A Researcher's Perspective: What do Researchers Need ? Challenges and Potential for Pure

1. A Researcher's Perspective:  What do Researchers Need? Challenges and Potential for Pure Thomas Ryberg |Professor mso | Aalborg University | Aalborg, Denmark ryberg@hum.aau.dk | @tryberg (twitter)

2. Agenda • A critique of PURE reasoning • Some web trends – sociale media & web 2.0 • How can PURE become a researcher’sfriend and ressource

3. Disclaimer • Not necessarily a representative researcher • From the humanities – but born into the publish-or-perish tradition (regime) • Interested in technology • Research into creative use of social media • Want ownership over systems • Do my own PURE registrations and like PURE (actually…) • My role today: Provoke, inspire, have a dialogue – any critique is well meant • Maybe I’m just a weirdo

4. But howaboutyou How manyareactive researchers? How many have been researchers? How manyareexperiencingresistance from researchers in terms of PURE? How manyare in contact and collaborate with researchers around PURE?

5. A critique of pure reasoning

6. PURE as public knowledge base • ”Research database is publicallyavailable og delivers knowledge and gains to localenterprises and research activities” • ”The database disseminatesAAUsreseach to society and the individualcitizen” • How PUREwasdescribedonce in AAU (and it was a genuine wish from ourlibrary)

7. PURE as control and surveillance of the employees • Extreme control and overview of individualresearcher’sproduction • Instrumentalisation and quanitification • Countingmachine – nowused for hiring/firing and distribution of moneyinternally • 6 points to becomeassociate professor – 75.000 DKK for a level 2 paper (localrules) – bonus for particularlyproductive researchers

8. Fear and insecurity Thomas lacks 2.5 points to attain this year’s minimum quota Efficiency to be increased by 145% to attain a professor mso 78% of the employees produce more than Thomas Thomas’ income (based on BFI) for AAU is lousy 15.000 DKK Thomas’ Publish-to-Perish-ratio is 0.25 (below 0.10 is perish)

9. AAU: Redundancies (firing) • ForskerForum 10. October: • ”Reason for firing people is that the deptdoesn’t generate enoughmoney, so there’s a deficit compared to number of staff. Managements criteria have been an assessment of the individualemployee’scompetenceprofilce and performance: Do you score publication points and grants? ” DJØF-union rep. Jesper Lindgaard Christensen. (my translation) • So….

10. This shouldbe ‘grants’ by the way…. Clip from PURE at AAU

11. General sentiment (not sayingthis is howthingsare…but howmanyfeeltheyare) "Paradoxically, the more that politics insists on the importance of the university, the more it actually drives the institution away from material realities and from democratic civil engagement... Management and control of knowledge has become more important than research, teaching or even thinking and living the good life together“ Thomas Docherty: "Universities at War“ Increased “professionalisation” of management (hugely increased salaries, less contact with research and researchers, more managers) Increased political control, micro-management, research assessments, growth in numbers of employees in the administrative layer etc.

12. That is not PURE’s fault? • No, but PURE and Elsevier important players in research policy as well • PURE is not neutral but the material basis for research assessment measures as Danish BFI and the like • Overview of the individual’s or departments ‘production’ – affects distribution of funding and therefor also research practice • More work has been put into PURE as a counting and administrative device than as a system benefitting and empowering researchers • This is the managements’ priorities – as always – focused on solving problems of the administration itself rather than supporting core services…(said somewhat polemically )

13. PURE 1.0 • Rules for PURE: • As researcher you need to spend time and enter correctly • It is important you enter a lot of data – less important whether the data are useful for you • Data can be used against you based on opaque criteria outside your own control • Only what the system and management deem relevant in relation to your researcher identity may appear in the system – you are a number and a number of publications • We take you data and we present them to you (or those we think it is relevant that you see) • Prototype of an administrative system 1.0 • What are the web trends

14. Web 2.0 and social mediA

15. Trends: • Personalisation and individualisations – yet inherently social • The individualised collective • From consumer to producer – increased ownership and control for the individual user • Crowdsourcing, collaboration, 2-way-communication • Personal networks and streams of information & activities

