Why do you need a degree to study a PhD?

[MajorLook]

So. Education in this country works like this: Broad spectrum undergraduate degree, more specific Masters degree, then if you have an original idea, you can study towards a PhD.

Question. Why do you need a bachelors (and/or) masters degree to do a PhD? Surely there are people out there who can have original thoughts, can research under supervision, and can write a PhD all without previous degrees?

Is it just the way it is? Is it because you have to 'prove your worth' to education? Is it that you have to learn specific skills along the way?

I would love to work towards a PhD and have a few ideas that would work very well, in a serious academic discipline, but I don't have a degree.

so interesting booboostoo - i love finding out the differences in disciplines. and yes, you're right about collaboration

i was speaking to a mathematics professor not long ago and that too is SO different to the medical research i work with - 3 years from manuscript submission to publication is considered very quick

i imagine the move away from expensive monographs by publishers has made things particularly difficult for your field?

Love this discussion.

I have learned an awful lot, not least of which that a) you don't have to be an academic bigwig to be published in PRJs, b) yes I probably do need bachelors/masters skills to progress a PhD and c) PhDs actually suck - they're hard work, expensive, don't always work out and the benefits probably aren't that great.

I also accept the idea that thinking I have a different angle on a concept is proabably massively offensive. Not trying to be at all, but I just think that sometimes it takes fresh eyes away from NHS rules or checklists or something else to get perspective.

The journalism route never occurred to me (despite my role). I guess because the media always wants big-name published academics, not some jumped-up blogger without any serious credentials backing them up.

I think the unique perspective I could offer is the manner in which research data is presented - I have ideas about ways to make people think, and believe that my USP is almost my ability to communicate effectively. If I can obtain the data I would like to use, I believe that I could present it in a way that could make a difference.

Why not look for a master's course, say in social sciences or social psychology, where they might be willing to accept you with professional and media experience, and test out your project there? That might be more feasible than immediately trying to combine midwifery (a vocational discipline with specific criteria to train and practise) with psychology.

It's not at all offensive to believe you have an original idea - but it's the gradual process through academic qualifications and disciplinary experience which eventually allows you to tell whether an idea is genuinely original or not, and test it against the field as a whole.

Another option you might consider could be writing a "trade" book, eg. aimed at an educated but not academic audience (my apologies if you know this already, just that it can be that people think "trade" is a pejorative term when it's not at all, just a bit of publishing jargon) - your experience as a journalist would serve you very well here, as many academics don't really write in a way that translates well to a general readership (nor often do they want to). A trade book might also give you an opportunity to collaborate with academic researchers in the field - they do the nuts and bolts research, you translate it for a wider market.

Willie no it's OK with monographs because e book and paperback are dead cheap so they just don't bother with many hardbacks anyway. Also the publishers make loads of money from the anthologies (Companions for Blackwell, Handbooks for OUP) but there is nothing in those for editors and authors so there is an unspoken agreement that they go to the trouble of printing monographs while we go to the trouble of doing commercial volumes for them. I suspect the entire system will change radically in the next few years. My last teaching book for example I decided to self-publish on a website so everyone has access to it for free and I can add to it as and when I want to. With Kindle books and other easy ways of self-publishing I don't really see why I should let the traditional publishers make a huge profit from my work.

Booboostoo pretty much no academic publisher makes any money from humanities monographs - even the big ones like OUP/CUP heavily cross-subsidise the humanities from other areas, so another way to think of it might be that the academic presses actually do an important job for the humanities by protecting the interests of humanities research against profit.

When the big presses are forced to give up humanities publishing entirely (this may not be that far off), then the future of humanities publishing, including self and digital publishing, looks v v bleak indeed - IMO it won't be a promised land of making research free for all on the web but will enable universities to kill off humanities departments entirely as serious research centres, and effectively downgrade them to post-school teaching factories whilst the sciences corner the market in research.

trainin they may not make profits from monographs as such but they make enormous profits from academic publications in all disciplines. The big sellers are the journals and the edited collections, especially the encyclopaedic type volumes like the Companions and the Handbooks. The journals are a particularly clever racket as libraries are forced to buy bundles of journals containing only 1-2 good ones and a load of second rate ones, and then another bundle at a separate price to get another 1-2 good ones. In many cases the journal articles are written by HE funded authors, who have received public money for their work, have given it freely to the publishers who then sell it back to the publicly funded universities. Editors and reviewers also work for free, again taking time from their publicly funded jobs to keep the system going.

