Publication Strategy as Ideology at Swedish Universities

Abstract

The subject of this chapter is the emergence of a new policy area at Swedish universities: the area of scientific publication. This process is closely linked to the growth of performance indicators as a tool for evaluation and distribution of resources. Performance indicators have a long history in Swedish research policy – it dates back to 1993 – but up until the 2000s, they were primarily used by government to assess the performance of education, not in research. The Swedish autonomy reform of 2010 led to a corporatization of the university sector, making each and every university and college responsible for its own organization and decision-making structures. As demonstrated previously, this rapidly led to increased top down decision-making and a loss of collegiate boards in a majority of Swedish universities and colleges, leaving rectors and university boards in control of large and basically economically viable organizations. The autonomy reform created the necessary organizational independence for the emergence of market-like behaviour, including competition between universities for students, funds, “star researchers”, etc. The development of performance indicators in research should be seen in this light – thereby not denying that (1) the projectification of research through a tipping of the balance between direct and external funding in the favour of the latter and (2) the development of university rankings have been central preconditions. With this development as a starting point, this chapter investigates the resulting publication strategy policy documents that have evolved. The judicial status of such documents is diverse. Some of them are issued by the university library as part of its service to researchers. Others are formalized policies with the obvious aim to channel the work of researchers into publication outlets that are favourable in the sense that they will increase the “competitive edge” of the university in a publication race where it competes with other universities for funding and prestige. Here publication strategy documents from a number of Swedish universities are treated as one and used as sources for answering the following questions: (1) What are the actual recommendations issued to Swedish researchers concerning publication by their employers? Are they uniform? (2) What role for meaning of and rationality of the dissemination of scientific results can be discerned in these documents? In short, according to Swedish universities, what is scientific publication for and why should we do it? (3) Are there underlying theories and/or assumptions that inform these policies? Is there such a thing as a late modern ideology of publication?