unibomber

Satisfação dos clientes

CM — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 17:40:53 +0000

A obsessão pelos rankings

CM — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 02:18:48 +0000

Bruno Carapinha

Público, 2 de Janeiro de 2012

O ensino superior português assiste há uma década à redução contínua do financiamento público da dimensão ensino. Conjugar o aperto financeiro com as reformas dos últimos oito anos resulta na transformação do sector num mercado ferozmente competitivo de estudantes e formações. Por isso, as universidades reagem com estratégias de comunicação cada vez mais profissionais. Na esperança de recrutar uma maior parcela de candidatos, as instituições (as públicas e as privadas) usam os media para aumentar a sua visibilidade e credibilidade. Mas algumas das práticas deste marketing agressivo alimentam um jogo perigoso.

Uma táctica recorrente é a promoção dos rankings como instrumentos credíveis para aferir a qualidade de cursos e instituições. Não há mês sem notícias sobre rankings internacionais e universidades portuguesas e os seus líderes multiplicam declarações. Geralmente, divulgar resultados de uma universidade num ranking provoca outra notícia com a posição de uma concorrente noutro ranking completamente diferente, lançando um ruído insuportável no espaço público. Um mero jogo mediático de universidade contra universidade e ranking contra ranking, sem benefício para a informação do público, nem correspondência com a qualidade das instituições.

Confesso que me choca que gente inteligente com formação superior queira ver o seu trabalho avaliado por instrumentos simplistas e incongruentes, que comparam instituições incomparáveis e as listam numa hierarquia assente em critérios arbitrários, variáveis e questionáveis. Quando promovem os resultados de instituições num dado ano, estão a dizer ao público para tomar os rankings como informação fiável.

É preciso dizer que os rankings internacionais de instituições servem para se confirmarem a si mesmos.

1. Os rankings distorcem a visão sobre as universidades e impõem a realidade que descrevem. Vários investigadores denunciam as manipulações dos rankings, por exemplo, quando baseados em citações de artigos: prevalência de instituições anglo-saxónicas e benefício dos seus autores; clubes de citações de artigos (“eu cito-te a ti, tu citas-me a mim”); contratação de investigadores e prémios Nobel (mesmo que não leccionem lá) para inflacionar resultados, etc.

Um dos critérios centrais é a reputação internacional, que reforça a supremacia das organizações antigas e não reflecte a qualidade actual. Os académicos estrangeiros têm como referência as instituições com redes bem estabelecidas, mesmo que estas vivam uma dourada decadência.

Se os candidatos ao ensino superior, empregadores e financiadores de investigação tomarem estas listas como fiáveis, a descida na escala, mesmo que injustificada, pode alterar fluxos de pessoas e capitais. Uma apreciação limitada da realidade (porque a realidade é mais complexa do que a hierarquia do ranking) acaba por “criar realidade”. Não devido ao mérito, mas à reputação criada a uma universidade e aos investimentos que se seguem ou desaparecem.

2. Os rankings forçam a uniformização do conceito de qualidade e uma visão de hierarquia no sector. A selecção de indicadores para comparar realidades diferentes é perversa, se resulta numa lista ordenada. Um ranking pode valorizar a dimensão das universidades (número de docentes, de estudantes, do orçamento anual, de publicações), mas isso não se traduz em qualidade. Conhecemos casos de governos que alteraram o financiamento dos seus sistemas (destruindo a sua coesão e qualidade geral) e reitores demitidos pelos resultados negativos. E há instituições em reforma para se “moldarem” aos critérios dos rankings e aos seus conceitos de qualidade.

3. Os rankings são instáveis e com metodologias pouco sérias. As alterações de indicadores são frequentes (às vezes anuais), deturpando os resultados. A situação piora, se comparam instituições de missões, estatutos jurídicos, orçamentos, áreas de investigação e ensino totalmente diferentes. Isto produz oscilações súbitas na posição das universidades avaliadas e retira sentido à comparação com as congéneres.

Mas são as próprias universidades que alimentam o jogo da reputação, misturando desempenho nos indicadores dos rankings e qualidade real. Longe de se unirem na crítica a exercícios redutores, as instituições ou mantêm o silêncio (porque desceram na listagem) ou celebram os resultados (afirmando a sua suposta credibilidade). No ano seguinte, trocando de posição, trocarão de atitude, aceitando passivamente as regras que lhes impõem.

Os rankings estarão para as universidades como as agências de rating estão para os bancos e os Estados? No emergente “mercado de ensino superior” internacional, em que a visibilidade e a reputação é meio caminho para o sucesso, quem usa os rankings para se promover aceita o seu conceito arbitrário de qualidade. Nesta Europa da crise há propostas de articular o financiamento do sector e avaliações deste género. Quando ministros decidirem concentrar fundos públicos em apenas algumas instituições. Ou quando o sector for um mercado financiado por empréstimos bancários a estudantes que custeiem propinas bem mais altas, não se admirem se estes (ou outros) rankings (nacionais ou internacionais) ajudarem a criar o mesmo processo de bolha especulativa a que assistimos noutras áreas.

Sendo prático: que estão as universidades a fazer sobre o assunto?

Natal é sempre que dois investigadores quiserem

CM — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 05:40:02 +0000

In last week’s press, X
reviewed Y: One of the best
poets now writing.

In this week’s press, Y
reviews X: One of the best
poets writing now.

Peter Reading – Diplopic (1983)

Was ist das?

MR — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:21:16 +0000

Ora bem. Os alemães preparam-se para refundar a Universidade.

Entre os conceitos de “universidade mediocre porque é paga” e o de “universidade mediocre porque não é paga”, estão a optar pelo segundo.
Mas é difícil imaginar as autarquias portuguesas a subsidiar o ensino superior.

German Universities

Mediocre, but at least they’re free

One by one, German states are scrapping university tuition fees
Economist, Jun 30th 2011

BRITISH protesters who attacked Prince Charles’s car last December failed to stop a rise in university fees. Perhaps they should have taken off their clothes instead, as a group of art students in Hamburg did earlier this year. The city-state’s newly elected government, formed by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), will abolish tuition fees in 2012. Hamburg is one of several German states in which new, usually left-leaning governments are bringing back free university education. Of the seven states that introduced tuition fees after the constitutional court allowed them in 2005, just two—Lower Saxony and Bavaria—plan to continue. A half-hearted experiment is fizzling out.

This is an odd way for Germany to push its universities into the top tier. No German institution is among the leaders in global rankings, and money is part of the problem. The United States spends nearly twice as much per student as Germany does. Two-thirds of American universities’ revenues come from private sources, compared with just 15% in Germany. The federal government is pumping in money through programmes like the “excellence initiative”, which promotes mainly research at a few select universities. But it so far has done little to improve teaching, which is what students tend to care about. Meanwhile states are cutting basic financing, notes Margret Wintermantel, head of the German Rectors’ Conference.

