GLOBAL:Higher education challenges post-2015 – UNESCO

Wachira Kigotho09 May 2014 Issue No:319

 

Unequal access to university education is likely to persist in most countries globally despite concerted attempts to expand opportunities by 2030, according to a UNESCO Position Paper on Education Post-2015.

It warns that the problem will not be limited to scarcity of places: there will also be a knowledge divide caused by lack of chances to acquire skills in technology.

Notably, considerable disparities will be experienced in most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where the total number of entrants to education declines steeply as students move from primary to higher levels of education, in comparison to other regions of the world.

The crux of the matter, says the position paper, is that the quality of schooling in many countries has continued to suffer from limited learning resources, teacher shortages, teacher absenteeism, and distance and safety to travel to and from school.

Such factors result in high drop-out rates, especially among girls.

In the face of growing concern about increasing global social inequity, unequal participation in development and social unrest, UNESCO says more attention should be paid to the central role of education in promoting peace and social cohesion.

“Education is a right that transforms lives when it is accessible to all, relevant and underpinned by core shared values,” said UNESCO Director-general Irina Bukova.

“Because quality education is the most influential force for alleviating poverty, improving health and livelihoods, increasing prosperity and shaping more inclusive, sustainable and peaceful societies, it is in everyone's interest to ensure that it is at the centre of the post-2015 development agenda.”

Post-2015 educational imperatives

UNESCO identifies six educational imperatives for the post-2015 development agenda:

• Equitable access to quality education for children, youth and adults should be provided for all, from early childhood to higher education.
  
• Quality education and learning at all levels and in all settings should be at the core of the post-2015 education agenda.
  
• A focus on equity is paramount and particular attention should be given to marginalised groups.
  
• Gender equality requires continued and central attention.
  
• Opportunities to acquire knowledge and skills for sustainable development, global citizenship and the world of work must be enhanced.
  
• Lifelong learning is a central principle of the post-2015 education agenda. Flexible lifelong and life-wide learning opportunities should be provided through formal, non-formal and informal pathways, including by harnessing the potential of ICTs to create a new culture of learning.
  

Taking into account that higher education in the past has not always delivered better working skills, especially in developing countries, the underlying challenge for the post-2015 education agenda is to increase relevant skills and lifelong learning opportunities.

UNESCO is urging countries to expand their tertiary education systems in order to allow the most qualified students to access studies leading to university diplomas and degrees – and to improve quality so that students succeed one they have accessed high-level education.

“An increase in access to and attainment of quality tertiary education is central to ensuring better living conditions and getting access to specialised and better-paid jobs,” says the UN agency.

A skills mismatch, joblessness

Such sentiments were also expressed in an OECD study conducted with the Ford Foundation. According to their report, All on Board: Making inclusive growth happen, a skills mismatch is now a serious problem in most developing countries.

“The issue is of great worry in that joblessness is more widespread in developing countries among the highly educated than among individuals with primary levels of education or less,” said Angel Gurria, OECD secretary general, in a report released last week.

Describing the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, the report noted that a significantly high number of tertiary graduates have careers in the social sciences, humanities or law, rather than in technology or science-related disciplines.

“Recruitment work agencies in these countries report scarcity of tertiary level graduates qualified for technical fields, such as the extractive industries, logistics, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, manufacturing and agribusiness,” the report notes.

An emerging scenario in many countries is that a tertiary degree is not guaranteeing a job, as a result of poor student choices or mismatches between skills and what job markets need.

“Quite often, although skills are a powerful determinant of employability, there is a mismatch between the qualifications of workers and the demands of employers, which implies a waste of human capital,” said Gurria.

According to the OECD report, the global distribution of university education-acquired skills among the adult population post-2015 and beyond will continue to be largely determined by socio-economic background and status.

Disparities in access and gender

“Disparities in access to higher education persist regionally within countries, driven by factors such as wealth, location and gender,” says UNESCO.

