Advancing Transparency and Credibility in Academic Evaluation: An Open Science Policy Brief for Penilaian Angka Kredit

Abstract

On the 24th of November, 2020, the Indonesian Open Science Team met the DIKTI Director General, Prof. Nizam, to discuss policy recommendations to help realize world-class Indonesian higher education institutions and academics. Afterwards, he requested a policy brief, as inputs for the upcoming amendments to the ‘Penilaian Angka Kredit’, a career evaluation and advancement system for Indonesian academics. If metrics and evaluation determines the type of academics, it begs the question, what type of academics do we want? Currently, the P.A.K focuses heavily on publications; however, to boost publication count academics use various methods, including but not limited to: being first author on research produced and written by students, selling out Indonesian natural resources to international researchers to be included in publications, self-plagiarism1 and self-citation, and neglecting national interests for their own. However, publications are not to be neglected, as they help us communicate our findings to the global audience. Therefore, we would like to make recommendations to a) produce academics that have impact to society and serve national interests, b) increase transparency to address poor practices in research and still gauge quality in a meaningful way. In other words, we would like to recommend changes so that we produce academics that have benefit to society, produce credible and useful research, rather than focusing solely on publications2.