It has called me to the attention this article published in The World.
I copy it next and the debate is opened …
THE INTEREST in the situation of the scientific investigation has occupying slightly more of the habitual thing to the mass media as the innovation, the knowledge and the competitiveness could help to reach the call «new economy» that will remove us from the economic and financial crisis.
Since to many other teachers of university and for many years, the state agency (ANEP) and autonomic agencies entrust me to evaluate research projects that random groups of teachers present (not even consolidated groups of investigation) to choose in the ambiences of the Right, sometimes of the Social sciences and of the Humanities education, to a financing with public money. Also I have been part, in the past, in several occasions of the ministerial committee that finally selects the projects and the share-out of the money for every project. In all my reports and interventions I have already exhibited these worries.
In little occasions (10 or 15 %?), after do the evaluation, me have found with real investigation proposals. Most of the requests are very trite topics, with tens monographs or articles already published in Spain (and hence, with hundreds of works in our European or international environment). There are matters, very often, very generally and, therefore, without any possibility of adding knowledge.
Without specifying the concrete investigation object, ask tens or hundreds of thousands of euros to travel round a countries sinnúmero, for example, to find the norms, judgments and other documents that are to a mouse's blow in the computer that the State pays to him, including the Internet connection, in his office or that are in our libraries (in general, very well provided in the democracy …). And such projects obtain public financing because immense most of the experts who do the reports act as in a society of mutual helps, today for you, tomorrow for me.
In the most honest cases, the project requests are a way of financing the maintenance of the magazines, of being present selectively at some good congress and the renewal of the computer material. But it is not an investigation.
In turn, to complete the squandering, the universities got into debt by generations, assign, to satisfy to his most mediocre clientele, money games for investigation in favor of projects that were pushed back by the national or regional agencies or simply they bothered to compete. Holiday for all, now he pays the Autonomous region; all of us.
I was a few years in a committee that was examining the proposals of brief stays abroad and: what an onlooker! a majority was in August, when in many European and North American university centers of investigation, although opened his libraries like our own ones, the principal persons in charge of the groups of investigation are on holiday and hardly they could begin scientific relations with them, which it would be today the principal target of these trips … Holidays paid with the budget of the State.
I am not going to solve the old question of what it is to investigate. But what is not, should be a skylight, it is the repetition of already existing knowledge; this is not an investigation. That the teachers must form and extend his knowledge, it is necessary, but this is a continued formation and needs only a few ordinary and stable budgets that should support appropriately the libraries (collections of scientific magazines - digital if they will be or of the galaxy Gutemberg - and the procurement of the books); many projects are false research projects and what is claimed one can achieve how it was done formerly when there was no money to be squandered: there are done systematical and wide readings of the investigation already published by others, accessible and already paid in the academic libraries; like that it is as we must form and investigate we new horizons.
Investigating is to create knowledge, to add new knowledge to the already existing one; to try to solve the new problems of the society. With general topics, reinventing the wheel, publishing on already released thousand times, in the scientific-juridical ambiences that me are next, investigation is not done. A big teacher was saying that it is not possible to do investigation on «the Atlantic Ocean» but on a drop of the ocean … it does not surprise us that we are not taken seriously by the scientists of «white robe» (although it would be necessary to reflect also on the control of his projects, his real level and the easy and accessible way of obtaining six-year periods or investigation stretches for all).
The fraud of the investigation in Spain is serious. In addition to financing projects of supposed groups on already studied topics, the universities are evaluated and him retroalimentando add points to the teachers in his professional promotion for the number of the obtained research projects and the financed quantities the fraud. There matter the quantities, not the quality of the results. And also universities and teachers are evaluated by the number of guided theses; so it already does not import if they are pirated, or are the centrifuged one of Google or of thousands of documents of the network; all that more better. We all know what the members of the courts do, nobody wants problems; it is a social act and a few points more for the moneybox of the positive evaluation in the future promotions or to take teaching load from him. And one more thesis for the Spanish statistics and the team rectoral grateful.
MANY PARTNERS think that publishing is to investigate. The investigation needs to transmit to the scientific community and to the society and, therefore, it needs to publish for the suitable river beds, but not quite what is published is an investigation. With complete certainty, it had never been published so much and with so much facility in the social and juridical sciences. But also we know that innovation works there are few ones. We publish because often the society (the public administrations, the companies, etc.) they need our knowledge and his systematization. But it is not an investigation. To contribute new ideas or original approaches neither is easy every day nor goes over to it … we All publish more that we investigate.
Moreover, it is published so much in the last times because the systems of evaluation of the Aneca and of the regional anequitas are so perverse that, again, only they are interested in the quantity of thesis, the number of financed projects and the number of publications and them contained … Even demonstrating that the same work, only that with different title and paragraph of beginning - if they ask for photocopy of the first page - it was included several times, each of them value positively. The teachers already know the pitfall and several times publish the same work, with different qualifications, in collective books or in diverse magazines or, of course, index-linked - that is to fulfill a few mere formalisms in the majority of the magazines - as they demand the educational bureaucracies of Bologna. It must surprise nobody that our universities occupy places very low in the European and world evaluation.
In Spain, the teachers and to the universities are evaluated by accumulation and by external indications … Without reading the contents. As the nobleman of The Petty thief, with the toothpick in the mouth to feign that he had eaten meat. The investigation is not of interest in Spain. Only the appearances and to spend and to spend in a swaying economy (although not because of not investigation politics). I am not in conditions to know if Spain needs to assign more resources in investigation; but I know that there are no good practices that select projects on new, unknown problems, and that need new solutions. There is squandering, with or without economic crisis. Like always, making friends.
Araceli Sleeve Martín is catedrática of Public international law in the University of Salamanca.
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