For instance, in Latin America more than 70% of children whose parents are tertiary educated also complete tertiary studies, but only 3.1% of children with parents who did not complete primary school attain this level of education.

There are various barriers to higher education, including for young people living in rural areas. UNESCO predicts that in the post-2015 period and beyond, access to higher education in developing countries will become harder for young people in urban slums.

Interestingly, whereas female enrolment at tertiary level has grown almost twice as fast as that of men over the last four decades in most countries as a result of social mobility, enhanced income potential and international pressure to narrow the gender gap, there are indications that gender equality will require continued central attention in post-2015 era.

According to Edward Fiske, principal author of UNESCO’s World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education, a group of developing countries – including Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Mali, Niger and Tajikistan – have university enrolments heavily skewed in favour of men.

In contrast, a range of small island states in the Pacific including Anguilla, Antigua, Belize, Bermuda, Dominica, Jamaica and St Lucia, have more women than men in their higher education systems. Other countries in this category are Iceland, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Significant differences are expected to persist post-2015 in the extent to which men and women pursue education at various levels.

Developing and implementing a post-2015 agenda

UNESCO is urging countries to develop a global post-2015 education agenda based on lessons learned from the Education for All initiative and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

“However such approaches should be embedded in national educational plans in order to strike a balance between the globally-comparable and measurable targets and their national adaptability,” says UNESCO.

According to the position paper, in their efforts to implement proposed post-2015 education development goals, governments are being encouraged to provide free and compulsory basic education as well as improve access to higher levels of learning.

They are also being encouraged to strengthen participatory governance and accountability mechanisms, and improve planning and monitoring processes at all levels of education.

“In addition, strong partnerships are required in order to contribute to the common goal of education for all and ensuring everyone’s right to education is fulfilled,” says UNESCO.

In Sub-Saharan African and other developing countries, governments will be required to establish a broad coalition of partners including stakeholders from international donor groups and charities, civil society, academia and the private sector.

“Even then, monitoring and accountability mechanisms for the post-2015 education agenda should be country-driven while UNESCO will provide institutional capacities in developing countries,” said Bukova in a statement.

UNESCO is in the process of ensuring that the future education agenda is fully reflected and anchored within the overall framework of the global post-2015 development agenda.

On the delivery of relevant higher education skills, UNESCO affirms that it will continue to encourage the use of technology for online and distance learning. Tertiary education systems are being urged to establish appropriate, high quality massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

UNESCO expects the post-2015 education agenda to be clearly defined, balanced and holistic, with a lifelong learning approach.

A strong common strand running through UNESCO’s post-2015 education policy paper is that investing in relevant higher education and skills will pay long-term dividends for economies and enhance the abilities of individuals to be competitive in the job market.
 

GLOBAL:The end of academic journal editors?

Jüri Allik09 May 2014 Issue No:319

 

The model of scientific publishing where the reader pays for the costs of publishing seems abnormal. It is clear that new knowledge is mainly beneficial to the public. As most science is done with the taxpayer’s money, it would be expected that all scientific results achieved with such support must be publicly available.

The United States Congress has taken this seriously and the Federal Research Public Access Act was proposed in 2006, ordering all publications using federal money to be publicly accessible. What does this mean? It means that many US scientists can no longer publish in journals that request money from readers in exchange for access to the content.

Right away, publishers smelled the possibility of further profits and made a proposal for those impacted by the act to make their articles publicly accessible by covering not only the publishing costs but the owners’ sturdy profit, too. As a result, some articles in the electronic versions of closed journals bear the ‘public access’ tag.

At the beginning of 2000, Nobel prize winner Harold Varmus, Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown and computer scientist Michael Eisen posted a petition in which they called on all scientists to boycott science journals with closed access. Journals with closed access are those that request payment in order to read the entire year’s worth of issues, a single issue or a single article.

At that time, the great majority of scientific journals were closed access. A reader who hadn’t paid for access could only read the title and abstract. Acknowledging the publishers’ right to profit, the authors of the petition made a compromise, allowing a variation of open access, which would come into effect after a moratorium of, say, six months.

