Rejoinder to the response to “the scholarly capital model”

Abstract

Crowston (2016) makes several criticisms of “the scholarly capital model”. In sum, he argues that we fail to develop novel measures, continue the worst aspects of the current system in terms of encouraging co-authorships with old boys, reinforce journal list fetishes, and that the SCM still provides ample ways to game the system. In response to his criticisms, we reaffirm that SCM’s aims to address the question “does this scholar possess sufficient scholarly capital to enable our organization to achieve its research goals?”. We argue that examining the research capital that a scholar brings to the organization is an improvement over the current method of evaluating scholars based on their number of publications in ranked journals. The profile of measures that we propose, while not as novel as altmetrics, encourages widespread co-authorships, de-centers the journal lists, and, thus, eliminates the journal fetishism and ecological fallacy present in the current system.