Re: copyright under stress

On 06/26/2000, Craig A. Summerhill <listmgr[_at_]cni.org> wrote:
>
> In research universities, traditionally, tenure is tied to publication.
>
> Publication in peer-reviewed journals carries considerably more weight
> than other forms of publication (review being one of those). Campus
> politics aside, at the most prestigious universitites gaining tenure
> without a significant track-record of peer-reviewed publication is
> virtually impossible. Although most university tenure policies include
> other methods of earning credit toward tenure (teaching, service to
> community, non-print publications such as database compilation, etc.),
> publication in peer-reviewed literature is usually the lion's share
> (70-80%) of the deciding factor in whether to tenure an employee.

Non-lawyers on the list may be interested to learn that the model is somewhat different for law school professors. "Publish or perish" is still the rule with regard to getting tenure; but the vast majority of that publication is done in student-edited law reviews and journals. There are a handful of peer-review journals, and it is a plus to appear in one of them; but it is common for a law professor to satisfy the publicatio n requirements for tenure without ever having been published in a peer-review journal. It is much more prestigious to get published in a top-twenty student edited journal, such as the Harvard Law Review.

Most non-lawyer academics find this to be a very strange system. [Frankly, so do we, but we've become used to it.]

Tyler T. Ochoa
Associate Professor
Whittier Law School
<tochoa[_at_]law.whittier.edu> Received on Tue Jun 27 2000 - 17:59:29 GMT