[ecrea] Papers from ALAIC-ECREA joint Task Force panel @ IAMCR conference now online - on Academic Production Assessment:

The ALAIC-ECREA joint Task Force organised a panel at the IAMCR 
conference, on the topic of "Academic Production Assessment: 
Latin-American & European cross-fertilizations in Communication and 
Media Studies".

Two of the papers of this session are now available online.

The Special Conference Session was convened by Fernando Oliveira Paulino 
& Nico Carpentier, and took place on Monday 16 July 2012 (16:00-17:30). 
The participants were Bart Cammaerts (LSE, UK), Gabriel Kaplún (UDR, 
Uruguay), Aimée Vega Montiel (UNAM, Mexico) and Katrin Voltmer 
(University of Leeds, UK). Also a statement from César Bolaño 
(Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Brazil) was included.

The following papers are available for download:

1/Katrin Voltmer: "Is quality in the eye of the beholder? Objective and 
subjective factors in evaluating academic production"
Download here as [pdf]: 
http://www.ecrea.eu/index.php/archive/download/filename/paper_voltmer.pdf

2/Aimée Vega Montiel: "For the democracy of the systems of evaluating 
academic production: convergences of Latin-American & European scholars".
Download here as [pdf]: 
http://www.ecrea.eu/index.php/archive/download/filename/paper_aimeevegamontiel.pdf

See also here for the ECREA news item:
http://www.ecrea.eu/news/article/id/184

Special Session Abstract

The theoretical, methodological and empirical development of the field 
of Communication and Media Studies is characterized by a diversity which 
also has a spatial dimension. Although opportunities for global exchange 
exist, academic communities are situated in the local, the urban and the 
regional and function as imaginary communities, because of 
institutional, financial and linguistic reasons. This regional diversity 
is a significant asset to our field, but at the same time we should 
avoid counter-productive processes of intellectual isolationism or 
hierarchisation through the organization of creative dialogues and 
exchanges.

The contributions in the ALAIC-ECREA panel aim to contribute to an 
interregional dialogue, between Latin-America and Europe by emphasizing 
the regional specificity and contextual embeddedness of theories, 
methodologies and research traditions in Latin-America and Europe, 
critically comparing the strengths and weaknesses, the abundances and 
gaps, and then articulating these differences as opportunities for the 
intellectual enrichment of both academic communities.

This panel topic fosters discussion and interregional dialogues on the 
assessment systems in the communication and media studies field, such as 
the evaluation of the peer-review system in academic production, 
academic publishing and publication models and the validation and 
endorsement of intellectual work. The models and systems designed for 
measuring and assessing peer-review system in academic production 
obviously reflect a country's political conditions and technical and 
operational capacities, both current and potential. As evidenced by the 
Latin American experience of academic assessment thus far, international 
organisations can play a role in planning, critiquing or adjusting 
systems of measuring and assessing academic production.

The purposes of academic production assessments and its uses will be the 
topic of an extensive debate in the ALAIC-ECREA panel in Durban. The 
advantages of specific approaches, methodologies, and instruments, as 
well as the expected impact of assessments, will be discussed in order 
to see how effectively a consensus can be reached for a joint academic 
assessment statement between communication and media studies researchers 
in Latin America and Europe.

It will be especially helpful to discuss and clearly define - in line 
with each association's mission and vision - the preferred methodologies 
and coverage of the academic assessment. Evenly crucial is the very 
necessary alignment of these methodologies with the purpose and use of 
academic assessment system. If the data provided by the assessments are 
to be used to improve research, the instruments must reflect this.

Abstracts of the Presentations

The impact of academic assessment on publishing strategies
Bart Cammaerts

While assessment of academics in itself is a good thing, there is also 
collateral damage induced by the way this assessment is conducted and 
the way in which academic work is evaluated. The heavy emphasis on 
star-quality peer-reviewed publications puts enormous pressure on top 
journals and on individual academics to get 'into' these journals. While 
it is often stated that a piece of work will be judged on its merits 
rather than on where it has been published, senior academics at 
departmental, school and university level do not want to take the risk 
and rightfully or wrongfully insist on monitoring, managing and 
sometimes shaping the publication strategies of their staff. This is 
often a highly subtle process whereby academic staff also internalise 
the requirements to comply and feel compelled to take strategic 
decisions on where to publish what they write, maximising impact in 
bibliometric terms. In the long run this could have a detrimental effect 
on smaller specialised journals, edited collections as well as online 
journals, all deemed un-REF-able in UK-terms. This de facto devaluation 
of publications in such outlets during appointments, promotions and 
research assessments also perpetuates and strengthens the stranglehold a 
few large publishing companies have over academic publishing and over 
access to academic knowledge. Criteria such as global impact, which in 
itself is not wrong to aim for, does end up favouring publishers with 
global reach, as well as the long standing top journals, which in every 
field have all been bought up by publishing conglomerates and firmly 
behind the pay wall. It also pushes academics to constantly aim higher 
and carefully consider their publishing strategy in line with the 
particular demands of the research assessment, whatever these are 
perceived to be within every institution fueled by the ambitions it has.

