Archive for September, 2011

Executive Compensation

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

The Center for Social Philanthropy has released a report on the most highly paid employees at Massachusetts’s private universities. As the figure shows, issue-brief-exec-comp-201109the average of the 8 top earners at Harvard far outpaced all other universities.

The Harvard numbers, however, include salary for the investors who manage the endowment. Removing those outliers, Harvard comes closer to BU as the institution with the highest average top earners.

The report points out that the outsized earnings came at the same time as the height of the financial crisis. At BU, the highest paid employees earn more than 17 times what the average faculty member earns.

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Working Mothers

Monday, September 19th, 2011

The magazine Working Mother released its list of the 100 best employers. Although for-profit companies dominated the top rankings, three academic medical centers rated highly. University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, Virginia Commonwealth University Health System, and Yale-New Haven Hospital have made family-friendly policies a priority.

Magazine editors looked for several programs that support working mothers:

  • Flex coupons that allow workers to take paid time off in increments
  • The ability to shift start and stop times
  • Compressed workweeks
  • Job sharing
  • On- and off-ramp programs
  • Options for employees to speed or slow their advancement without penalty

Some of the hospitals' innovations include:

  • subsidized care for elderly relatives
  • on-site daycare
  • benefits for adopting children
  • college counseling for children of employees
  • legal and financial seminars

It's telling that financial services companies figure highly on the list. Their commitment to flexible work policies should be a model for academic institutions keen on retaining faculty.

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Peer Review for Trainees

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

In one week in 2010, educators nominated the best articles about rethinking higher education. Organizers as the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University compiled the submissions into an e-book called Hacking the Academy.

One of the provocative ideas there for shaking up traditional academia is from Cathy Davidson, former Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke. She describes an experiment in "crowdsourcing" student grades. Rather than the faculty member alone evaluate student performance, she had fellow class members determine if a student's work was satisfactory.

This approach eliminated some of the usual student jockeying to perform for the teacher and gave them a wider audience. The method could easily be applied to clinical teaching settings where peers observe each other's performance.

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Action on Retraction

Friday, September 9th, 2011

RETRACTED SCIENCE AND THE RETRACTION INDEX -- Fang and Casadevall, 10.1128IAIAfter the editors of Infection and Immunity retracted six articles in one year, they got to thinking about the frequency of retractions.

They took a sampling of 17 journals with a range of impact factors and then created an index for each one that measured the number of retracted articles from 2001-2010 as a proportion of total articles published.

Their findings show that the higher the impact factor of the journal, the greater the frequency of retractions. They speculate that the rewards of publishing in prestigious venues may motivate researchers to engage in scientific misconduct.

Others who have looked at the data remind us that the number of retractions in all journals is vanishingly small. While it's important to enforce ethical research practices, we may be overstating the impact of retracted papers.

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Posted in Faculty development | 15 Comments »

Punking Peer Review

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

The Open Information Science Journal is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published by Bentham and indexed in Open J-Gate and Genamics JournalSeek.

Phil Davis, a postdoc at Cornell, was interested to see how rigorous the review process at the journal was. So, he used software to generate a realistic-looking but gibberish article called "Deconstructing Access Points." Access Points

As the figure on the right shows, the article looked scientific but in reality made no sense. Still, four months after submission, Dr. Davis received word from the editor that his article had passed peer review and was accepted for publication. All he had to do was send $800.

He declined to pay, but wrote about the experiment for a scholarly publishing blog. His trick recalls the Sokal hoax where a physicist submitted a nonsense paper to a humanities journal, got it published, and revealed it later. But where Sokal was poking fun at the meaninglessness of postmodernism, Davis is pointing to the lax regulation of open access journals.

Not all online journals are this craven, but it shows that peer review is no guarantee of quality.

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Posted in Faculty development | 30 Comments »