they
can publish in, but at least here they need to have an IF of 1 or more
to count, and there aren't that many taxonomy journals that would
work.)

So yeah, it's all very well to sit in the west and be safe and secure
in your position, but it's a different matter in many other countries.
I have colleagues from across the Arab world and South Asia who are in
similar positions, as well. As stupid as the IF system may be, the
sensible approach would be to *first* change the way funding grants,
tenure track systems and so on be, and *then* dismantle the IF system,
if that is the goal. Otherwise, you are very much favoring western
systems of academia over non-western ones.


Cheers,
Daniel

On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 11:44 AM Michael A. Ivie via Taxacom
<taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:
>
> Something that does not seem to have been made clear to those of us not
> cursed with IF obsessed administrators, it seems that this is not just a
> forward-looking problem that could reduce submissions to Zootaxa. A
> worker that has built a careful record of say 10 excellent publications
> in Zootaxa over the last 6 years may/will not be allowed to present them
> for credit when coming up for tenure/promotion/review. They are suddenly
> all simply removed from the record because Zootaxa lacks an IF.  Just
> imagine the gut-wrenching blow that would be to a career.  Forget the
> less-than-stellar papers being discussed, what about this person who
> does excellent work?  Compassion for our fellow taxonomists demands we
> give them our support.
>
> Mike
>
> --
>
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