I see no loss in moving the entire academic journal system to a free access online one. Indeed some funding bodies like the Welcome Trust make it a condition of their grants that outputs are freely available and rather than killing humanities research they have a very respectable number of interdisciplinary projects with medicine and disciplines like sociology, philosophy, communication studies, etc.

Here is a nice article on the profit margins of academic publishers:
www.economist.com/node/21552574

The Companions and Handbooks have been enormous money earners for publishers will passing on miniscule profits to publishers and nothing to authors. Springer recently refused to even give me a hard copy of a companion type volume I had contributed to so why exactly did I take time out of my busy schedule to make them money? The volume (Handbook of risk theory) has an interdisciplinary appeal and retails at 526 euros even as e-book. I know the editors of this book receive a miniscule portion of the royalties and are only entitled to that after the first few hundred sales, the authors get nothing, marketing costs are minimal because everyone knows everyone in academia anyway, so it's all pure profit for no work.

Then again I may be bitter but I don't see why as I just received my royalties statement today for the princely sum of 41.92!!! Drinks on me people, drinks on me!

trainin and of course I forgot textbooks. Take my magnus opus, I've made a grand total of 100 euros from it in two years, but it retails for 52 hardcover which is what most libraries will buy and only recently has dropped from 45 paperback/e-book to a more sensible 16.

i think things are changing booboostoo... (i'm not au fait with the monograph/major reference work world but i am with the journals world)

Booboostoo I'm very familiar with the accounts of both CUP and OUP and actually they don't at all make large profits - the humanities depts are pretty much subsidised by other areas of the company (eg. textbooks) and are under tremendous pressure. Revenues are falling dramatically from Companions and similar lines. The big academic presses are normally part of their universities and pay their profits back as subventions into the university's funds to cross-subsidise research and teaching - they are not quite the same as a profit-making company (as some science journal publishing houses are).

Traditional academic publishing is definitely not making large profits at the moment - science journals publishers and electronic publishers are slightly different, but I'm not sure that the big electronic publishers are a great example for electronic free access. The problem is though that digital publishing is actually very expensive to make work - just as much as traditional print publishing, and in some cases more (the costs of managing and storing the data are actually very high). It definitely isn't a cheap and democratic solution, at least at the moment.

It's really not pure profit at all - a print run of a traditional humanities monograph for an academic press might be less than 400 copies and it will break even if the publisher is lucky. A digital version of that same text costs just as much to produce, maintain and make available - the costs are spread across everything from staff salaries to hardware and data management and storage, but it's certainly not pure profit. The biggest markets are libraries - mostly academic libraries in the US - not individuals, so the marketing is directed at library buyers - not individual academics.

there is some marketing to individual academics i believe - those who run relevant courses for example, trying to encourage them to adopt them as set texts?

there is some marketing to individual academics i believe - those who run relevant courses for example, trying to encourage them to adopt them as set texts?
or does that not happen any more?

sorry, mn is playing up

Willie - yes, a bit, but the textbook publishing market is different to the scholarly research market - but if CUP (say) doesn't make some profit on humanities textbooks then it can't then subsidise research monographs, which tend to make a loss.

What's likely to happen to humanities research in the move to open access will be that the traditional academic presses and small presses and the humanities arms of the commercial presses will just go out of business - there's no profit in humanities research - and little incentive for the big electronic publishers to establish and maintain humanities departments. There won't be any incentive for anyone to publish serious humanities research. And when humanities research is just people posting work online - well, who's going to fund the data management and storage, just to start with? If humanities publishing just becomes individuals posting Word documents on their personal web-pages, like so many scholarly livejournal rings (remember them?) then why should universities fund humanities researchers at all?