This should have been acceptable to all publishers, as an axiom of the publishing business is that most of the profits are made in the first couple of months after publication.

PLoS One

Brown and Eisen followed their call to arms with a project they named the Public Library of Science, or PLoS. In 2002, philanthropists Gordon and Betty Moore gave US$9 million to the PLoS as a gift.

With this starting money, a series of journals were launched, all with PLoS in their name – PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine etc. But the flagship would be PLoS One which, at least at the level of declarations, does not discriminate against any field of science.

In the case that a manuscript is technically sound, anyone can publish his or her work in the journal after paying a publication fee of US$1,350.

(In real life, things aren’t that easy. In practice, the journal doesn’t exactly follow its promises. The scientists who are asked to review an article often act as though it were a typical closed journal. Still, one thing is certain: the shallow nature of quality control has had no dramatic effect when it comes to the quality of published works.)

Of course, publishing involves an electronic version. Paper probably couldn’t handle the popularity of the journal.

In 2013, PLoS One published over 31,000 articles, which made – it is easy to calculate – more than US$40 million for the journal. Sixty-four of those articles had at least one scientist working in Estonia among the authors.

Currently, PLoS One is the world’s largest scientific journal. In spite of the vast number of articles and low threshold of submissions, the impact factor of the journal is quite high, at 3.7 in 2012 (This is the quotient between the number of articles published in PloS One in 2010 and 2011 and the references made to them in 2012).

Unfortunately, the bad habits of closed scientific publishing have reached open journals.

One thing is clear: in the combination of a single fixed price for an article and the unexpectedly large torrent of articles, profits have been growing at a quicker rate than maintenance costs. The public was shocked when it turned out that Joseph Esposito, CEO of the PLoS journals, had a salary of over US$500,000.

The number of open access publications has grown really fast.

For example, in 2011 there was public access to half of the scientific articles published in the world.

Big publishers also gain

One would have thought that the world of closed publications, where Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and other publishing houses reign, would just wither and die out. But the actual picture is quite the opposite.

The big publishers have gained the most profit from the open access revolution. As many scientists can no longer publish in closed journals, payments have doubled. The library pays to subscribe to the journal, while the author pays to make his or her article public.

Springer has been especially aggressive, as it bought one of the biggest open access publishers, BioMed Central, with all of its 258 journals, which continue as open access journals under the new owner.

Actually, it doesn’t make much difference for the publisher if the author or reader of a scientific article pays for them. Probably the scheme in which the author pays has even less risk as there will be no trouble distributing the journals.

The worst of all possible worlds

I hope I have succeeded in showing that the existing world of management for science is by no means the best possible one. In some aspects, it’s even the worst, as it does practically nothing to protect the author’s dignity, let alone the truth.

I can imagine the joy that everybody vocally criticising all kinds of bibliometry feels while reading this. One cannot trust the number of publications because the acceptance or rejection of an article is often biased towards some kind of ideology (of science).

How can one keep a straight face when talking about the number of references if one can gain over a thousand references with data that’s basically fabricated?

In my opinion, it’s not very important how scientific significance is judged. For example, The John Hopkins University is much smaller than even the University of Tartu, be it in the number of students or lecturers (the latter being 609).

In spite of this, 20 researchers or professors from this university have won the Nobel prize over time, not to mention the eight Nobel prize winners who started working here after they had already received their prizes.

Appreciation is definitely a good measure to use when evaluating a scientist’s scientific significance.

One of Estonia’s science administrators has justified the obvious poor financing of Estonian science, stating that our scientists don’t deserve greater backing as they haven’t achieved anything remarkable thus far. There haven’t even been rumours about anyone being chosen to be a candidate for the Nobel.

In my opinion, it doesn’t much matter if scientific significance is thought to be based on the number of publications, patents or, for example, grants received. Certainly, counting references has its considerable shortcomings, too, as it’s not the best indicator of whether somebody has had something important to say to the world.

