Knowledge Management and Dissemination

One of the requirements for obtaining my PhD (eventually) here at Duke is that I must go through 12 hours of training in what is called 'Responsible Conduct of Research'. I attended a recent RCR forum on the issue of copyright and was alerted to a few issues which I think are of relevance to our local universities.

The production and dissemination of research is the lifeblood on which academic life runs. The system here in the US is very good at doing both. There are multiple journals in which one can get one's academic work published in. Usually, the problem here is a case of too many articles chasing too few journals. I won't go into the details of how one gets published but what I do want to highlight is the fact that the distribution 'power' of these journals make being published in them valuable. The more one's work is read, the more one's academic career progresses.

Many of the journals which I'm familiar with (American Economic Review, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Journal of Economic Literature etc...) are easily available online through institutional and personal subscriptions. Many of these journals are also part of a larger 'network' of journals which are accessible through bulk subscription on the part of an institution. For example, subscription to JSTOR allows one access to a few hundred journals across different fields.

Their accessibility combined with their reputations as leading journals ensures that there is a steady supply of good papers by good academics whose reputations are enhanced by publishing in these journals.

By contrast, I know of no economics or political science journals published in Malaysia which are either available online or 'plugged' into a larger network of journal subscriptions. For example, the Malaysian Journal of Economic Studies, published by UM only have paper abstracts online. This means that a university such as Duke cannot even subscribe to online versions of this journal but has to opt for the hard copy version instead. What this means in practice is that the works by academics published in this journal won't be read widely which decreases the value of this journal.

Note: This also might impact the 'citations per faculty' index in the THES rankings for our local academics.

I tried to do a few 'Malaysian journal' searches on google and came up with these sites.

The first site is called the 'Electronic Journal of University of Malaya' (EJUM). It has 5 journals in it mostly covering engineering and scientific fields but I don't think it's plugged into a larger network of journals, making the articles less accesible to a wider audience.

The Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences, a USM publication, is actually part of a larger network called Bioline International which makes these articles accessible to a wider audience.

Journals to do with Malaysian law are, arguably, the best organized (both online and offline) probably because of the high demand and profitability of such journals which can be access here.

Finally, I tried to locate papers or research which have been funded by IRPA (Intensification of Research in Priority Areas) and didn't manage to locate any such database or publication. In contrast, the National Institute of Health (NIH) here in the US has a database in which research and papers on the projects in which they fund are deposited there and they are in the process of making this mandatory for all their funded projects. There are many universities which collect works done by their own professors and graduate students from various fields and puts them on an online database. This way, knowledge can be shared and the research done by academics can be appreciated and acknowledged by others.

I think there are some concrete proposals which can come out of this and I'll list some of them here:

1) Ensure that all Malaysian journals are available in online versions (and past volumes should be converted into soft copies to be uploaded)
2) Encourage the universities who publish these journals to try to be plugged into a larger network of journals (perhaps an Asian wide body that is similar to JSTOR) to improve accesibility (and perhaps profitability)
3) Encourage universities to set up databases and collect published works by its own staff and make these available online for knowledge sharing and research acknowledgement purposes
4) Ensure that one of the conditions of IRPA funding is that the result of the funded research is made public (within a reasonable time frame)

While this issue of knowledge sharing and dissemination is not as important as the other larger structural factors which have been brought up in this blog and elsewhere, sometimes, it's these small incremental steps which can be taken that together, make a bigger difference towards improving the state of our public universities in the long run.