Digital Tenure

We love the idea of Digital Tenure.  Writing for electronic publishing should, and must, be considered in matters of awarding faculty tenure at traditional universities.

Data is becoming a first-class object. In the days of completely paper publication, the article or book was the end of the line. And once the book was in libraries, the data were often thrown away or allowed to deteriorate.

Now we’re in a massive shift. Data become resources. They are no longer just a byproduct of research. And that changes the nature of publishing, how we think about what we do, and how we educate our graduate students. The accumulation of that data should be considered a scholarly act as well as the publication that comes out of it.

Consider an assistant professor who has five years of field data. If she could combine that with five years of data on children from a researcher in another country, or another ethnic group or DNA strain, think of how much more powerful their work could be. We can bring these together and make comparisons on a large scale — these are things we couldn’t do before.

We understand merely collecting data may not be enough to justify a tenure slot, but that important process should not be discounted if there is rational analysis to back up the aggregate data. 

We cannot separate data collection from scholarship and to even attempt to do so negates the very reason for awarding tenure in the first place.