At tertiary institutions the average professor handles 53 students, and that will rise. By shortening secondary-school study by a year, states have created a bulge of new entrants; the end of military conscription in July will add more. The extra government help universities are getting won’t be enough, says Mrs Wintermantel.

Universities embraced fees as a way to improve teaching conditions. The burden on students looks light. In most states they pay €500 ($720) per term—nothing like the mortgage-sized sums levied on American, and soon British, students. Fees produced €1.2 billion for German universities in 2008, a modest but useful sum compared with their total spending of €36 billion. They spend it predictably, on smaller classes, better-equipped laboratories, longer library hours and the like, usually in consultation with students.

This did not convince left-of-centre parties, which think education should be free from kindergarten to colloquium. Fees, they allege, deter potential students, especially from poor families. The money is often wasted, for example on billiard tables, barbecues and, in one case, defibrillators.

Such objections are mostly nonsense, says Ulrich Müller of CHE, a think-tank. Students can defer payments and states offer loans on easy terms. A study of western states by HIS, a state-run consultancy, found that school-leavers in states that charge tuition are no less likely to attend university than those in non-tuition states. Graduates’ extra earnings will pay for the fees many times over. Mr Müller argues that fees encourage students to think harder about what they want to study and universities to treat them with more respect. The misspending complaints are based on a few lurid press reports, he says.

To no avail. SPD-led North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, and rich Baden-Württemberg, now run by a Green-SPD coalition, plan to join Hamburg in abolishing tuition fees. All pledge to replace the lost revenue, but such promises have been broken before. Hamburg’s naked art students may rue their victory.

Diante da folha de cálculo em branco

CM — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 16:07:47 +0000

É tempo de reescrever o poema de João Cabral de Melo Neto:

Toda a manhã consumida

como um sol imóvel

diante da folha de cálculo em branco

(Os restantes versos são tão “ineficientes”

que podemos bem suprimi-los sem remorsos.)

The Wrong Way to Lower College Costs

Anthony Grafton and James Grossman

NYRBlog, 31-5-2011

UCSD Coaliton for Educational Justice

A poster for the national Day of Action to Defend Public Education on March 4, 2010

Want to know how to solve the problem of ever-increasing college costs? A lot of people have answers. One of the Very Serious People who can give you one is the economist Richard Vedder, professor at Ohio University, Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. In a recently issued report Vedder and two researchers use data provided by the University of Texas system, which includes nine universities, to argue that the state “could move towards making college more affordable by moderately increasing faculty emphasis on teaching”—and, more remarkably still, do so “without importantly reducing outside research funding or productivity.”

Vedder’s report is being publicized by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a “non-profit, non-partisan research institute” that seeks “to promote and defend liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise in Texas and the nation,” where the ubiquitous Vedder is a Senior Research Fellow. The Foundation has become known for the acerbic (and sometimes ill-informed) critiques of higher education in Texas put forth by one of its directors, Jeff Sandefer. But Vedder’s report is of more than local interest—as is clear from the discussions it hasprovoked across the blogosphere and beyond.

From coast to coast, great public universities are under attack as expensive luxuries that the nation can no longer afford to support. Governors and state legislators are withdrawing state funds from universities that they continue to regulate. Critics outside and inside the academy denounce professors for doing too much research, teaching too few students, receiving too much pay and offering unwelcome expertise on ideas ranging from climate change to the causes of the Civil War. Meanwhile tuition and other costs continue to rise, and promising students from poor families are reluctant to commit themselves to expensive institutions. In this climate of crisis, ideologues with simple, radical ideas about how to lower costs will attract an audience eager for a solution, especially one that does not include the words “taxes” or “public responsibility.”

Using data on the University of Texas at Austin from a spreadsheet that gives information on salaries and teaching responsibilities for the entire system, Vedder and his colleagues arrived at some striking conclusions. It turns out that just 20 percent of the faculty whose work they analyzed—some 840 out of 4,200—account for nearly 60 percent of the total number of “student credit hours” taught at the university. Student credit hours are calculated as the number of credits awarded for a course multiplied by the number of enrolled students; on average, each of these remarkably productive faculty members teaches 896 student credit hours and 318 students each year. Yet these engaged and effective teachers are also effective researchers—as Vedder argues by pointing out that they bring in 18 percent of the university’s outside income from government and foundation grants. By contrast, the bottom 20 percent carry only 5 percent of student credit hours and attract only 13 percent of the research grant funds.

To Vedder, these data immediately suggest a remedy for rising college costs: “If all faculty were as productive as the top 20 percent of faculty at teaching (that is, each faculty member taught, on average, 896 student credit hours), then the University would require a faculty only 34 percent its present size. This could potentially save up to $323 million in total loaded costs for faculty.” Even more modest changes, though, could result in substantial savings. If the whole faculty became 25 percent as productive as the top quintile, “the University could save roughly $77 million by consolidating its total faculty by releasing 852 faculty.” The remaining staff could handle all of the necessary teaching and continue to do research. Joy in the morning: “moderately increasing faculty emphasis on teaching” will save us by making mass layoffs possible.

At first sight, the analysis seems to hold water. But as soon as you begin to pull on the strands, it turns out to be fragile gossamer and falls apart. At the center stands an untenable assumption: faculty productivity can be measured by the number of students in the seats and by the amount of outside research funds generated. If this notion weren’t so dangerous it would be merely absurd. Is the university’s “product” the hours its students spend in class or the quantity and quality of student learning? Surely it is the latter. Big lectures can be amazingly effective tools for introducing material and spreading enthusiasm for a subject—but they can also be staggeringly soporific. Students often learn more in small classes, whether a group of forty all known to the instructor, or an intensive seminar of ten or fifteen.

It’s not just tweedy fuddy-duddies who believe that small classes are vital to the mission of the American university. Another recent study questions how much students are learning in American higher education. A substantial proportion of students—especially those in the large majors, such as business, education, and communication—show no measurable improvement in thinking or writing in their first two years of college. But those who study core liberal arts subjects with teachers whom they get to know—as students do in small liberal arts colleges, the bastions of small classes and faculty who would rank low on Professor Vedder’s productivity scale—actually do learn. Historically, the University of Texas has been notable for its ability to create rich liberal arts environments in the midst of a great public university. Its internationally renowned Classics program depends on relatively small upper level courses to maintain its quality, in part because of the language requirements for such instruction. Surely Professor Vedder values the teaching of the bedrock of Western Civilization, even if it is “inefficient.”

