New and Old Critiques on the Evaluation of Academic Science: Implications in the Latin American Context

• In Event: Evaluation of Academic Science and Scientists: Perspectives from Latin America

Abstract

Since 2010 a series of manifestos exposing critiques of scientific evaluation were published and widely disseminated within academia. We start this presentation by examining and assessing the critiques of (academic) science evaluation contained in six of those manifestos: Slow Science Manifesto (Berlin, 2010); Innovation, Sustainability, Development: a New Manifesto (Sussex, 2010); San Francisco Declaration on Research Assesment (DORA, 2012); The Leiden Manifesto (Leiden, 2013); la Charte de la Désexcellence (Bruselas, 2014); The Academic Manifesto: from an occupied to a public University (Halffman y Radder, 2015) y Saving Science (D. Sarewitz, 2016). Secondly, we put these critiques in a broader historical perspective, comparing the emergent arguments in the discussion with those raised in a previous debate on the subject, initiated in the 1960s. In a third movement, we explore the particular implications of this long-term discussion for the development of science in countries, such as the Latin American ones, where science infrastructures and human resources are under construction, where the problems science agendas should face are different from those addressed by more industrialized countries, and where the main language is not English. The six manifestos were selected taking into consideration their wide dissemination and the discussion they prompted. The study was carried out through content analysis of the texts and their contextualization through a literature review.

Authors

• Noela Invernizzi, Universidade Federal do Parana

• Amílcar Davyt, Universidad de la Republica