Academic hiring

I have a friend that is a Nova DBA that has been a professional adjunct for the last 20 years. She is now in a panic mode because few schools stop hiring her for doctoral courses because the lack of publications.

It is indeed unreasonable to ask adjuncts to publish but it is the reality of the times. As some stated, why hire full time faculty to do research when there are plenty doctors willing to do it for free just to remain employable?

I noticed that there are quite few schools now offering online DBAs, this will create more doctors in the market that will push salaries down and requirements high.

 

My layman's sense is that the phrase 'adjunct professor' refers to additional teachers, supplemental to a university's own teaching staff, who are typically brought in part-time and perhaps for a limited period of time to perform particular functions.

We sometimes see research universities bringing in outside researchers on an adjunct or 'by courtesy' basis, people whose primary affiliation is with a different institution, which oftentimes isn't a degree-granting university at all.

For example, the University of California at San Francisco has awarded UC professorships to all the next-door Gladstone Institute's principal investigators. (One of whom received a recent Nobel Prize.) They advise UCSF doctoral students and UCSF doctoral students work in their labs.

UCSF Affiliation | Gladstone Institutes

The University of Washington has a similar arrangement with the prominent Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center up in Seattle that's also produced Nobel Prizes.

Graduate Students

Some of the Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories' researchers hold supplemental University of California faculty appointments, as I understand it. I believe that the US Geological Survey and NASA Ames research center have researchers with supplemental Stanford faculty affiliations. There's SLAC. Google has some kind of relationship with Stanford as Genentech does with UCSF. It isn't all that uncommon.

So I guess that my point in this post is that research profile, including publications and all the rest of it, might be crucially important in the case of those supplemental adjunct-ish positions that are primarily about mentoring doctoral and postdoctoral researchers.

 

This is basically correct. However, there is one "particular function" that has driven the explosive growth of adjunct positions in recent decades. That function is: adjuncts can provide teaching (particularly at introductory levels), yet can be paid very low salaries, without benefits or job security.

This is also true. However, these sorts of positions represent only a small part of the fast-growing market for "adjunct" professors -- who now, in fact, outnumber the traditional tenure and tenure-track professors:

 

I have been thinking about this and wanted to add something else. If you are in a humanities field, do not pay to publish, unless it’s a separate fee (which your university will cover) to make a free restricted publication open-access. The consensus seems to be that it can ruin your reputation to pay to publish even once, as everyone knows the journals/publishers who demand this.

This is by no means a criticism of “RFValve” or “jhp” who reported being in a field where paying to publish is acceptable and apparently routine. Having asked around in other disciplines, especially the hard sciences where research grant funds pay for the publication fee, I have no doubt they are correct for their own discipline.

 

I don't think paying for a publication or not paying matters as much as the ranking of the journal and impact factor. There are some recognized indexes such as SCOPUS and thompson routers.
Some academics use the ranking engine below:
SJR : Scientific Journal Rankings

My University actually has a grant to publish in open access journals, it is cheaper for the library to pay these fees that paying the open access fee to recognized publishers.

Google scholar also has a ranking engine:
Google Scholar Metrics

In few words, it is not about paying or not to publish but the credibility of the journal. Journals are credible if they have citations and impact factors.

The model of open access is not just followed by new journals by established publishers such as Springer. The issue is that there is a massive number of new journals that they are trying to abuse the model by profiting from some academics that are required to publish. I receive about 2 or 3 emails a day from new journals mainly from India that are very new and try to get your 200 or 300 bucks by publishing anything you send.

 

For your discipline, I believe you’re giving excellent advice. In my experience, the humanities operate differently, and I confirmed this with others who have wider publishing experience than I. The responses I got ranged from “someone who paid to publish a good piece of research would be throwing that article away,” to “someone who did that might make themselves unemployable.” There are two separate issues here:

1. A number of journals that are not ‘pay-to-publish’ offer additional ‘open access’ or ‘gold access’ options which one pays a fee for (but is usually waived if one’s grant or institution won’t cover it). This option is important for those who want to get cited more, as well as those who have done government-funded research in which the grant funding mandated an open-access venue. This isn’t really what I’m talking about.

2. Humanities journals that have a fee to publish at all are looked down on. It does not matter if you can find one indexed or cited elsewhere. If they charge, they are the sort of journal that will leave a black mark on your CV. This is perhaps because most humanities fields are awash in credible and well-established (100+ years) journals who do things the way they always have, so other models like demanding publication fees aren’t just sticking out like a sore thumb, they’re not really needed.

I’m certainly willing to believe that there are credible, highly-ranked journals in your field that demand a pay-to-publish fee. My point is that there aren’t any credible, highly-ranked journals doing that in the two fields I publish in, and apparently not the rest of the humanities, either. Different fields function differently, no worries.

So, authors beware!