The university’s Arabic Flagship Program, one of five in the country designed “to create the next generation of global professionals,” offers “[s]tudent-centered classes, a high teacher-to-student ratio, and more contact hours than most other programs”—exactly what students need to become proficient in a foreign language and culture—and exactly the sort of teaching that would register as unproductive by Vedder’s measures. A measure of productivity that exalts class size over all other factors may work for some fields (who is teaching Macroeconomics this year?), but it’s useless for assessing the productivity of faculty in an intensive teaching program.

Equally questionable is the facile assumption—perhaps natural to an economist accustomed to the clarity of monetary calculations—that outside grants adequately measure research achievement. Few historians or other humanists—even the most productive scholars—bring their universities large sums of research money. Grants in these fields are usually made to individuals rather than to the institution, and they do not appear on spreadsheets. Prizes, given for completed work, often tell the observer far more about research quality than grants—given for work not yet done—can possibly do. But they don’t show up on spreadsheets either. And if they did, few of them would impress Professor Vedder. Scholarly societies award the princely sum of $1,000 to the best book in a given field. Even a Guggenheim Fellowship or a Pulitzer would be budget dust on a balance sheet in the sciences.

Even if the data Vedder et al. use are accurate—and some have found multiple flaws in them—they and the analysis they sustain are far too crude to tell us what happens in teaching at a single great university, or to serve as the basis for major decisions about educational policy. Everything about the university, from teaching loads to libraries, should be examined. Many practices should probably change. But three principles should stand: the quality of research is measured by the result, not by the amount of money spent to achieve it; what students learn is more important than the efficiency of the delivery of information; and one size will never, never fit all.

May 31, 2011 1 p.m.

Crónicas de uma morte anunciada

MR — Tue, 17 May 2011 12:47:55 +0000

Sejamos claros sobre a morte da Universidade: os sintomas já tinham sido identificados em 1970 (ver AQUI e nos links abaixo); agora, por consideração para com as gerações futuras, devemos esclarecer perante um caso de eutanásia, de um assassínio, ou pura e simplesmente de um suicídio.

E, entretanto, celebremos Edward Palmer Thompson, o solitário herói que se demitiu em protesto contra o processo de mercantilização académica.

Da nota biográfica de EP Thompson:

“…In protest against the “tailoring of Warwick University to the needs of industry” Thompson resigned his post in 1971.

Thompson spent the next few years as a roving ambassador for world peace. He also wrote a series of books including Whigs and Hunters (1975), The Poverty of Theory (1978), Writing by Candlelight (1980), Protest and Survive (1980), Customs in Common (1992), Witness Against the Beast (1994) and Making History: Writings on History and Culture (1994).

Edward Thompson died in 1993.”

Edward Palmer Thompson, The Business University (também AQUI)

Sharon R. Roseman, New Perspectives on the Business University

Sidnei Munhoz, Fragmentos de um possível diálogo com Edward Palmer Thompson

Da bordelização universitária

MR — Fri, 06 May 2011 12:16:12 +0000

Lower Education

Northwestern University, the school at which I taught for 30 years, has been visited by a delicious little scandal. A tenured professor, teaching a heavily attended undergraduate course on human sexuality, decided to bring in a woman, who, with the aid of what was euphemistically called “a sex toy” (uneuphemistically, it appears to have been an electric dildo), attempted to achieve a climax in the presence of the students. The professor alerted his students about this extraordinary show-and-tell session, and made clear that attendance was voluntary. The standard account has it that 120 or so of the 622 students enrolled in the course showed up. Questions about what they had witnessed, the professor punctiliously noted, would not be on the exam.

The professor, J. Michael Bailey, is a man with a reputation for specializing in the outré. (Northwestern ought perhaps to consider itself fortunate that he didn’t teach a course in Aztec history, or he might have offered a demonstration of human sacrifice.) The word got out about the demonstration he had arranged, journalists quickly got on the case, and Northwestern found itself hugely embarrassed, its officials concerned lest parents think it was offering, at roughly $45,000 a year, the educational equivalent of a stag party.

The president of Northwestern, a man named Morton Schapiro, issued what might be termed Standard Response #763; every contemporary university president has a thousand or so of these equivocal responses in the kit that comes with the job. This one read:

I have recently learned of the after-class activity associated with Prof. Michael Bailey’s Human Sexuality class, and I am troubled and disappointed by what occurred.

Although the incident took place in an after-class session that students were not required to attend and students were advised in advance, several times, of the explicit nature of the activity, I feel it represented extremely poor judgment on the part of our faculty member. I simply do not believe this was appropriate, necessary or in keeping with Northwestern University’s academic mission.

Northwestern faculty members engage in teaching and research on a wide variety of topics, some of them controversial. That is the nature of a university. However, in this instance, I have directed that we investigate fully the specifics of this incident, and also clarify what constitutes appropriate pedagogy, both in this instance and in the future.

Many members of the Northwestern community are disturbed by what took place on our campus. So am I.

I have never met President Schapiro, but I have begun to establish a relationship with him. This relationship may be compared to that of a tsetse fly with a white settler in the Congo. As an emeritus faculty member, I have decided, without waiting to be asked, to be a pest. When, for example, a month or so ago it was announced that Northwestern had selected Stephen Colbert for this year’s commencement speaker, I sent President Schapiro the following email:

I was a touch saddened, though not greatly surprised, to discover that you have chosen Stephen Colbert as this year’s commencement speaker. In this you follow the low tradition of choosing commencement speakers from television journalism, show business, and minor celebrity. I know Mr. Colbert is a Northwestern graduate, and I am sure he will prove, in the cant phrase, a fun speaker. But the choice of Stephen Colbert is pure public relations, and not in any way an educational choice. I’m not sure you will grasp this, but I thought it worth mentioning.

President Schapiro wrote back to assure me that he had grasped my meaning and also to predict that the graduating students would arise from Mr. Colbert’s talk “inspired.” I replied, “I’m sure that Stephen Colbert will be every bit as inspiring as Julia Louis-Dreyfus was three or four years ago or as Diane Sawyer will be next year,” and promised not to write to him soon again.

The current scandal over Professor Bailey’s sex demonstration caused me to break my promise. Rosinante to the road again, I mounted my computer and tapped out the following: “I have just read your statement on what we may now term the Michael Bailey Dildo Scandal. I would have liked it a bit better if you’d added a final sentence, which read: ‘And so I have decided to have Professor Bailey castrated, the schmuck deserves no less.’ . . . Isn’t the faculty lots of fun?” President Schapiro, who gets high marks for equanimity, wrote back: “Never a dull moment.” And not many enlightening ones, either, I thought to answer but did not.