We should be celebrating the university and academic presses, not complaining about them. They are full of people who genuinely care about creating and preserving real scholarly work. By all means complain about the commercial science journal behemoths, but the idea that Edinburgh UP or Polity or OUP are sucking huge amounts of pure profit out of research is just not the case.

it's a long time since i had anything to do with textbooks, monographs and MRWs!

wrt to maintenance of the electronic database, presumably that's where humanities subjects suffer in terms of author pays open access models, as there is less likely to be funding for the publication fee (which supports amongst other things content and platform development and maintenance). that would apply to commercial and UP publisher IMO. so that suggests humanities would predominantly benefit from the embargo model (thereby continuing to rely on subscription journals at least as brands that signify greater or lesser quality). though many institutions are developing their own repositories so it wouldn't necessarily just be word documents on author web-pages. abstracting and indexing services would be ever more important in that instance

i guess it will depend on the way the wind blows with OA mandates in humanities, which i know nothing about. i'm in STEM so it's a hot topic

trainin I am sorry but what you say doesn't make much sense to me, how can "humanities" and "textbooks" be two separate but comparable areas? Either the division is along discipline lines so "humanities", "sciences", "arts", etc. with a further subdivision for each along type of work, so "textbook", "edited collection", "monograph", etc. Or the other way round. Mixing the two and saying the "humanities" makes a loss but "textbooks" is profit making sounds like creative accounting and an illogical mess.

Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Elsevier, Bloomsbury/Continuum, Palgrave and Acumen are not part of Universities to my knowledge nor do they give their profits back to Universities but I stand to be corrected if I am wrong.

Here's another article on academic publishing profits, do you think the figures they mention are wrong?
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist

Yep, exactly - well, a lot depends on the OA model that gets adopted. Whatever it is doesn't look that great for humanities research or the incentive to maintain research-led departments. And these trends are in conflict with REF pressures.... It's certainly possible that HE research becomes mostly science-led, with humanities teaching-led (students as cash cows for bums on seats teaching) - not great for balance within the university system as a whole.

oh yes, especially when funding applications are increasingly expected to demonstrate return on investment (funding bodies as venture capitalists etc etc)

sorry, completely deviating from the OP now

Booboostoo so for example CUP will have a humanities department, divided into subject areas. That subject area will have editors who manage monograph lists, scholarly editions, some lines which are aimed at student readerships (eg the Companions), and so on. Schools textbooks are dealt with in a separate department, even a separate division. So within the humanities division more profit-oriented lists like the Companions or Introductions cross-subsidise the monographs and scholarly editions; and broadly, company-wide, the schools textbooks side cross-subsidises the humanities division more generally.

As I said, the small presses and university presses are different prospects than the commercial presses - but do you really think the scholarly humanities divisions of Palgrave or Continuum are making giant profits? Where from? Their print runs for monographs are tiny.

boo my interpretation was "humanities research monographs" vs "humanities textbooks"

the latter are bought by students and generate more profit. the former tend not to generate much (if any) profit, so the profits of the former support the losses of the former. publishers (UP or otherwise) may continue to do the former despite the losses because of the benefit to academia (presumably more likely in the case of a UP) or perhaps because it increases the profile of the publisher's portfolio (probably unlikely but you never know)

so the profits of the latter support the losses of the former

(Textbooks aimed at schools or adult further education readerships and EFL textbooks are normally in completely separate sides of the business to university teaching text-books.)

Willie - yes exactly! And then there are all sorts of important things which aren't either monographs or student textbooks - like translation series, or big scholarly editions (works of Freud, works of Swift, works of Descartes, works of Marx etc.) which are big multi-volume, multi-author projects which are massively expensive, run for decades (and have to be funded and managed for decades), have tiny print runs but are absolutely essential to scholarship and which no commercial press would ever touch. And the academic presses fund electronic projects too - which are very expensive. And run a rigorous peer-review process, and maintain a brand reputation, manage lists of important authors and works, and all the other things that academics wouldn't be able to do for their own research. If we lose the academic presses, the loss to humanities research will be very great.

i visited OUP a few years ago. iirc the OED has never been profitable!

'Data journalism' is becoming a big thing now, and I think the professional qualifications in it will soon be here. Sounds to me like that'd be a better route for you than a PhD (spoken as someone with a data-driven PhD!) as you can make use of what you already know about the media.