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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)
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Agenda
• A critique of PURE reasoning
• Some web trends – sociale media & web 2.0
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How can PURE become a researcher’s friend and ressource
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Disclaimer
• Not necessarily a representative researcher
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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
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But how about you
• How many are active researchers?
• How many have been researchers?
• How many are experiencing resistance from researchers in terms of
PURE?
• How many are in contact and collaborate with researchers around
PURE?
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A CRITIQUE OF PURE
REASONING
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PURE as public knowledge base
• ”Research database is publically available og
delivers knowledge and gains to local enterprises
and research activities”
• ”The database disseminates AAUs reseach to
society and the individual citizen”
• How PURE was described once in AAU (and it
was a genuine wish from our library)
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PURE as control and surveillance of
the employees
• Extreme control and overview of individual
researcher’s production
• Instrumentalisation and quanitification
• Counting machine – now used for hiring/firing
and distribution of money internally
• 6 points to become associate professor – 75.000
DKK for a level 2 paper (local rules) – bonus for
particularly productive researchers
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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)
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AAU: Redundancies (firing)
• ForskerForum 10. October:
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”Reason for firing people is that the dept doesn’t generate enough
money, so there’s a deficit compared to number of staff. Managements
criteria have been an assessment of the individual employee’s
competence profilce and performance: Do you score publication
points and grants? ” DJØF-union rep. Jesper Lindgaard Christensen.
(my translation)
• So….
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• Clip from PURE at AAU
This should be
‘grants’ by the
way….
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General sentiment (not saying this is how things
are…but how many feel they are)
• "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.
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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
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This is the managements’ priorities – as always – focused on solving
problems of the administration itself rather than supporting core
services…(said somewhat polemically )
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PURE 1.0
• Rules for PURE:
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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
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WEB 2.0 AND SOCIAL MEDIA
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• Trends:
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Personalisation and individualisations – yet inherently social
o The individualised collective
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From consumer to producer – increased ownership and control for the
individual user
o Crowdsourcing, collaboration, 2-way-communication
o Personal networks and streams of information & activities
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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.
Web
Organizing communicative processes
Dialoging
Text forums
Chat
Video phone
Networking and
awareness-making
Person-centred
social networking
sites
Networked weblogs
Micro-blogging
Organizing resources
Creating
Weblogs
Podcasts
Wikis
Application sharing
services
Sharing
Object-centred social
networking sites
Social bookmarking
• But these happen across different levels of scale from individual to collective
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Sociale konstellationer – nye arkitekturer for læring
• Group
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Well known members, strong ties, mutual
dependency
• Network
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Looser constellation of people, come-andgo
• Collectives
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Tag-clouds, Google Search Rank,
aggregations of activities
• Researcher in middle – creation of
transparency between the levels
Picture taken from: (Andersson, 2008)
http://terrya.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/networks-versus-groups-in-highereducation/
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Challenge (the center does not hold)
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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
Collective
Network
Group
Individual
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Creation of Personal Learning Network
• Individual in the center of self-generated personal networks –
connections to groups, networks and collectives
• Streams of information and activities come from the networked
collective
• Content depends on the network composition – whom are you
connected to
• Facebook News-feed, Diigo, Twitter, Researchgate, Academia.edu
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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
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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?
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PURE: IS JUST A FRIEND YOU
HAVEN’T MET
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Characteristics of social media
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Ownership– own profile – strong personal 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 connections are created through aggregation of uncoordinated
actions
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Sharing of own and other’s content (music, pictures, data-sets, papers, bookmarks,
tweets)
Co-ownership in terms of relevance – collective as editor (folksonomi)
Very individual as well as collective
Social filtrering through a network (good bookmarks, paper recommendations,
videoes)
Direct and automated recommendation from the collective
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Challenges and potentials for PURE
• The fundamental problem:
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PURE a system decided top-down and fundamentally adopted for surveillance and
control …the very anti-thesis to web 2.0 (sort of….) – but it has become better 
• Increased attention to:
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Researcher focus – what do researcher need and how can you empower them
How can PURE make life easier (good existing examples: publications connected 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 other networks and collectives
(new) connections between between people and between people and content –
recommendations, ’awareness’ of other’s activies
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Resarchgate.net & Academia.edu
• Competition to PURE and to institutional
repositories at large – spurious business model
(but so are publishers business models)
• I don’t use them very actively – still I am logged in
several times a week…
• Connections to other researchers – streams of
information (papers, questions, potential
connection)
• Satisfying academic vanity – mail-updates,
statistics – So many have downloadet, read,
interacted with your research or searched for you
on Bing, Google etc.
• Problem – partial and somewhat haphazard
network (yet international)
• Heavily focused on the needs of researchers over
those of the institution or the administration
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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
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Thank you!
www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence
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