From 2021, PhD a must for university teachers

In addition to the PhD, aspirants will have to clear the National Eligibility Test or an accredited test (state level eligibility test) or other similar exams.

So far, at the entry level, the minimum eligibility requirement for an assistant professor was that they should have cleared the National Eligibility Test (NET) and have a Masters degree.

From 2021, a PhD will be a must for teaching at university level , even for assistant professors, which is the entry level designation for instructors in universities, according to a draft policy document seen by Hindustan Times.

Teachers will undergo a mandatory, month-long induction programme before starting work and also have to devote two hours for mentoring of students for community development/extra-curricular activities.

According to a senior Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry official who asked not to be identified, these changes have been made to enhance the quality of education in the higher education sector. This person added that the University Grants Commission (UGC) will soon define the minimum qualifications for teachers.

So far, at the entry level, the minimum eligibility requirement for an assistant professor was that they should have cleared the National Eligibility Test (NET) and have a Masters degree.

The government is likely to notify the new qualifications and other measures for the maintenance of standards in higher education soon.

In addition to the PhD, aspirants will have to clear the National Eligibility Test (NET) or an accredited test (state level eligibility test) or other similar exams, HRD ministry officials added.

However, those who obtained PhDs before 2009 will not be required to clear NET.

UGC , which had put up the draft regulations online for suggestions and objections, has incorporated all the changes and sent it to the HRD ministry for approval.

Some of the other features of the regulations include doing away with the Academic Performance Indicator (API) based appraisal , the introduction of a simplified teacher evaluation grading system, and the addition of a academic/research score for universities to improve research output.

In addition to this, promotion in colleges up to the level of associate professor will be based on teaching-centric metrics and in universities, teaching and research-centric. A PhD has also been made mandatory for promotion to the level of associate professor in colleges and assistant professor (Selection Grade) in universities.

To encourage the return of best brains who made a mark in foreign universities, a special provision has been made in the in eligibility conditions for recruitment of assistant professors in universities and colleges. All those who have a PhD degree from a university/institutions with a ranking among top 500 in the World University Ranking (at any time) by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), the Times Higher Education (THE) or the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (Shanghai) will be eligible for direct recruitment and not be required to clear NET.

“The Seventh Pay Commission had recommended that PhD should be the minimum eligibility for recruitment at universities. After much consideration, it was decided that it should be applicable from 2021. NET as the minimum eligibility criteria is important for a diverse country and as there are so many different subjects,” said VS Chauhan, who was the chairman of the pay review commission for the seventh Central Pay Commission (CPC), and is the current chairman of National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC).

“I am unaware as to what has prompted these changes. I am sure that there must be some wisdom behind them,” said Dinesh Singh, former Vice Chancellor of Delhi University.

Singh added that it was ironical that because it isn’t in the Top 500 globally, the University of Delhi will, in effect, not be able to hire its own PhDs directly and require them to clear NET. “I have first-hand knowledge of so many doctoral students of the universities whose doctoral work have been deemed outstanding at the global level and have been published in outstanding research journals. Such PhDs will be humiliated by making them take the NET exam,” he added.

Source: Hindustan Times

Link: https://www.hindustantimes.com/education/from-2021-phd-a-must-for-university-teachers/story-gAS1LGqIXihSUuaIiTYIOL.html 

ACTIVE USERS OF THE LIRC MONTH OF April 2018

ACTIVE USERS OF THE LIRC

( 1^st April to 30^th April 2018)

 All the below Active Users are eligible for one extra library card for the month of 

May 2018.

Sr.No.	Member	Total Transaction
1	KOSSAMBE GAURI DATTARAM MINAL	27
2	HRISHIKESH MAHESH TELANG	27
3	ANTONY ALEX LEENA	27
4	JAYBHAY SHEETAL SHANTILAL MANISHA	26
5	POOJARY ROSHANI SHIVRAM GUNAVATI	25
6	DIVYA PANDIT	25
7	BHATNAGAR RISHABH SUSHIL RITU BHATNAGAR	24
8	JOSHI JIGNASA SANTOSH HEMLATA	24
9	SHRUTI SURESHAN RAJANI	24
10	SANTOSH RAMSHARA SHARMA	24
11	KALYANI JADHAV	23

Impact Factors Fail in Evaluating Scientists. Why Does the UGC Still Use Them?

The journal impact factor has numerous flaws, which makes it highly irresponsible for the UGC to rely on it to evaluate a teacher’s research performance and decide whether she gets a job or not.

