In our value statements, we usually say we value diversity, but our strategies and plans don’t quite live up that. Academics are themselves diverse. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all job description. The 40-40-20 model itself doesn’t fit everyone, and doesn’t fit every stage of the career. It is natural to focus more on different roles at different times, depending on opportunities and energy. Some of us are just not meant to be president, and not everyone has to lead large EU projects to contribute to research. Individuals sometimes manage to make other types of research contributions by forging productive partnerships, eg between people at different career stages, but it requires them to work against the system a bit, and subvert the expectations the University has written into its metrics.
[...]
Some of my colleagues are probably thinking, based on recent discussions in committees, that I’m kind of bolshie and difficult about university administration activities. Thank you, perhaps yes.
— Being an incentive, being an obstacle, being values by James McDermott
I am the difficult one in my department. Peer Review is in danger, facing an increased number of submissions (both papers and projects for funding). There are AI companies selling solutions to automate some of these solutions, but everyone with a Claude or Codex subscription can generate a paper in a couple of hours. A great paper? maybe not, but enough to be yet another submission to have to review.
In Artificial Intelligence conferences, you are limited to 20 submissions and/or you are required to be a reviewer (ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS). The quality of reviews decreases, and there are undergraduates [reviewing] some papers. I'm all in favor of Shadow PCs, but this seems too random to attribute any level of trust to the reviewers.
In Software Engineering, ICSE defined a maximum of 3 submissions (remember the Guinness World Record-level 12 accepted papers by the same author). ICSE, FSE and TOSEM have also agreed to share review(er)s, to avoid repeated work on the same submissions (reducing the reviewer bias resilience).
Other areas are also following suit with senior authors having to agree to review papers if needed, imposing submission limits, and even adding a submission fee.
These are all patches, not solutions to the problem. Many people have identified the solution: we must not count the number of papers (or funded projects) in the bean-counting process of research evaluation. If you give that much importance to a measure, the measure itself becomes the goal, and Peer Review will not survive.
And who rules the university? We do. It's a collegial management, so we need each of us to rise against these practices. Bureaucrats require KPIs and metrics that do not look at the substance of the work. But the idea of being a collegial organization is that we should look at the substance (and that requires time, that no one wants to spend).
And this is not a new idea. David Parnas said it in 2007, Computing Research Association has said it in 1999 and in 2015.
Another related issue is that when everyone is targeting Q1 and Core A/A* conferences (~top 25% venues), the top 25% conferences are now responsible for 75% of the submissions, and lower ranked venues die. This is non-sensical.
Recommendation R4.1 states: “Publication counts, whether weighted or not, must not be used to evaluate research value.”
— Informatics Europe, Informatics Research Evaluation (2025)
“the scientific content of a paper is much more important than publication metrics or the identity of the journal in which it was published.”
I agree with James, we need to fight for this change ourselves, because the attrition of the big machine of large organizations is against us.