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Should ALL academics be required to publish? opinion
As competition to attract the attention of prospective students intensifies, the higher education sector finds itself grappling with the question: Should every academic be required to publish research?
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There are at least two points that can be made in relations to this article. First, if the “double blind peer review” system is as good as the authors state it to be (and there are many who would have significant reasons for disbelieving this) then the submission of papers into the system from the non-university sector academics should not bias or overwhelm the system. Good articles will be published from wherever they come. Second, if the non-university tertiary education system is to attract high quality staff, experienced, intelligent, future oriented and “agile”, then it needs to be able to attract staff who will be prepared to move into and out of the binary systems, moving into non-universities and back into the public sphere. And the currency to enable that movement is the publication record of the staff member, in addition to any high student evaluations and learning metrics that she may have been able to accrue along the path. To publish is a sign of being able to contribute to knowledge, not merely act as a conduit for the contributions of others.
In many fields, science and medicine in particular, the majority of publications have multiple authors, so the statement “that adds up to five million academics competing for 1.5 million articles every year” is clearly not accurate.