Professor J. Michael Bailey has a sex lab at the university, which turns out to be not at all like Masters and Johnson’s lab, set up to do intricate physiological recording—“a blow-by-blow account of the clitoris in action,” as one of their critics once described it—but a room with a few computers in it. A somewhat softish-looking man, balding, he was recently photographed in open-necked shirt and jeans (leisure cut, to be sure). But then perhaps a sexologist ought not to be too elegant, or even comely. Mrs. Johnson, of Masters and Johnson sexological fame, looked like nothing so much as a prison matron, and Dr. Masters resembled a little the evil Dr. Sivana in the old Captain Marvel comics. One of the founding fathers of sex studies, Alfred Kinsey, a serious masochist who in his spare time went in for self-circumcision, after a hard day at the office measuring the intensity of male orgasms, used regularly to be seen in Bloomington, Indiana, watering his lawn in a bikini.

On his Northwestern home page, Professor Bailey provides a picture of himself in his high-school graduating class, when he wore his red hair shoulder-length. He lists his favorite albums—“I think you can tell a lot from someone by the kind of music they listen to,” he writes—the symphonies of Shostakovich or the Beethoven late quartets not among them. Divorced and the father of a son and daughter, he also offers a picture of his former wife, whom he describes as “a generally cool woman” and Dave, her new husband or boyfriend, it isn’t clear which, “who is equally cool.” Thanks, professor, for sharing.

Professor Bailey wrote a book called The Man Who Would Be Queen, which apparently argues that homosexuality is innate, not the result of nurture, and which caused some controversy among politically minded homosexuals. The section of his book on transgendering especially inflamed transgendered readers, arguing as it did against the standard view that men who wish to cross genders are really the victims of a biological mistake; Bailey’s view is that such men are instead motivated by erotic fantasies of themselves as females. The heat he took for this, mostly played out on the Internet, was hot and heavy.

The sex demonstration controversy is not the first to have visited Professor Bailey. Earlier a transgendered woman complained that she had had consensual sex with Bailey after discussions having to do with his research. Two transsexual professors on Northwestern’s faculty filed a claim that he, who is not a registered psychologist—where, one wonders, does one go to register?—inappropriately wrote letters evaluating whether candidates were ready for sex-reassignment (happy phrase) surgery. In another instance four women claimed he failed to alert them that he was using discussions with them about their sexuality for a book. In each case, Northwestern concluded that Professor Bailey either was being harassed or was operating within scientific guidelines or else chose not to press the matter. A man with a penchant for smashing taboos, Professor Bailey enjoys pushing the envelope, but, like many another radical academic, prefers not to pay the postage.

As for the most recent controversy, Professor Bailey’s first defense was to go on the offensive. “I think that these after-class events are quite valuable. Why? One reason is that I think it helps us understand sexual diversity.” (Ah, diversity, the leading buzzword of the contemporary university.) “Sticks and stones may break your bones,” he said, “but watching naked people on stage doing pleasurable things will never hurt you.”

“I regret upsetting so many people in this particular manner,” he said. “I apologize. . . . In the 18 years I have taught the course, nothing like the demonstration at issue has occurred, and I will allow nothing like it to happen again,” he said. Getting in a last shot, though, he added, “Thoughtful discussion of controversial topics is a cornerstone of learning.” And for Fox News he noted, “Earlier that day in my lecture I had talked about the attempts to silence sex research, and how this largely reflected sex negativity. . . . I did not wish, and I do not wish, to surrender to sex negativity and fear.”

“It’s science, pal,” Professor Bailey’s defense in effect is, “and I am a courageous scientist, out there on the edge, so shut up and pass the K-Y, and grab a handful of Viagra on your way out.” Bailey’s remarks are the social-scientific equivalent of the old avant-garde blackmail. Bailey would have us know that he is doing edgy science; and the implicit blackmail here is that if we are not with him out there on the edge then we are intellectual philistines, no better than those people who, more than a century ago, attempted to scratch the paint off French Impressionist paintings or broke chairs in anger at the first performance of Le Sacre du printemps. Disagree with Professor Bailey’s views, in other words, and you are rearguard, a back number, one of those “fools in old style hats and coats, / Who half the time were soppy stern / And half at one another’s throats.”

What is of interest here is the professor’s apparently genuine puzzlement that anything untoward was going on. Was there? Let us assume that human sexuality of the kind on display is a legitimate subject of social-scientific inquiry. The question is, why bring undergraduate students, who are neither scientists nor social scientists, in on the actual research itself? Might the justification be that watching an abnormal woman with the aid of an electrical device attempt orgasm before an audience of young strangers will make the students’ own sex lives better? Or was Professor Bailey merely running a sideshow on the wackiness of human nature? Pretty flimsy, in either case.

One wonders if Professor Bailey isn’t the heir all-too-apparent of decades of misunderstanding of the meaning of academic freedom. When did this understanding break down? The rough answer is: over many years, though it took its most drastic drop during the 1960s. Academic freedom is that unwritten body of assumptions and unspoken standard of ethics that has implicitly ruled university education from its earliest days. Without going into intricate detail on particulars, it is the freedom that scholars and scientists require if they are to pursue their studies and researches and their obligation to pass on their knowledge through teaching.

In earliest times, academic freedom’s greatest opponent was religion, which in the nineteenth century felt its tenets being violated by biblical criticism and by the findings of geology. (Darwin, fortunately, was not attached to a university, nor was the great geologist Charles Lyell, so neither required academic freedom for his researches.) Earlier in the American twentieth century, academics were often under fire for their political opinions and causes they supported outside the classroom. Academic freedom would support a university teacher who thought himself a socialist or pro-union, or held nearly any other view, no matter how far out of the mainstream, so long as he did not argue for it or otherwise inflict his views on students in the classroom.

Northwestern has long boasted a stellar instance of the protection afforded by academic freedom by having on its engineering faculty a man named Arthur R. Butz, the author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry. Butz is an unembarrassed, in fact a rather aggressive, Holocaust denier, but because he doesn’t express this view in the classroom, where, as a teacher of electrical engineering, he specializes in things called control system theory and digital signal processing, his job is safe. (In a world where side effects sometimes seem greater than central ones, Butz’s position on the Northwestern faculty may even be said to have been good for the Jews. Partly owing to him, wealthy Jewish patrons have installed a Holocaust studies chair at Northwestern, and other Jewish alumni have set up Jewish centers of study at the school. One can almost hear them muttering, above the scratching of the pen upon their checks, “I’ll show that S.O.B. Butz . . .”) Meanwhile Butz, through the sufferance of academic freedom, keeps his job, and rightly so.