However, my mind refuses to accept knowledge of a couple of exotic details as scientific intelligence – for example, something scandalous about the relatively unknown laundry bills of DH Lawrence – something which is nice to share with your two friends.

Where is the world of science heading?

It’s quite obvious that the system of closed scientific journals is being substituted by open access. It probably doesn’t even require green thinking to end journals printed on paper. Instead, printing is becoming a private affair – everyone can use on-demand printing to have a paper copy of a journal if he or she should happen to need it.

One doubts that peer review will remain unchanged as well, as two primary reasons for it are becoming extinct – the reader who finances the printing of a scientific article and the constraints on a journal’s volume.

One possibility is that peer review (censorship, in fact) will vanish altogether. Physicians, for one, have for more than 10 years used arXiv, managed by the Cornell University Library, where one can post his or her article without it going through the ordeal of review.

The format of an article must be .pdf or LaTeX. The archive can be freely accessed by all, and every month 7,000 manuscripts on average are added – quite an amount to read.

Another possibility is to make the review system interactive, offering the author a chance to argue with the reviewer if the former considers the latter to be wrong or unjust.

Such a system is used by the journals published as Frontiers, founded by Swiss scientists Henry and Kamila Markram. The first journal in the series was Frontiers in Neuroscience, and the first issue was published in 2008.

In 2013, Nature Publishing Group bought all the Frontiers journals. Frontiers is distinguished by its interactive reviewing system. After an article is accepted, the names of the reviewers are made public, so, in a way, they share responsibility for the article.

Publishing an article there is not exactly cheap, but a scientist working in an establishment and getting grants can afford the expense of €770 to €1,600 (US$1,070 to US$2,230).

(A good alternative would be SAGE Open, which asks only US$99 for publishing an article shorter than 10,000 words. Although the journal is open to all social and humanitarian sciences, it hasn’t achieved the same kind of popularity as PloS One. This will probably change when Web of Science starts to index it.)

Many journals with open access have maintained anonymous reviewers but lowered the threshold substantially.

The PloS journals, for example, say that, when reviewing, mostly the reliability and technical quality of the means used is evaluated, not the prospect of possible scientific contribution. Unfortunately, the reviewers often cannot follow the guidelines, as the line between the content and technical quality is often really vague.

When trying to conclude what is happening, one has to admit that open access hasn’t led the world’s science astray.

Scientific articles produced under conditions of open access haven’t turned out to be much worse than the closed science with its strict censorship. Based on what has happened, one can predict that not very much would change if most of the 80% of articles that the journals used to reject were in fact published.

The only risk the journals would have is contributing to the already vast number of articles that no one ever references. On the other hand, it’s very likely that some of them would have a lot of citations and advance science.

One of the virtues of open access publications is the modern technological platform inherent to them. PloS journals will tell the reader how many times the article has been accessed via the internet, how many times it has been downloaded as a text document, how many and which other publications have referenced it, and if it has made any waves in social media.

For instance, in 2009 the article on the “Genetic Structure of Europeans” by Andres Metspalu’s research group was published in PloS One.

In the following 57 months, the article was viewed over 12,000 times and the full article was downloaded over 3,000 times. In addition, we found that journals indexed by the Scopus database have already referenced the article 99 times and Wikipedia articles have mentioned it 14 times.

So, the indicator of an article’s relevance would be its ‘life’ after it’s published and the activity surrounding it which, in the case of the article mentioned above, has been remarkable.

With this in mind, it doesn’t seem strange at all that the four main authors of the article – Mari Nelis, Tõnu Esko, Reedik Mägi and Andres Metspalu – are among the 1% of scientists referenced the most in the fields of molecular biology and genetics, according to the current chart of the world’s scientists, renewed by the Essential Science Indicators every two months.

Electronic publishing

Internet-based, open-for-all publishing has brought along the predictable extinction of many old concepts.

