Cameron Neylon

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[Science Online London](http://www.scienceonlinelondon.org/) ran late
last week and into the weekend and I was very pleased to be asked to run
a panel, broadly speaking focused on evaluation and incentives. Now I
had thought that the panel went pretty well but Iâ€™d be fibbing if I
said I wasnâ€™t a bit disappointed. Not disappointed with the panel
members or what they said. Yes it was a bit more general than I had
hoped and there were things that I wished weâ€™d covered but the
substance was good from my perspective. My disappointment was with the
response from the audience, really on two slightly different points.

The first was the lack of response to what I thought were some of the
most exciting things Iâ€™ve heard in a long time from major
stakeholders. Iâ€™ll come back to that later. But a bigger
disappointment was that people didnâ€™t seem to connect the dots to
their own needs and experiences.

Science Online, both in London and North Carolina forms, has for me
always been a meeting where the conversation proceeds at a more
sophisticated level than the usual. So I pitched the plan of the session
at where I thought the level should be. Yes we needed to talk about the
challenges and surface the usual problems, non-traditional research
outputs and online outputs in particular donâ€™t get the kind of credit
that papers do, institutions struggle to give credit for work that
doesnâ€™t fit in a pigeonhole, funders seem to reward only the
conventional and traditional, and people outside the ivory tower
struggle to get either recognition or funding. These are known
challenges, the question is how to tackle them.

The step beyond this is the hard one. It is easy to say that incentives
need to change. But incentives donâ€™t drop from heaven. Incentives are
created within communities and they become meaningful when they are
linked to the interests of stakeholders with resources. So the
discussion wasnâ€™t really about impact, or funding, or to show that
nothing can be done by amateurs. The discussion was about the needs of
institutions and funders and how they can be served by what is being
generated by the online community. It was also about the constraints
they face in acting. But fundamentally you had major players on the
stage saying â€œthis is the kind of thing we need to get the ball
rollingâ€?.

Make no mistake, this is tough. Everyone is constrained and resources
are tight but at the centre of the discussion were the key pointers to
how to cut through the knot. The head of strategy at a major research
university stated that universities *want* to play a more diverse role,
*want* to create more diverse scholarly outputs, and *want* to engage
with the wider community in new ways. That *smart institutions will be
looking to diversify.* The head of evaluation at a major UK funder said
that funders really want to know about non-traditional outputs and how
they were having a wider impact. That these outputs are amongst the
*best things they can talk about to government*. That they will be
crucial to make the case to sustain science funding.

Those statements are amongst the most direct and exciting I have heard
in some years of advocacy in this space. The opportunity is there, if
youâ€™re willing to put the effort in to communicate and to shape what
you are doing to match to match their needs. As [Michael
Nielsen](http://michaelnielsen.org) said in his morning keynote this is
a collective action problem. That means finding what unites the needs of
those doing with the needs of those with resources. It means compromise,
and it means focusing on the achievable, but the point of the discussion
was to identify what might be achievable.

So mostly I was disappointed that the excitement I felt wasnâ€™t
mirrored in the audience. The discussion about incentives *has* to move
on. Saying that â€œinstitutions should do Xâ€? or â€œfunders should do
Yâ€? gets us nowhere. Understanding what we can do together with funders
and institutions and other communities to take the online agenda forward
and understanding what the constraints are is where we need to go. The
discussion showed that both institutions and funders know that they need
what the community of online scientists can do. They donâ€™t know how to
go about it, and they donâ€™t even know very much what we are doing, but
they want to know. And when they do know they can advise and help and
they can bring resources to bear. Maybe not all the resources you would
like, and maybe not for all the things you would like, but resources
nonetheless.

With a lot of things it is easy to get too immersed in the detail of
these issues and to forget that people are looking in from the outside
without the same context. I guess the fact that I pulled out what might
have seemed to the audience to be just asides as the main message is
indicative of that. But I really want to get that message out because I
think it Â is critical if the community of online scientists wants to be
the mainstream. And I think it should be.

The bottom line is that smart funders and smart institutions value what
is going on online. They want to support it, they want *to be seen to
support* *it*, but theyâ€™re not always sure how to go about it and how
to judge its quality. But they want to know more. Thatâ€™s where you
come in and thatâ€™s why the session was relevant. Lars Fischer had it
absolutely right: â€œ[I think the biggest and most consequential
incentive for scientists is (informal) recognition by
peers.](https://twitter.com/#!/Fischblog/status/109665338483937280)â€?
You know, we know, who is doing the good stuff and what is valuable.
Take that conversation to the funders and the institutions, explain to
them whatâ€™s good and why, and tell the story of what the value is. Put
it in your CV, demand that promotion panels take account of it,
whichever side of the table you are on. Show that you make an impact in
language that they understand. They want to know. They may not always be
able to act -- funding *is* an issue -- but they want to and they need
your help. In many ways they need our help more than we need theirs. And
if that isnâ€™t an incentive then I donâ€™t know what is.

###### Related articles {#related-articles .zemanta-related-title}

- [Submission to the Royal Society
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- [Recognising, Appreciating, Measuring and Evaluating the Impact of
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  (ukwebfocus.wordpress.com)
- [A new sustainability model: Major funders to support OA
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  (cameronneylon.net)
- [(S)low impact research and the importance of open in maximising
  re-use](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/slow-impact-research-and-the-importance-of-open-in-maximising-re-use/)
  (cameronneylon.net)
- [Some questions for British research
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- [Proceed with caution when setting up financial incentives for general
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  (eurekalert.org)

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Image via Wikipedia  Science Online London ran late last week and into the weekend and I was very pleased to be asked to run a panel, broadly speaking focused on evaluation and incentives. Now I had thought that the panel went pretty well but Iâ€™d be fibbing if I said I wasnâ€™t a bit disappointed. Not disappointed with the panel members or what they said.

Publicaciones de Rogue Scholar

Incentives: Definitely a case of rolling your own