[Taxacom] Fwd: Zootaxa taken off of JCR

[Ross Mounce]

Dear Roland/Daniel,

I can't help but note that from what I have read, the Chinese system of
research assessment, specifically the Ministry of Science and Technology is
actually moving away from using Journal Impact Factor™ anyway. Under the
new system announced in 2020, only a limited number of a researcher’s or an
institution’s most important papers count - rather than all publications
counting.  I appreciate that this new system may perhaps not be in-place
yet, and news of it may not have filtered to all researchers in China, but
it is coming for sure. So Clarivate's actions might not actually impact
future Chinese research assessment processes.

See this article for a deeper analysis:
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/02/27/new-chinese-policy-could-reshape-global-stm-publishing/
And here for the original memo in Chinese:
http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A16/moe_784/202002/t20200223_423334.html

I should also point out that many European countries are proactively
working to disavow the use of journal-level metrics in research assessment.
Clarivate's Journal Impact Factor™ is just one of those journal-level
metrics. In the UK, Netherlands, Switzerland the reform comes at both
funder and institution level via the 'Declaration on Research Assessment'
(DORA). https://sfdora.org/

Significant organisations and funders to have signed-up to DORA include but
are not limited to:

in the UK:
a) UKRI - all UK research councils inclusive of NERC and BBSRC
b) Wellcome Trust, the largest private philanthropic research funder in the
UK
c) Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)
d) most, if not all UK universities including Cambridge and Oxford
e) The Royal Society

in the Netherlands:
a) NWO - Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
b) KNAW - Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
c) VSNU - Association of Universities in the Netherlands

in Switzerland:
a) Swiss Academy of Sciences
b) Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences
c) Swiss National Science Foundation
d) swissuniversities (the umbrella organisation of the Swiss universities)

in the US:
a) the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
b) the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)
c) the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
[just because NSF isn't yet on the list do not assume that they are not
looking at this issue very closely right now!]

elsewhere DORA supporters include but are not limited to:
Croatian Science Foundation, Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), Israel
Science Foundation (ISF), Foundation for Polish Science, Research Council
of Norway, League of European Research Universities (LERU), European
University Association, Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR),
International Council for Science (ICSU), the Systematics Association, the
International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT), Zoologia (the
Sociedade Brasileira de Zoologia journal), Belgian Royal Society of Zoology
and Belgian Journal of Zoology


I would strongly urge this community to use this outrage at the stupidity
of Clarivate to reform research assessment practices, along the lines of
DORA (or other similar initiatives), to help kill-off the statistically
illiterate game of assessing research articles by journal-level metrics.

If anyone knows of a research funder that is still actively using
journal-level metrics in their research assessment exercises, I would be
only too happy to use my multiple 'Global North' privileges to draft and
send a letter to those research funders to try and convince them to change
their ways. This is the kind of positive reaction that I would like to see
the taxonomy and systematics community make.


Kind regards,

Ross




On Wed, 8 Jul 2020 at 14:08, Roland Bergman-Sun via Taxacom <
taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:

> Dear Carlos,
>
> I'm uninterested in your political conspiracy theories; I average
> about 10–15 pages per review over the last few years regardless of
> where the authors come from, and so far only one manuscript has been
> by Chinese authors (which was rejected and to my knowledge never
> resubmitted anywhere). Trying to get more publications out in less
> time, and sending in shoddy work, is by no means limited to Chinese
> authors. In my experience, the worst manuscripts I have reviewed (and
> either rejected or recommended major revisions for) have been from
> India, the Arab world, Germany, South Korea, and Singapore. However, I
> am alone in studying my organism group in China, and if there had been
> more people working with the group here, things may have been
> different. I've also done a lot of work since I got here to review and
> revise my colleagues' manuscripts *before* they are submitted, and
> with few exceptions, they are indistinguishable in quality from those
> I review or co-write with non-Chinese authors, with the main problem
> usually being linguistic. Your anecdotal data is thus less meaningful
> to me than you may think.
>
> But yeah, the large number of entirely faked publications in medicine
> (particularly TCM) and things like material science coming out of
> China is horrible. There's no denying that, and it is remarkable how
> poorly reviewed some of those subjects seem to be. This is entirely a
> consequence of the Chinese reliance on the IF and their practice of
> paying researchers for their publications based on IF.
>
> Nevertheless, if people are at least partially dependent on a system
> -- over which they have little or no control -- for their continued
> career, and the system suddenly changed -- for reasons outside their
> control -- I'm going to feel empathy for them regardless of if the
> system itself is illogical or not. Changing administrative systems is
> not why I got into taxonomy, and I suspect the same is true for most
> taxonomists.
>
> Don't get me wrong -- I have no particular love for IF, and in the
> absence of externally imposed administrative systems that require me
> to take them into account, I would never have given the IF of a
> journal a second thought. In the absence of such systems, I would pay
> more attention to the quality of the editor (stellar in Zootaxa for my
> organism group, nonsensical in e.g. Folia Parasitologica), the contact
> network of reviewers they have (insuperable in Zootaxa for my organism
> group, bizarre in some other cases, but largely ameliorated by the
> option to recommend suitable reviewers), and the final treatment and
> layout of the published manuscript (for all practical purposes
> adequate in Zootaxa, horrible in e.g. Acta Parasitologica). If I had
> still worked in the west, where I was in a position similarly
> privileged to yours so that I didn't have to take the IF into account,
> I wouldn't (and didn't). Now I have to, and the options available to
> me, in your outline, are:
> - run and be a victim/coward (I assume this translates into leaving
> China and trying to get a job elsewhere, which would definitely upset
> my wife);
> - be "brave and fight back", for which no applicable analogue
> immediately suggests itself, other than doing exactly what has been
> proposed and try to get Clarivate to reverse their decision, which you
> somehow reject;
> - be an "accomplice" by continuing to work with the things I love in
> the one place in the world where I know for sure that I can continue
> doing it (which in this case *is* making the choice that implies
> personal sacrifice, so it seems your alternatives are not very well
> thought through).
> The choice, to me, is thus obvious: to be a "brave accomplice".
>
> As I said, I am lucky enough that both my current grants have not
> formally started yet, so I have the option to reroute the manuscripts
> I have "promised" in my grant proposals to other journals than
> Zootaxa, or accept that manuscripts I submit there will not be counted
> and thus have to write more manuscripts that would, if accepted,
> count. If I had been at the end of my grants, with lots of manuscripts
> published in Zootaxa (currently 12 publications and a few more
> submitted), only to suddenly have the rug pulled out from under my
> feet like this, that would have been an entirely different matter. No
> doubt there are many researchers here in China (and elsewhere) that
> are in that situation at the moment. For these people, I feel empathy,
> and maintain that the correct way to go about this is to first change
> the systems they are "trapped in", and then dismantle or replace the
> IF system. This is exactly why I agree with what Mike said (July 7th),
> which I sought to exemplify with my original email.
>
> Cheers,
> Daniel
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 7:09 PM Carlos Alberto Martínez Muñoz
> <biotemail at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Roland Bergman-Sun (Daniel),
> > I am from "the South" and I am by far not in a safe and secure position.
> > About dismantling the JIF, you wrote: "Otherwise, you are very much
> favoring western systems of academia over non-western ones". For your
> information, the JIF is a western system of academia, which China happily
> imported. It is China's fault not assessing the system and using it in a
> disproportionate way to encourage its scientists to exert increased world
> impact by playing by its rules.
> > Moreover, Clarivate was sold (Web of Science included) by Thomson
> Reuters to Onex Corporation and to Baring Private Equity Asia. The latter
> is based in Hong Kong, and it is very clear to me whose game is this now
> and to which interests the JIF and Clarivate currently serve.
> > About the current self-destructive system that China has in place, you
> wrote: "... 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."
> > It is actually much worse than just inflating authorship. Chinese
> authors are also trying to get more publications out in less time. They are
> writing half-baked publications and sending it to the journals. That
> translates into an unfair workload being put on reviewers like me. This
> year I rejected one Chinese paper, with a two-page review. Other Chinese
> paper passed, with a 14-page review. Two papers in ZooKeys that were never
> sent to me were published with basic but fatal flaws. And so on.
> > However, it is worse than that. Chinese authors in Medicine are buying
> papers from "paper mills" and publishing fake data on life-saving topics
> such as cancer research. That is plainly a crime.
> >
> > Now, I won't romaticize this "need for the JIF" and "empathy" as others
> have done here. There may be not many, but certainly there are a few
> scientists in this list that have endured overwhelming powers, like the
> power of a totalitarian government and its secret police. Scientists that
> know what is like to stand for a fair cause and to lose what they care
> about most. Those scientists know how to differentiate a victim from a
> coward and from an accomplice. When one is "trapped" (to use Michael Ivie's
> word) in a conflict situation, one always has choices at hand. One can be a
> coward and run away, effectively getting out of the conflict. That I would
> call a victim. One can be brave and fight back, whether one could win or
> not. Courageous, self-sacrificing people, setting examples for all of us.
> And one can stay in the conflict situation, playing a twisted game,
> profiting from it and harming colleagues close and far. People that are not
> willing to make any moral choice that implies personal sacrifice. That is
> not a victim, that is an accomplice, and I feel no empathy for those.
> >
> > You also wrote: "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." The JIF is global and requires global commitment to be changed, or
> commitment of a few players that are powerful enough. Funding grants and
> tenure track systems are mostly national and require internal changes. If
> there is a perceived personal economic benefit from the national system in
> place, it is highly unlikely that any internal change will happen. In the
> overall scenario, you should expect the JIF system crashing globally first
> and then China catching up with new policies. During the transition period,
> you should expect Chinese scientists to suffer the consequences of previous
> bad national decisions and of their own personal choices of not fighting
> the system when they could. Of course, you may still be on time "...to
> *first* change the way funding grants, tenure track systems...", as you
> suggested yourself.
> >
> > Good luck,
> > Carlos
> >
> > Carlos A. Martínez Muñoz
> > Zoological Museum, Biodiversity Unit
> > FI-20014 University of Turku
> > Finland
> > Myriatrix
> > ResearchGate profile
> > Myriapod Morphology and Evolution
> >
> >
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