University Grants Commission. Credit: PTI

Thomas Manuel

The Sciences

18/Apr/2018

Since 2012, nearly 12,000 individuals and 500 organisations have signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). This includes India’s Department of Biotechnology (DBT). In fact, in their joint Open Access Policy, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the DBT quote the central recommendation of the declaration verbatim, which is that journal-based metrics like the journal impact factor (JIF) should not be used as “a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decision.”

And yet this enlightened attitude has only partially filtered down to the ground.

The JIF is a simple metric, originally designed to help librarians decide what journals to buy for their libraries. It is the total number of citations received by a journal in the preceding two years divided by the total number of citable items published in those years.

In their book chapter preprint, Vincent Larivière and Cassidy R. Sugimoto lay out six major critiques of the JIF. The first is the inclusion of citations for “front matter” such as editorials, news reports, obituaries, letters to the editor, etc. in the numerator while not actually counting these items in the denominator as they aren’t ‘citable items’. The authors show how large journals like Nature and Science have used front matter to boost their impact factors. The second critique is the inclusion of self-citations (when a paper from a journal cites other papers from the same journal), which has led to documented cases of manipulation by unscrupulous editors.

The third critique is the arbitrariness of the two-year window for citations which favours certain disciplines over others. Larivière and Sugimoto write that, while “physics papers generate more citations than psychology papers within the first five years, the reverse is true for the following 25 years. … [U]sing a 30 – year citation window, we find that the first two years captures only 16% of citations for physics papers, 15% for biomedical research, 8% for social science papers, and 7% in psychology.”

Another related critique is that the JIF does not take into account the differences between fields and disciplines. Because of this, the indicator cannot be used to compare across disciplines. The difference in publication and reference practices means that “medical researchers are much more likely to publish in journals with high JIFs than mathematicians or social scientists.”

The fifth critique is the skewness of science research, i.e. that a small percentage of papers accounts for the majority of citations. Their analysis shows that for the large majority of journals indexed in the Journals Citations Report 2016, only 20-40% of papers receive as many citations as the JIF suggests.

The last critique is the systematic inflation of average JIFs, caused by a number of factors, including the rise in number of papers and references per paper. Some 56% of journals increased their JIFs between 2014 and 2015. Larivière and Sugimoto write, “As there is no established mechanism for acknowledging inflation in reporting, editors and publishers continue to valorise marginal increases in JIFs which have little relation to the performance of the journal.”

The JIF in India

In a recent paper, titled ‘Evaluation of research in India – are we doing it right?’, Muthu Madhan, Subbiah Gunasekaran and Subbiah Arunachalam discuss how the “the answer to the question in the title cannot be anything but ‘no.’”

(Muthu Madhan and Subbiah Arunachalam are affiliated with the DST Centre for Policy Research, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and Subbiah Gunasekaran with the CSIR-Central Electrochemical Research Institute, Karaikudi.)

They systematically go through the evaluation and promotion frameworks of a number of different regulatory agencies in India and critique their use of JIF and other metrics. The DBT and DST still include cumulative impact factor as a criterion for awards like the Ramalingaswami Reentry Fellowship, the Tata Innovation Fellowship, the Innovative Young Biotechnologist Award and the National Bioscience Awards for Career Development.

The Indian Council of Medical Research “routinely uses average IF as a measure of performance of its laboratories.” Laboratories of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research on the impact factor and number of papers published to assess scientists.

The National Assessment and Accreditation Council uses various bibliometrics including impact factors in its accreditation process. It also asks for the “h-index of each paper”, which the authors describe as “patently absurd” because it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the h-index means. Only individuals can have an h-index.

Business schools have instituted monetary incentives for publishing in high impact-factor journals. Dinesh Kumar, the chairperson of research and publications at IIM-Bangalore, told the Wall Street Journal in 2011 that the institute had been giving a cash award since 2006 to any faculty member whose paper was published in an ‘A-grade journal’.

The National Academy of Agricultural Sciences assigns impact factors of its own to journals and uses these scores to select fellows. This impact factor is calculated in an opaque and seemingly arbitrary manner. The authors argue, “The Annual Review of Plant Biology had an IF of 18.712 in 2007, which rose to 28.415 in 2010. Yet, the NAAS rating of this journal recorded a decrease of four points between the two years.”