I remember the uplifting feeling and the smell of chalky paper from my distant youth, as I took the fresh issue of a journal out of the envelope, containing my own article next to others. For sure, approximately 200 articles later, the feelings are much more subdued, but the main thing is that the conception of ‘an issue’ is rather up for debate when it comes to electronic publishing.

Most standards of referencing, nowadays entrusted to computer programmes such as EndNote, don’t even require you to refer to the issue number of a journal. As the pages are counted throughout the volume or the year, the numbers of these are enough for precise identification of the article. Although some electronic journals are still imitating a virtual single issue of a journal, there isn’t much point.

One of the best things about electronic publishing is that one doesn’t have to wait a year or so between the acceptance of a manuscript and its publication. In fact, it only takes a few minutes or an hour until the article is available on the web, after the decision to accept it has been made. The biggest delay comes from waiting for the publication fee to be transferred.

The numeration throughout the volume and the year is a thing of the past as well. A scientific article published on the internet is an autonomous entity. Its location is no longer determined by these numbers.

The more recent scientific articles have their own digital object identifiers. This is enough to identify every article, as well as recognising and finding its location, or at least the address of its location.

All these developments hint that after some time passes, the concept of a journal as such will become vague, too. When there’s no peer censorship – I mean, peer review – anyone who has finished his or her manuscript can put it on his or her homepage where it will be available to the whole world.

Really, why should I pay €1,600 to someone else for putting my article on the internet? At the moment, the trouble is the vastness of the internet, with my article possibly just vanishing. But it’s highly likely that soon there will be a device that finds the articles, indexes them and makes them visible to all who are interested.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, have already given scientists a present, as they have created a search engine called Google Scholar.

This search engine finds virtually every scientific publication on the internet and identifies all other publications that have referenced it. Moreover, each scientist can create his or her researcher profile that will automatically start counting everything the scientist has published, as well as which other publications have referenced his or her output.

My good colleague Andres Metspalu, for example, has no trouble writing his CV, as it’s always possible to visit his Google Scholar profile and learn that by today (23 April 2014) his works have been referenced 9,390 times.

If no one else will do the job first, then Google alone could possibly make centralised journals extinct, with something that one could call the social network of science taking their place.

Still, I’d argue that scientific journals will not vanish altogether.

The centralised editing practice, making enormous profits for the owners of publishing houses, will cease to exist. With distributed editing, all authors are editors as well. Naturally, there will be no use in maintaining the entire bureaucratic machine of the editorial staff. Anyone interested in this topic can just visit the e! Science News portal.

Compared to other analogous portals, it’s definitely not worse. It might even be better and more interesting and, what is most important, more operative. The only substantial difference would be the lack of an editor.

This electronic news engine has been directed by an artificial intellect since it was started in 2008. The code was written by Michael Imbeault, a student of virology and bioinformatics, using the high-level programming language Drupal, created by another doctoral student Dries Buytaert.

In my opinion, this is a really convincing example that there’s no point for a human being to do the job that a computer can do much better.

The losers

As I see it, the revolution looming in the near future has a sole loser – the big publishing houses, which will lose their enormous profits.

But when thinking about the great mass of scientists who have to – in addition to their main job and often instead of it – do the work of the editor and reviewer, which is not only mostly thankless but also, as I hopefully made clear, simply meaningless, then the number of winners is bound to be much greater.

The biggest winner would be science, as the amount of pointless work would decrease.

I really hope that some influential group of researchers will soon join forces with some capable programmer, resulting in a model of a scientific journal using, for example, the above-mentioned Drupal, where there will be no editor or peer review. Registering could just require the address of a university, just as when creating a Google Scholar profile.

The quality of articles published would be determined by post-review: the number of all views, downloads, likes, comments and references would offer a suitably diverse evaluation of the ideas in the article.

* Jüri Allik, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Tartu in Estonia, belongs to the top 1% of the world’s most cited scientists in his field. Allik has written two other articles on scientific publishing: “Brave New World of Scientific Publishing” and “The Crazy World of Peer Review”. This article was first published on the University of Tartu blog.