Academic freedom, though, works two ways. While it protects university teachers from outside forces that would inhibit them, it also sets a standard of conduct on what doesn’t deserve to be protected by academic freedom. In “The Demand of the Academic Profession for Academic Freedom,” Edward Shils wrote about this subject with great force and subtlety. Along with much else, Shils notes that academic freedom might be rightly abrogated “from a genuine conviction that [a scholar’s or scientist’s] research is unacceptable according to strictly intellectual standards,” and that “academic freedom is primarily the freedom to do serious academic things without obstructions imposed with other intentions in mind.” Academic freedom, as Shils also notes, is a specialized right that is “hedged about by obligations and conditions.” Some of these have to do with academic behavior on the job, for not alone in dreams but in freedom begins responsibility.

When I began teaching at Northwestern in 1973, the smoke had not yet cleared from the student revolution. I recall at the time hearing gossip about a teacher who was sleeping with one of his students, and when I checked with a friend on the faculty, he confirmed that it was likely true. “Do many younger professors sleep with their undergraduate students?” I asked this same friend. “I don’t know many who don’t” was his rather casual reply.

Does sleeping with one’s undergraduate students come under the shield of academic freedom, or was it instead an academic perk, or ought it, again, to be admonished, if not punished by dismissal? Although a youngish bachelor at the time, I eschewed the practice myself, chiefly because I thought sleeping with one’s students was poor sportsmanship—fish in a barrel and all that—and my own taste happened to run to grown-up women; I also thought it was, not to put too fine or stuffy a point on it, flat-out wrong. I wondered, too, if in its taking unfair advantage—a teacher after all has the power of awarding grades to students—it wasn’t an obvious violation of academic freedom, and not merely crummy.

Someone wishing to argue the other way might say that, by the end of the 1960s in America, there were not all that many college girls who could any longer be considered innocent. In these sexual transactions, they might go on to argue, it wasn’t always clear who was seducing whom. That such an argument can be made shows how the culture impinges upon the university. In an earlier age, the university preferred to think itself as outside of, and if truth be told superior to, the general culture of the society in which it functioned.

For many people today, the more the culture impinges upon the university the better. From the 1960s and perhaps well before, they longed for the university to reflect the culture by being more open, democratic, multicultural, with-it, relevant. These people have seen their longings come to pass. Pursuing the old ideal of the university existing in splendid isolation, a place for the cultivation of the mind, where scholarship is garnered in tranquility and important scientific research done without the pressures of commerce or government—this ideal, the ideal of Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold, is no longer available. “There are no culture wars,” Irving Kristol is reported to have said. “They’re over. We lost.” In those wars, the fall of the university was equivalent to the battle of Aegospotami in the Peloponnesian War: After it, Athens, and American culture, was never the same.

One of the most important things that departed from higher education with the old ideal of the university was intellectual authority. One of the first changes I noticed from my own undergraduate education when I began teaching at Northwestern—and this is certainly not true of Northwestern alone—was all the junky subject matter being taught. Courses in science fiction, in the movies, in contemporary or near contemporary writers already consigned to the third class, along with many courses that sounded more like magazine articles in quite boring magazines. At an earlier time, a powerful department chairman might have put the kibosh on the notion of courses on the Beat Generation or on secondary women writers or on soap opera as drama or on graphic novels or on videogames for the good reason that such things were insufficiently serious. Not any more. No powerful department chairmen any longer existed—democratic departmental procedures had done them in—nor is there anything like a rough general consensus in the contemporary university about what is serious in the realm of culture and ideas. Who is to say that the films of Steven Spielberg are less important than the plays of Shakespeare, or for that matter that Shakespeare himself wasn’t gay and a running dog of capitalism into the bargain?

Nor are there any figures higher up the academic ladder who can be counted upon to call a halt to the nonsense. No provost such as Jacques Barzun at Columbia, no university president such as Robert Hutchins at Chicago, now exists. If one is hard-pressed to name a single university president today, it is chiefly because none has much to do with actual education. The last major university president to concern himself with the educational content of his school—with appointments and with what was actually being taught—was John Silber of Boston University, and his efforts were far from appreciated by a large portion of his faculty. The contemporary university president’s main tasks now, as everyone knows, are to siphon off money from the rich and put out little fires with wet public-relations blankets.

Higher education used to be an elite endeavor. The acquisition, in Matthew Arnold’s formulation, of “the best which has been thought and said” was what it was supposed to be about. But one has to have the authority to know what really is best, and confidence in the belief that acquiring it is decisive. This, somehow, was lost. And once it was, great subjects in the university curriculum were increasingly replaced by hot ones; just as often, traditional subjects were corrupted by politics in ways that constituted a frontal assault on academic freedom, though not many people in the university seemed either to notice or much to mind.

Not long after I began teaching at Northwestern there arrived in the English department in which I taught a woman teacher committed, in a full-time and lifelong way, to a personal radical political program. She taught literature on strictly Marxist lines and organized a student political group to which she openly recruited students, inviting them to her home for May Day dinners and carefully cultivating them in other ways. (Some of these students appeared in my classes, and a glum and predictably dogmatic lot they were.) Everybody knew about this, but no one said a word in protest of a teacher proselytizing students for her own political causes. Did they so misconstrue academic freedom, I used to wonder, that they thought telling her to knock it off would interfere with her rights, or were they worried that doing so would seem bad manners?

Things went along in this way for a few years, when the teacher, with her student acolytes, organized a shout down of a Nicaraguan contra speaker visiting the campus. One of her students threw a red liquid—animal blood? nobody knew for certain—at the man. Afterwards, she told a reporter from the Chicago Tribunethat the speaker had no right to be on campus; that, in fact, he deserved to die. When asked about the freedom of speech, she said that it didn’t extend to such a man.

Because of the publicity this response evoked, a faculty committee was formed to investigate the incident and censured her behavior. The censure carried no penalty; quite the reverse, it made her a heroine of sorts on the campus. Eighty-five faculty members, chiefly from the humanities and social sciences, signed a petition protesting the censure. Later she was recommended for tenure by the English department and by a faculty panel and the arts and sciences dean—tenure that was denied only at the very end because the then-provost of the university, an old-fashioned liberal named Ray Mack, said he could not grant tenure to anyone who was on record not believing in free speech in a university. She departed Northwestern for that Valhalla for sixties radical teachers, Rutgers University at Newark, where she remains today.