But the most problematic deployment of the JIF is its use in the appointment and promotion of teachers by the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the All India Council for Technical Education. The UGC calculates an Academic Performance Indicator (API) score which includes points for research. According to UGC policy, teachers earn more points for papers published in journals with a higher JIF. The authors of the ‘Evaluation of research’ article summarise the rules thus:

The API score for papers in refereed journals would be augmented as follows: (i) indexed journals – by 5 points; (ii) papers with IF between 1 and 2 – by 10 points; (iii) papers with IF between 2 and 5 – by 15 points; (iv) papers with IF between 5 and 10 – by 25 points.

As discussed above, the JIF has a number of flaws. It fluctuates erratically from year to year because of the two-year window. It favours certain journals and disciplines. It doesn’t take into account any kind of field-normalisation. It doesn’t predict citations. And it suffers from a creeping inflation. This makes it highly irresponsible for the UGC to rely on JIFs to evaluate a teacher’s research performance and decide whether she gets a job or not.

The UGC has further compounded the arbitrariness of its policy by formulating awarding points based on the ranges of impact factors. As Madhan et al write,

Take the hypothetical case of a journal whose IF is around 2.000, say 1.999 or 2.001. No single paper or author is responsible for these numbers. If a couple of papers receive a few more citations than the average, the IF will be 2.001 or more and the candidate will get a higher rating; if a couple of papers receive less than the average number of citations the IF will fall below 2.000 for the same paper reporting the same work.

In 2010, Anthony van Raan, director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands, told Nature that, “If there is one thing every bibliometrician agrees, it is that you should never use the journal impact factor to evaluate research performance for an article or for an individual – that is a mortal sin.”

Metric-based assessments discourage risk-taking and long-term thinking among young scientists. It tells them that they can’t afford working on something that won’t lead to citations and papers immediately. Institutions need to follow the lead of the DBT and consider signing the DORA. It would be the first step in signalling to young researchers, as the declaration states, “that the scientific content of a paper is much more important than public metrics or the identity of the journal.”

Thomas Manuel is the winner of The Hindu Playwright Award 2016.

Source: The Wire / The Sciences dated 18 April, 2018

Link:  https://thewire.in/the-sciences/impact-factors-fail-in-evaluating-scientists-why-does-the-ugc-still-use-it

(accessed on April 23, 2018 at 2.45pm)

An improved way to check your Scopus Author Profile!

 From SCOPUS.....

Share these step-by-step instructions on how to improve their Scopus author profiles using the new Author Feedback Wizard with your authors. This new feature helps ensure that the correct papers are associated with the author’s preferred profile name.

Source: https://blog.scopus.com/posts/an-improved-way-to-check-your-scopus-author-profile
(accessed on April 23, 2018 at 1.30 pm)

This Goregaon school is grooming eco-warriors to protect environment

Environment protection programmes are as important as the academic curriculum at VIBGYOR High, a school in Goregaon. Keeping in mind various pressing issues related to environment protection, the school has been taking effective steps to facilitate an environmentfriendly campus.
They have initiated multiple campaigns like ‘Go Blue’, to save water, ‘Waste Management’, where compost pits have been installed to control school waste and ‘Anti-Plastic’, where students have taken to clean the beaches of Mumbai, to raise awareness among students.
As a part of the waste management initiative, VIBGYOR collaborated with non-governmental organisation Daily Dump to install compost pits in their campus that help recycle food waste into manure.
This is used as fertiliser in the school garden.
These compost pits are situated behind the canteen, where most of the food waste is generated.
“Students are taught to segregate their leftovers into wet and dry waste,” said Jerry Paul, manager, administration, VIBGYOR.

As a part of the pilot project started in November, a total of 1,331 kilograms of compostable waste has been collected till February this year.
“Owing to the success of the compost pits in managing food waste, the pits are now being set up across all 28 schools of the VIBGYOR chain situated across the country,” said Paul.
Following the footsteps of corporates, the school has set up a Students Social Responsibility Council (SSRC) for classes 9 and above. “It is our collective endeavour to create awareness and sensitise our students about the anti- plastic drive with the focus to make our school free of one-time-useplastic,”saidTanya Gulrajani, principal, VIBGYOR High.
One such initiative taken by the SSRC is the cleaning up of Versova beach.
The school has been working on its beach clean-up project with Afroz Shah, a lawyer and beach clean-up crusader, for a year.
Every alternate Saturday, about 200 students of the school gather on the beach and collect marine debris.