Discipline and indiscipline in Latin American communication studies
Gabriel Kaplún

The different traditions that built the field of communication studies 
in Latin America not only proposed problems and suggested ways to 
address them, but also brought different ways of relating to the 
academic world and the traditions of other regions. A first generation 
of studies focused on the structures of media power-economic and 
discursive structures gave way to another generation with a greater 
emphasis on recipients, their cultures and subjectivities. On the other 
hand, the field became the site of professional studies geared toward 
for the exercise of professions, in a predominantly functionalist 
perspective. And finally research dealing with social practices, 
initially away from academia, focused on the search for alternative and 
counter-hegemonic communication practices. These four traditions more or 
less intensely talked among themselves, producing multiple crossings, 
conflicts and hybridizations. Some of them were from the outset an 
explicit link with European and American intellectual traditions. In 
others, this was less explicit but no less important. Some were born and 
maintained a greater disciplinary vocation within the scope of the 
academic world and under a scientific heading. Others are geared more to 
research social and political actors with transformative vocation, whose 
ways of doing research are considered acts of "indiscipline" in 
academia, by their dialogue with forms of knowledge not classified 
within the scientific field. To evaluate the academic production that 
comes from different intellectual proposals becomes a complex but 
necessary challenge, especially for a dialogue between European and 
Latin American intellectual traditions. Academic assessment is a complex 
topic namely when discussed in the context of accreditation or 
regulatory processes that have financial and legal implications, like 
it's the case of many in Europe. Besides the difficulty of agreeing on 
the instrument, scale and measures to be applied when we talk of such a 
broad field as media and communication studies, another important 
difficulty arouses if we bring into the debate the vocational and 
professional oriented training provided by many of the schools in this 
area, a fact that calls upon competences on the teachers side rarely 
considered by more traditional academic assessment procedures. In this 
talk we will try to present some of the main trends present in current 
European assessment procedures, namely in southern Europe, and see how 
they conflict or complement other more informal and sometimes efficient 
assessment approaches.

For the democracy of the systems of measuring academic production: 
convergences of Latin-American & European scholars
Aimée Vega Montiel
Download here as [pdf]: 
http://www.ecrea.eu/index.php/archive/download/filename/paper_aimeevegamontiel.pdf

The contribution of Latin-American scholars to Media and Communication 
Studies has been very significant in at least two 
theoretical/methodological fields: communication policies and cultural 
studies - with special emphasis on the convergence between communication 
and culture. However, the dialogue and exchange with scholars from the 
North are not usually in terms of equality but of hierarchy. Why? 
Southern scholars communities do not actively participate in the 
definition of the models and systems designed for measuring and 
assessing academic production. Southern scholars are subjected to the 
rules defined in other latitudes of the world - in latitudes where 
different social problems and different scientific conditions for 
research exist. The effects of this are evident in at least two 
scenarios: the construction of the object of study, i.e., theoretical 
and methodological definitions for research. The second is the influence 
on the research agenda: there are many problems in the southern regions 
that, not qualifying as a priority for organizations such as UNESCO, 
become invisible. In this logic - the logic of the market-, that tends 
to legitimate a few theories, methods and problems, competitiveness over 
cooperation tend to be the rule of our production and organization. For 
this reason, I firmly think IAMCR is the place where the convergence 
between Latin-American and European scholars can take the form of 
specific and practical actions to promote a more democratic field for 
researchers. Some of these proposals will be discussed in my presentation.

Is quality in the eye of the beholder? Objective and subjective factors 
in evaluating academic production
Katrin Voltmer
Download here as [pdf]: 
http://www.ecrea.eu/index.php/archive/download/filename/paper_voltmer.pdf

Recent years have seen increased efforts to measure and objectively 
evaluate the work of both individual academics and academic 
institutions. League tables of universities, impact factor scores of 
journals, publication profiles of scholars have become a key factor for 
the success or failure in an increasingly competitive market. For most 
of us evaluating the academic quality of academic outputs is part of our 
professional life as reviewers for journals, conferences, funding 
organisations etc. In this contribution I want to challenge the 
assumption that academic quality can be measured objectively. I argue 
that quality is a social construction that emerges from the discourses 
of scholars of the academic community. However, the academic community 
of a field, e.g. Communication and Media Studies, is itself fragmented 
and hence applies different criteria for evaluating the quality of 
academic production. Not only do different research paradigms - 
positivist, hermeneutic etc. - imply different quality criteria; 
national cultures have also developed specific ways of evaluating 
intellectual outputs. I conclude by suggesting a deliberative approach 
to academic evaluation that encourages dialogue between the evaluators. 
By addressing the reasons for consensus or disagreement deliberative 
assessment practices could help to overcome some of the weaknesses and 
failures of the existing 'objective' methods of academic evaluation.
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