That so many of the faculty at Northwestern had no qualms about her proselytizing students is noteworthy. But then there is always faculty ready to back up the most egregious behavior of colleagues. In the case of J. Michael Bailey, the Chronicle of Higher Education chimed in with an article by an assistant professor of sociology at Middlebury College named Laurie Essig, who finds the Northwestern sex scandal, as we now say, a great teachable moment. Professor Essig is of the view that shaking things up, attacking the status quo, is of the very essence of education, what the whole enterprise is really about.

“Clearly,” Essig writes, “this ‘live sex act’ triggered a national conversation about what we can and cannot look at.” She goes on to ask “what is it about the fact that there were people there on the stage that makes it different than a film with a sex scene or a book with a sex scene? . . . Why are we so damn uncomfortable with sex that is not mediated by film or text that ABC, CNN, and all the rest of the media outlets can’t stop talking about it?” Essig even wonders if “the live sex act had occurred between a straight, vanilla, normatively gendered and married couple, would we have cared as much?” She concludes: “These all seem like important questions and questions that can be asked because a professor allowed something to happen in his classroom and triggered a national debate about the dangers of sex and education getting into bed together.”

Professor Essig joins Professor Bailey as one of the university’s shock troops. A student I talked with, who had earlier taken Bailey’s human sexuality course and who did not otherwise speak harshly of him, noted that he seemed more than normally pleased to shock his audience of students. Does Professor Bailey, one has to wonder, thrill to his own acts of épater les bourgeois? Does he, so to say, get off in his combined role as Pied Piper, Krafft-Ebing, and the Diaghilev of the kinky?

Because of the great ruckus that his sex demonstration caused, Professor Bailey later allowed that, if he had to make the decision to stage the sex demonstration again, he probably wouldn’t do it. But then he remarked: “Those who believe that there was, in fact, a serious problem have had considerable opportunity to explain why: in the numerous media stories on the controversy, or in their various correspondences with me. But they have failed to do so. Saying that the demonstration ‘crossed the line,’ ‘went too far,’ ‘was inappropriate,’ or ‘was troubling’ conveys disapproval but does not illuminate reasoning.”

Allow here a small attempt at illumination. Because a subject exists in the world doesn’t mean that universities have to take it up, no matter how edgy it may seem. Let books be written about it, let research be done upon it, if the money to support it can be found, but the nature and quality and even the sociology of sexual conduct—all material available elsewhere in more than plentitude for the truly interested—does not cry out for classroom study. Students don’t need universities to learn about varying tastes in sex, or about the mechanics of human sexuality. They don’t need it because, first, epistemologically, human sexuality isn’t a body of knowledge upon which there is sufficient agreement to constitute reliable conclusions, for nearly everything on the subject is still in the flux of theorizing and speculation; and because, second, given the nature of the subject, it tends to be, as the Bailey case shows, exploitative, coarsening, demeaning, and squalid.

Difficult to understand how an expert in the field such as Professor Bailey missed the obvious analogy, but in the demonstration he arranged for his students the poor woman is little better than a prostitute, the students pathetic johns-voyeurs, and he himself, quite simply, the pimp. A curious role for a university teacher to play, but I guess it’s a living.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Andamos todos a brincar a quê?

MR — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 05:04:38 +0000

Claro que a qualidade de um texto académico é quase impossível de avaliar. Sobretudo porque os peers são tão mediocres como nós.

Publish and perish: why the current publication and review model is killing research and wasting your money In:

Casati, Fausto Giunchiglia, Maurizio Marchese

Note: this is preliminary work (version 1.0, or rather 0.9). We release it anyway according to the concepts proposed in this document. The research world, and specifically the academic world, is centered around the notion of publication as the basic mean to disseminate results, foster interaction among communities, and achieve international recognition (and career advancement). Publications are done in conferences or journals, and are usually reviewed by a committee of experts, also referred as “peers.” Typically, each paper is reviewed by 3 or 4 reviewers. The “best” papers among all the submitted ones are then accepted for publication in the journal or in the conference proceedings. In the computer science area, people typically publishes a dozen paper per year, and submit a little more than that (not all papers are accepted the first time around). Acceptance rates for conferences are often around 20% or lower . There are three drivers behind this model:

1. Disseminate ideas and make them visible. Through publication and review, papers are made known to colleagues, and the review process is supposed to ensure that the best papers are more visible, so that researchers know where to go (good journals and conferences) if they want to read literature on certain topics. Publications also have legal implications as they “timestamp” work and ideas.

2. Get credit, recognition. Having papers accepted at prestigious conferences and journals is a way to prove (in theory) that the work is valuable. This in turn is a major criterion to determine career advancement.

3. Meeting and networking. Publications and conference participation leads to exchange of ideas with colleagues, and to networking. Conferences are also very useful for students to come and learn how the research community operates. Highly Inefficient Publishing Process. This model is incredibly inefficient under every perspective, and results in a colossal waste of public funding, and forces researchers worldwide to waste countless hours that could be devoted to better research (or to have fun with family and friends). It is a system deeply rooted in the past, oblivious to the advent of the Web and related new forms of communication, information sharing, social networking and reputation. Here are some problems with the current state of affairs:

Too much time is spent writing papers rather than developing research. Dissemination of results is important, and writing problem statements and results in a clear manner is also important. It is in integral part of the research work. This being said, one thing is to write papers with the purpose of making results available, and another is struggle to package and “sell” the work to try to get the highest number of papers published in the best conferences (or, in those conferences that guarantee career advancement in a certain institution). The latter is a huge effort and often results in papers that are incremental work with respect to previous research by the same authors. The reviewing process kills good papers and is inherently flawed. In general, reviewing a paper is not easy, and it is rarely done properly. There are many problems with the peer review process today:

1. Judging the impact of a paper is very hard, in general. Even smart people and great researcher have a hard time assessing whether a topic is interesting and relevant and likely to have an impact. See the reviews of the famous papers by Dijkstra on Goto statements, of the paper by Codd on the relational model, and many others [Santini, 2005].

2. Sometimes good papers are cut because of bad reviews. It is not unheard of to have a paper rejected by a conference and win the best paper award at the next one. The main reason is that only one bad review is often enough to kill a paper. Reviews are often inconsistent, sometimes an author gets reviews criticizing the paper and saying opposite things.

3. There are reviewers who are generally more negative and some that are more positive. So it is often a matter of luck to a certain extent whether your paper gets accepted. Clearly good papers eventually go through, but sometimes late and after a lot of reworks.

4. Reviewing takes time, and is not necessarily time that results in better papers. Reviewers, especially scrupulous ones, spend a lot of time in doing reviews, and authors spend a lot of time adapting and tuning the paper not so much for the sake of making the best possible explanation, but to please reviewers and the conference style. While improving papers following comments is a good thing, very often one has to fight with meaningless or contrasting comments as well as space limitations that make the whole work cumbersome. Furthermore, sometimes there are certain styles of writing papers that is better accepted by reviewers, or that reviewers feel particularly bad in rejecting.