Source: Hindustan Times dated 23 April 2018
Link: http://htsyndication.com/htsportal/ht-mumbai/article/this-goregaon-school-is-grooming-eco-warriors-to-protect-environment/27049707

Colleges plan workshops to help staff upgrade their skills

SELF­IMPROVEMENT Teachers to learn how to use technology in classroom and develop e­content

Our routine work revolves around conducting lectures, supervising exams and assessing answer papers. We hardly get enough time to upgrade our knowledge. It is good to know that colleges are noticing this and organising faculty enrichment programmes to help teachers upgrade. ASHWINI MHATRE, teacher

MUMBAI: At a time when college teachers are busy supervising University of Mumbai (MU) examinations and assessing answer sheets, college managements are simultaneously planning faculty enrichment programmes for their teaching and non-teaching staff.
Workshops on developing e-content, using technology in classrooms and assessment methodology are some of the topics that colleges plan to cover this summer for their staff.
Mithibai college, Vile Parle, which recently secured autonomy from University Grants Commission (UGC) had organised a two-day faculty development programme to help teachers upgrade to the new curriculum.
“We had experts from various fields, including head of departments at colleges that have already got their autonomy, who were part of the workshop. This not only helped our teachers brush up their knowledge, but also understand what more they need to do to be prepared for regular class starting mid-June,” said Nupur Mehrotra, vice-principal, Mithibai college.
RA Podar College, Matunga, will also organise workshops for its teaching and non-teaching staff during summer holidays.

“Even the non-teaching staff has been asked to attend workshops on financial management and personal development. We ask teachers in advance about the areas they need to improve and accordingly organise workshops during vacations,” said principal Sobhana Vasudevan.
The delay in announcing results for exams conducted in March-April 2017 by MU not only disrupted the schedule for the ongoing academic year, but also delayed the examination season for the current semester.
Exams that commenced in the second week of April and will end in June, leaving teachers with no summer vacation because they will be busy supervising and assessing answer papers.
Keeping in mind that the teachers are being overworked, several colleges are also planning to conduct these workshops by giving their teaching staff space to accommodate a small vacation.
“It’s unfair to expect teachers to keep working without taking a break. So this year, we have scheduled our faculty enrichment programmes in a way that teachers don’t have to compromise on their summer holidays or reporting for assessment duty,” said Naresh Chandra, principal of Birla College, Kalyan

Source: Hindustan Times dated 23 April 2018
Link:  http://htsyndication.com/htsportal/ht-mumbai/article/colleges-plan-workshops-to-help-staff-upgrade-their-skills/27049585

Good Reads: April 2018

 57. Break the Glass Ceiling! By Aruna Sundarajan, Secretary, DoT

Voice and Data, Vol.25, Issue 3, March 2018

She is being dubbed as the ‘first lady in Indian telecom’ and is credited for bringing in reforms to India’s ICT arena. On the occasion of Women’s Day, Aruna Sundarajan, Secretary, DoT, sends out a message to the women workforce - to come out of cocoon and break the glass ceiling

58. IoT to be the Catalyst for Industry 4.0 by Jayant Krishna, ED & COO, National Skill Development Corporation

Voice and Data, Vol.25, Issue 3, March 2018

National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) is playing a proactive role in acquiring new skills around Big Data, Data Analytics, Cyber Security, IoT and Android.

59. Software: Testing Times by Jyoti Bhagat

PC Quest, Vol 31, Issue 4, April 2018

60. Tech Outlook 2018

Dataquest, Vol XXXVI, No. 1, January 2018

Technologies and trends that will shape Enterprise IT in 2018 that will bring new technology trends that will change the way industry works

61. India’s share of World Research according to Science and Engineering Indicators 2018, by Gangan Prathap

Current Science, Vol 114, Issue 7, 10 April 2018

62. Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) by Rajesh Gopakumar and Spenta R. Wadia

Current Science, Vol 114, Issue 7, 10 April 2018

63. Face to Face: On Research Misconduct: Hari Sridhar talks to Vidyanand Nanjundiah

Resonance: Journal of Science Education, Vol 23, No. 4, April 2018

64. The Billion Dollar Startup Factory: the idea and people behind Growth Story by Deepti Chaudhary and Debojyoti Ghosh

Fortune India, April 2018

65. Big Data meets Biology by Erika Fry and SY Mukherjee

Fortune India, April 2018

66. Artificial Intelligence: pushing the frontiers of Machine Intelligence by Shobhna Kunwar

Science Reporter, April 2018