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> * Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking. Unfortunately, that's just not practical. Science has become (always been?) so hyper-specialized that adequately judging impact of publications outside your speciality, let alone your field, has become very hard, unless it's a Huge Deal, in which case nobody would care to gather the board for the hire. (I'm talking about Computer Science, no idea about other fields.) Basically, you need to follow the current state-of-the-art to adequately judge the novelty, importance and merit of the paper. You might have a person from that field on the board, but that's unlikely -- departments usually try to diversify the range of research directions in their hiring decisions. But, suppose, you require the board to carefully review all the publications on their own merit anyway. Suppose that reviewing one paper thoroughly takes at least 4 hours --- more, if you don't know anything about the area. And, say, an average applicant has 20 papers. You need at least 80 hours to judge the merit of one candidate's publications. Considering that hiring committees consist of professors, who are often already overloaded with teaching, research and administration, it's simply unrealistic to require them to spend so much time on one candidate. Journal and conference rankings are helpful, because the ranking usually correlates with the quality of the peer review (though, recently, there have been some embarrassing examples to the contrary). So, the hiring committees can and do make use of rankings and citation counts as a proxy measure for the quality and merit of the candidates' publications. That might not be very thorough, but, at least, it scales. |
My biggest disagreement is with the "Therefore" implication, and allow me to illustrate why.
As a PhD student, I am also obligated to teach (T.A., mostly). The hiring process we mentioned completely ignores teaching skills, and at my uni there is very little negative feedback if you do a "modest but not very good" job.
Therefore, some PhD students actually do not think too hard about their teaching, and just reuse exercises that were given last year, so they can do other things (research). Not all PhD students do this, mind you, but it is clearly a good strategy if you want to get hired.
You can use the same argument you just made to say: "The students are overloaded (they are), therefore we should be okay with them doing a sloppy job when teaching." But is it something that you can actually agree with? In my opinion, we should come back from the other way: The teaching has to be good, so we have to give the students enough time to prepare and not overload them, so they do a good job at whatever we assign to them.
And this argument translates to the professors' case as well, at least for me. The hiring process has to be fair, and the research has to be free, so we should give enough incentive to the professors on the scientific board to spend enough time so they do a thorough job. Or maybe invent new ways of ranking, so that we do not depend on the closed-access journals of old. Either way, we should not give up open-access research just for this triviality.