academia

Living on Hope? Reflections on ‘Hope Labour’ in Academia

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Written by David Brax

This blog has been reposted from Lex Academic. Find the original post here.

In academic fields where competition is tough and resources are scarce, it is common for people to perform work for little or no remuneration, hoping that this will lead to better opportunities for further employment, promotion or recognition. This sort of work can be described as ‘hope labour’. David Brax, adviser at the Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research, reasons here about hope in academic work as an important driving force but also warns about it as a potential source of exploitation.

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The unsustainability of the “pay-as-you-go” publishing model

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By Abel Polese

This blog was originally published at The Research Whisperer on the 7th of March, 2023.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Recently, Zhejiang Gonggong University announced that articles published with MDPI, Frontiers Media & Hindawi, the three largest open access publishers, would not be included in research performance statistics.

Universities have discouraged or banned staff from publishing in individual journals in the past, but this is the first report of whole publisher catalogues being excluded. I’ve seen discussions about whether these journals are worth publishing or whether they should be considered predatory. I’m concerned that the boundary between a predatory approach and the approach of pay-as-you-go journals is blurring.

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Should academics do unpaid work to share their research? if so, when and how?

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This is a guest post from Dr Anna Bull, Lecturer in Education and Social Justice at the University of York and co-director of research and campaign organisation The 1752 Group. 

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