16. Web Organizing communicative processes Organizing resources Dialoging Networking and awareness-making Creating Sharing Text forums Chat Video phone Person-centred social networking sites Networked weblogs Micro-blogging Object-centred social networking sites Social bookmarking Weblogs Podcasts Wikis Application sharing services Web 2.0 typology – Dalsgaard & Sorensen Dalsgaard, C., & Sorenson, E. (2008). A Typology for Web 2.0. In Proceedings of ECEL 2008 (pp. 272–279). Presented at the ECEL 2008, Greece. But these happen across different levels of scale from individual to collective

17. Sociale konstellationer – nye arkitekturer for læring Picture taken from: (Andersson, 2008) http://terrya.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/networks-versus-groups-in-higher-education/ • Group • Wellknownmembers, strong ties, mutualdependency • Network • Looserconstellation of people, come-and-go • Collectives • Tag-clouds, Google Search Rank, aggregations of activities • Researcher in middle – creation of transparencybetween the levels

18. Challenge (the center does not hold) • ICT enables multiple interactions across levels of scale – and horisontally • New arenas for finding and contributing knowledge • Supporting people in making sense of the bits and pieces • But important to support the continuous traversing of scale

19. Creation of Personal Learning Network Individual in the center of self-generatedpersonalnetworks – connections to groups, networks and collectives Streams of information and activitiescome from the networkedcollective Content depends on the networkcomposition – whomareyouconnected to Facebook News-feed, Diigo, Twitter, Researchgate, Academia.edu

20. Delicious.com, Diigo.com or Mendeley Online representation of bookmarks / favourites Share, connect to and explore others’ bookmarks Easily monitor what your network bookmarks – or see what’s popular, or browse particular ‘tags’ Creating streams of potentially relevant material

21. Lifestreaming – microblogging - Twitter.com Microblogging tool - 140 chars tweets (status updates) Follow people – but not necessarily both ways – Lance Armstrong, Howard Rheingold etc. Create focused streams around hashtag (e.g. #openaccess #iranelection) Use: Keep updated through creation of professional network Focused streams for events #ThisorThatEvent?

22. PURE: is just a friend you haven’t met

23. Characteristics of social media • Ownership– own profile – strongpersonal or professional’presence’ • User as co-producer • Privatisation & collectivisation • Play, creativity– mix of formal and informal • From ’smaller’ communities to networks and collectives • Structure and connectionsarecreatedthroughaggregation of uncoordinated actions • Sharing of own and other’scontent (music, pictures, data-sets, papers, bookmarks, tweets) • Co-ownership in terms of relevance – collective as editor (folksonomi) • Veryindividual as well as collective • Social filtrering through a network (goodbookmarks, paperrecommendations, videoes) • Direct and automatedrecommendation from the collective

24. Challenges and potentials for PURE • The fundamental problem: • PURE a system decided top-down and fundamentallyadopted for surveillance and control …the veryanti-thesis to web 2.0 (sort of….) – but it has becomebetter • Increased attention to: • Researcher focus – what do researcher need and howcanyouempowerthem • How can PURE makelifeeasier (goodexistingexamples: publicationsconnected to projects, RSS-feeds on publications) • Autonomy, ownership, co-producer, opportunities for import/export • Visualisation of networks and relations, connecting to others • Handle streams of information and activities from othernetworks and collectives • (new) connectionsbetweenbetweenpeople and betweenpeople and content – recommendations, ’awareness’ of other’sactivies

25. Resarchgate.net & Academia.edu Competition to PURE and to institutionalrepositories at large – spurious business model (but so arepublishers business models) I don’tusethemveryactively – still I am logged in several times a week… Connections to other researchers – streams of information (papers, questions, potential connection) Satisfyingacademicvanity – mail-updates, statistics – So many have downloadet, read, interacted with your research or searched for you on Bing, Google etc. Problem – partial and somewhathaphazardnetwork (yet international) Heavilyfocused on the needs of researchers over those of the institution or the administration

26. PURE 2.0 I can connect to other researchers that I work with or I’d like to follow I have greater ownership of profile and the information on the page and I can export/import to e.g. linkedin or the liket I can integrate content from elsewhere (Slideshare, delicious, bibsonomy, Zotero, wordpress) – blog posts, tweet-stream I can ‘favorite’/’read later’ a colleagues paper, so I can maintain my own to-read list (which others can see) I can click tags/keywords and find similar papers – across institutions even I get a message when there are new papers within my area (I have created my own ifttt alert for PBL) I get suggestions for publications and persons I might find interesting Most importantly: I get the feeling that PURE is a system for me, and not that I am there for the system – a cog in the machine

27. Thank you!