5. A common effect of this review process is that many conferences tend to accept very detailed papers resulting from very detailed studies, rather than more innovative and creative papers.

Limited dissemination. The entire review process itself limits dissemination (unless people post the papers on the web, which is a different kind of “publication”, and likely a more appropriate one): reviewing introduces delays and if the paper is rejected then 6 more months will pass till the work has the chance to be published. Moreover, and very curiously indeed, research sponsored with public money is given to private publishing companies that profit from it and that sell papers.

Furthermore, although it is nice to have papers in front when hearing presentations, printed proceedings by institutions tend to increase the cost of conferences. Furthermore, the current publication model, and even the notion of “publication”, are rooted in the past. If academic research was born after the Web, we would not even be talking about publications as they are today. With a printed paper model, typical of journals, one needs to have the notion of publication, which happens periodically. If the authors do some extra work or have new findings, they need to write another paper, they cannot update or extend the current one. If people want to comment or discuss on the paper, they need to do this via email and via private discussions with the authors. Of course there is the issue of how to evaluate and give credits to people, but that is a separate matter. With the Web, this is not the case, and there is no reason for the “publication” model to go on unchanged.

Failures of the past. Despite these very significant shortcomings, the research community has been unable to come up with a better model. This is certainly also because the problem is hard in itself, but we suspect a significant reason is that people respected in the community are successful in the current system, and hence are not very interested in changing it. Besides, people are always so busy writing papers that it is hard to take a break and think about creating and pushing for a better system.

This does not mean to say that no attempts have been made or that the problem has not been studied. Over the last decades, there have been a few attempts to experiment with different models as well as to study in a scientific way the effectiveness of the current approach to paper evaluation and publication.

In terms of conference models, variations include:

Peer-review with rebuttal (e.g., ICSOC’05) or double blind review (e.g., Sigmod): unlike traditional conference review models where authors cannot reply, some conferences are experimenting today with rebuttal, where authors have a few days to reply, in a few lines, to the reviewers to correct errors in the review. In theory, this is used as input in the discussion among PC members. In practice, rebuttal rarely leads to reviewers changing their minds, but it affects PC chairs when making decisions and, most importantly, leads to better reviews in the first place. Double blind reviews occurs when reviewers do not know the name of authors. There is contradicting research on whether double blind improves the fairness of the selection process.

Community review (e.g., eclipseCon 2006): the community can vote on papers or on abstracts. There is no restricted program committee, the community decides what they want to be presented. This approach had very little success, for reasons yet to be fully studied and understood.

Open (e.g., INFORMS): There is little to no selection, everybody can go to present. Participants can read abstract and exercise their own judgment with respect to what presentation they will listen to.

Open conferences do not assign credit to the papers, though they are great for dissemination and networking.

By invitation (e.g. in physics): the conference organizers invite people to come and give presentations. This appears to be good as it is a freeform way for the community to select top researchers to come to conferences. However it is not clear how to distinguish good conferences/meeting from average ones and at times, if people are not serious, it may be more based on friendships rather than scientific merit.

Journals also experimented with alternative models. The most significant one is ETAI, where papers are first put online and then reviewed, with comments openly posted on the pages (open reviewing) before a review process begin. For reasons that are still unclear, but probably related to the fact that people were posting comments in the open, this approach did not succeed and ETAI stopped publishing in 2002.

In terms of research on this topic, a few papers have been published on various aspects of the reviewing process, sometimes with contradicting results (see e.g., papers on double blind reviewing or repeatability of the review process [Tung, 2006; Madden, 2006; Fisher, 1994; Rothwell, 2000]. The conclusions are sometimes contradictory. There are no indications on which review process and model works best and no clear evaluation of benefits and shortcomings of each, so that program chairs and journal editors are still left in the dark and, in the absence of a clearly stated “better way”, proceed with the status quo. This is often the approach that generates the least discussions: even if most people want a different model, they disagree on which one, so in the end it is sometimes just “easier” to keep going with the same old approach. However a large-scale study is still missing, and contributions mostly focus on small samples of reviews.

Thoughts towards new models extreme writing and paper as software. We are in the initial stages of an investigation on innovative publication and review model. Our exploratory direction will be initially based on two main ideas:

Separate the dissemination, evaluation/recognition, and retrieval aspects: today, with a publication, researchers achieve all of them. A publication disseminates the work, causes recognition for the authors (the peer evaluation recognizes it as quality work), and makes the paper “visible” in that people can look on papers published in “good” conferences or journals if they want to find “good” work in a certain area. However, there is no reason for these three aspects to be tied now that dissemination is not necessarily related to the physical, paper printing of the scientific contribution in a journal.

Extreme writing and papers as software: we can make a parallel between paper writing and software development. In software, the code is developed and then improved. New functionality is added with time, and the artifact is released and then improved. In extreme programming approaches [Beck, 1999], the code is also “evaluated” quickly in the process, rather than waiting till development is complete. Taking into account differences that do exist, one can borrow ideas from software development and try to apply them to writing. In software development, we do not change the name of a class each time we make a change to a function. We just release a new version of the class. Once a certain amount of functionality is developed, then the code is released for “testing”. Similarly, with scientific papers, an approach that seems sensible is to publish versions of the paper when the work is sufficiently mature and clear so that somebody can read and gain insights from it, and then improve it. More importantly, minor changes (delta contributions) should not result in yet another paper (class) and yet another set of peer reviews as it is always the case today, but in variations or extensions to (versioning of) an existing work.

Of course the development of a large program is a cooperative effort, while researchers compete more than cooperate, so this has to be taken into account. One sometimes does not want to release initial ideas for fear that they are copied, but usually this does not happen and whoever posts a version of a work has a significant lead on others. Besides, early posting, coupled with a secure and community trusted timestamp mechanism, gives people the right to claim that they have been the “first” to a certain discovery. Furthermore, the researchers keep the control on when they want to release the new version of a paper. Needless to say, early releases contribute to science more than late releases.

Other interesting analogies are with web search and open source software development.

Open source development can provide interesting insights for the way people cooperate to provide feedback and improve the development. Again this is challenged by the fact that researchers are not very cooperative while open source development is often led by enthusiast that really use the results of what they develop. Still, it is a very effective way to improve and extend an artifact and it would be interesting to see what can be “reused” for paper evaluation and even improvement. Web search gives an almost instantaneous way to identify significant documents. One wonders how much of this can be applied to evaluate posted versions of papers. Today’s approaches use page rank to rate documents [Brin, 1998] and citation/impact factors to evaluate papers (research document). The problem here is how much of these can be leveraged to either “automatically” evaluate papers, or at least to assist reviewers or perform a preliminary screening.

