发布或灭亡

这本书前言中的一句话网络制图-交互式和移动设备地图设计作者是Ian Muehlenhaus博士(见我的评论)在这里)尤其引起了我的兴趣。Muehlenhaus博士意识到关于网络地图设计的教科书少之又少，他说:“那些确实存在的教科书要么是极其技术性的，要么是编辑过的，对于非专业人士来说往往过于学术化。”这张照片证实了我自己的观察，我在我的书的序言中表达过地理信息-技术、应用与环境这本书于2011年由施普林格出版。我写道:“一本教科书由一个或几个作者撰写的情况越来越少了……如今，涉及25个或更多作者的情况已经很常见了……所涉及的主题既复杂又专业。”问题的关键是——为什么?为什么会有这么多的书被编辑成会议论文集出版?为什么这么少的教授有兴趣在他们的专业领域构建现有的知识，并以适合学生和实践者的形式展示它?我想我知道答案:对大学目前的报酬和职业体系不感兴趣。在这种情况下，大学的任务有三个方面:(1)创造知识;(2)知识的保存和构建;(3)知识向学生、实践者和整个社会的转移。一个天真的观察者可能会认为这些任务具有同等的重要性和同等的回报，但事实远非如此。 The task listed as number 1 – the creation of knowledge – has been hurled out into the far zenith (okay, I may be exaggerating slightly but it is certainly true to some extent). Nowadays it is no longer the actual creation of knowledge which matters, but rather its countable derivative: the number of articles published in high-ranked scientific journals or, to use the jargon, the ‘impact factor’. I recently published several articles in this magazine and I am pretty sure that some of them will become course material. But their formal impact factor will be zero – no reward and no credits because they have been published in a professional journal instead of a scientific one. And that’s not all. It is also the ability to attract funding that counts. I know of professors who have never gained a PhD, who have never published a scientific syllable, but who were appointed because of their network and thus their skills in collecting money. I know of professors who were appointed on the understanding that their education obligations would be de facto non-existent. I know of professors who are very good in knowledge transfer but whose careers have stagnated because they never gained a PhD. When will it stop? I see signs all around the world that members of academia are getting sick and tired of the whirligig of science as a paper-production industry. I see how they are suffering as the reward-and-career system is all but bankrupt. Indeed, they are longing for release from the straitjacket of ‘publish or perish’.