Preliminary work on this topic is starting to appear. Chen et al [Chen, 2007] studied alternative metrics of paper quality and impact. They have applied a variant of the PageRank algorithm [Rodriguez, 2006; Ball, 2006] to assess the relative importance of all publications in the Physical Review family of journals from 1893-2003. PageRank number and the number of citations for each publication are in fact positively correlated. Furthermore, outliers from this linear relation identify other exceptional papers or “gems” that are not easily found with traditional citation/impact factors. The reasoning behind this approach is that the situation in citation networks is not that dissimilar from that in WWW links: scientists commonly discover relevant publications by simply following chains of citation links from other papers. Thus it is reasonable to assume that the popularity or “citability” of papers may be well approximated by the random surfer model that underlies the PageRank algorithm. One meaningful difference between the WWW and citation networks is that citation links cannot be updated after publication, while WWW hyperlinks keep evolving together with the webpage containing them. Another limitation of citations is that in the current publication models they cannot be used directly for evaluation in the extreme writing model as they assume that a paper is published, visible, and with an “identifier” (published in a journal/conference or at least as a technical report), because before the paper has a high citation count it has to be above the noise level among all documents, and because this is a slow process (you need for many referring papers to be released before you can assess the quality of a paper).

Pre-print repositories, such as e-Prints and academic digital libraries and academic web search services, like CiteSeer.IST , Google Scholar and Windows Academic Live , have also seen a significant increase in use over the past years across multiple research domains. Furthermore, emerging standard, like the DOI� (Digital Object Identifier) are appearing and acquiring momentum to provide a system for persistent and actionable identification and interoperable exchange of managed information on digital networks. On this basis, researchers are beginning to develop applications capable of using these repositories to assist the scientific community above and beyond the pure dissemination of information. In [Rodriguez, 2006] a deconstructed publication model is presented in which the peer-review process is mediated by an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) peer-review service. This peer-review service uses a social-network algorithm to determine potential reviewers for a submitted manuscript and for weighting the influence of each participating reviewer’s evaluations.

In summary, it seems that the road towards an alternative review and publication model has received so far too little attention. There are spot studies on small numbers of cases and a few proposals that quickly lost appeal or that for reasons not entirely clear failed to stick. There is also evidence that the traditional process has flaws and that the famous “publish or perish” approach is a waste of time and money. Online communities have found many alternative ways to solve analogous problems, but these solutions have failed to reach the world of academia, or at least to be transformed in a way that could be applicable with success. With this paper we hope to raise awareness and stimulate researchers to join our currently ongoing search for a better approach to publication and review. We also hope to post soon, on this same forum, a contribution that presents the results of our efforts.

References

[Blog, 2005 ] Academia’s Conflicted Reaction To Blogging. 2005 http://acrlblog.org/2005/11/28/academias-conflicted-reaction-to-blogging/

[Beck, 1999] K. Beck. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. Addison-Wesley Professional, Reading. 1999.

[Chen, 2007] P. Chen, H. Xie, S. Maslov, and S. Redner. Finding scientific gems with Google. Journal of Informetrics, to appear (2007); (http://physics.bu.edu/~redner/pubs/ps/google.ps).

[Brin, 1998] S. Brin and L. Page. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30, 107 (1998).

[Ball, 2006] Philip Ball. Prestige is factored into journal ratings, Nature 439, 770- 771 (2006).

[Fisher, 1994] Martin Fisher, MD; Stanford B. Friedman, MD; Barbara Strauss. The Effects of Blinding on Acceptance of Research Papers by Peer Review. JAMA. 1994. http://www.ama-assn.org/public/peer/7_13_94/pv3058x.htm

[Madden, 2006] Madden and DeWitt. Impact of Double-Blind Reviewing on SIGMOD Publication Rates. Sigmod Record, Sept 2006.

[Rodriguez, 2006] Marko A. Rodriguez, Johan Bollen, Herbert Van de Sompel. The convergence of digital libraries and the peer-review process. Journal of Information Science, Vol. 32, No. 2, 149-159 (2006)

[Rothwell, 2000] P. Rothwell and C. Martyn. Reproducibility of peer review in clinical neuroscience. Brain, Vol. 123, No. 9, 1964-1969, Sept. 2000 http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/123/9/1964

[Santini, 2005] Simone Santini. We are sorry to inform you� IEEE Computer, 38(12). Dec 2005.

[Tung, 2006] A. Tung. Impact of Double Blind Reviewing on SIGMOD Publication: A More Detail Analysis. 2006. http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~atung/

AUTHOR BIOS

Fabio Casati.

Professor of Computer Science at the University of Trento. Fabio got his PhD from Politecnico di Milano in 1999. After that, he joined HP Labs, Palo Alto (1999-2006) and the University of Trento (2006-). He has been working in the fields of of workflows, web services, data warehousing, and business process intelligence. He is member of the editorial board of ACM TWEB and in the steering committee of the ICSOC and BPM conferences. Fabio has acted as program chair, industrial chair, or in other officer positions in many conferences including ICDE, ICSOC, BPM, ICWE, and CEC/EEE. More details at the URL: http://www.dit.unitn.it/~casati

Fausto Giunchiglia.

Professor of Computer Science at the University of Trento, ECCAI Fellow. He has done research in various related areas including knowledge management, reasoning with context and formal methods. He has been program or conference chair various events, including: IJCAI 2005, Context 2003, AOSE 2002, Coopis 2001, KR&R 2000. He has been editor or editorial board member of around ten journals, including: Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, Journal of applied non Classical Logics, Journal of Software Tools for Technology Transfer, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He has been Member of the ECCAI Fellows Selection Committee, of the IJCAI Board of Trustees member (01-11), President of IJCAI (05-07), President of KR, Inc. (02-04), Advisory Board member of KR, Inc., Steering Committee member of the CONTEXT conference. More details at the URL: http://www.dit.unitn.it/~fausto Maurizio Marchese. Maurizio Marchese graduated with full honor in Physics in 1984 at the University of Trento, Italy. He has been Visiting Researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Material Research Laboratory, University of Urbana-Champaign, USA; Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Computer Applications, University of Stuttgart, Germany. He is currently Assistant professor at the Department of Information and Communication technologies at the University of Trento, Italy. Current research interests are: architectures for web services, distributed architectures for digital libraries, service integration in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) environments. He has published more than 60 papers in international journals and conferences. Dr. Marchese is a member of IEEE the Computer Society and ACM.