[SystemSafety] RVS and PBL publications

[Prof. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin]

I am slowly getting my private WWW mirror site running again. Thanks to those who made suggestions!

rvs-bi.de has a new Home Page which references what I consider the three essential parts of the Uni 
RVS pages:
*RVS publications,
* the CRICA compendium
* the WBA Home Page.

It also has a new part:
* links to my recent publications of record (since "retirement")

Since 2019 I have 19 publications of record and another one is accepted and "in process". Here 
things are a little simpler: I have only been publishing open-access (or in the case of SCSC 
quasi-open-access), so I have included the links to the publications rather than uploading copies to 
the the site itself.

There is still a fair amount to do. But I am not going to rush it.

The Faculty of Technology cut off rvs.uni-bielefeld.de on July 10th, without informing me. I 
received an email from the faculty administrator eleven days later, on July 21st, that they had done 
so. And suggesting that I could, if I wish, set up a private site.

First, "collegial" and "courteous" are not the first characterisations that spring to mind. Second, 
organisational memory seems to be lacking: they know about rvs-bi.de from our negotiations with 
another lawyer concerning another image in 2023. The site rvs-bi.de has been down since I 
re-organised my IT in early 2024. It used PHP; the older PHP version wouldn't run on the new Linux 
virtual machine; the new PHP version wouldn't render the pages. I asked some professional tech 
people in Bielefeld for help, but no one would take it up. My SysAdmin observed that if PHP versions 
couldn't maintain backwards compatibility, then one couldn't expect forwards compatibility, so 
getting away from PHP would be a wise idea. Besides, I am still a raw-HTML fan for cybersecurity and 
low-maintenance reasons.

Third, I have been trying to have a conversation with my former Faculty for some years about 
archiving my publications. All of the places I previously worked or visited: Kestrel Institute, 
International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, University of Berne, IBM Almaden 
Research Center, University of Stirling, INRIA Lorraine, have research reports authored or 
co-authored by me in their catalogues and those interested can order them. Still. But not Bielefeld 
University.

That is why I set up the RVS site with its document numbering system in 1995. The University did set 
up some sort of archiving for publications of record in the early years of this century in the 
Library ("Bibliothek"), but by then there were hundreds of entries on the RVS site. In typical 
German bureaucratic fashion, the Uni made it a requirement to put publications of record on the 
Bibliothek site, but didn't provide any resources for us to do so. Look up RVS publications on the 
Bibliothek site, and I think there is one (our researcher on the SmartTerms project submitted his 
paper).

My former faculty tacitly supported archiving of our publications by keeping the 
rvs.uni-bielefeld.de pages up. But those have now gone. And no one seems willing to engage in a 
conversation with me about how my/our writings are to be archived. So I have written a four-page 
letter to the Rector. She is a historian, so she might well take this more seriously than colleagues 
in my former faculty.

This is just the latest in a series of deprecations I have suffered over the years in my former 
faculty. After thirty years of it, at the age of 74 and retired from the university for eight years 
I am getting really fed up with it. Given my experience, I wouldn't recommend a professorship in a 
German university to anybody (that is, to anybody who didn't come through the system and has learned 
to game it).

Two things in this long list really stand out.

One. Back in the early years of this century, the then-Dean wanted to reform the way university 
money was distributed amongst the research groups (called an "Etat" as in French). I had a "small" 
group, namely just me. And according to the then-Dean's new criteria my group was the 
"worst-performing" of any. My support money, which was already half of that of other groups, was 
going to be cut in half (again). I said "wait a minute -- my citation counts according to citeseer 
are the highest of anybody in our faculty, which included a Leibniz-prize winner, the highest German 
academic accolade. Public writing and citations are important components of science. The criteria 
should reflect that, and they don't." The argument went outside the faculty (lawyers were involved 
and it went to formal mediation). The then-Rector wrote to me to tell me that writing articles and 
citations weren't important. That bringing in grant money is important. I found and find that 
perverse. Defining academic success not by what you have actually produced, but by what you have 
promised someone you are going to produce (and most often didn't).

I calculated a quarter century ago through a thorough analysis of citeseer stats that the German 
taxpayer paid about fifteen times as much for a piece of well-cited computer science as the US 
taxpayer did (if you introduced a cost-of-living factor, that roughly doubles to thirty times). I 
was advised by (US) colleagues to keep that to myself. I regret having done so. Things have changed. 
Within a year of that letter from the then-Rector, the university won a "Centre of Excellence" 
designation for a new institute (along with some €m/yr in support) and the criteria for evaluation 
explicitly included publications (but not citations). Nowadays, your H-index is a valued criterion 
of academic success.

Two: When I arrived in 1995, the pension criteria were that profs get something over 70% salary (it 
used to be 100%, but that had been reduced to 75%, I think, by the time I arrived, and now it's 
around 71%). That was all reformed by the Schröder government in, I recall, 2002. Now there were 
explicit criteria - you got credit for time spent obtaining the qualifications that led to your 
appointment (PhD and such - but only 5 years credit for PhD. My PhD took me 14 years, in a very 
different system; I was the second in my incoming year to finish, and I was the 29th graduate of the 
Group in 30 years of its existence). The NRW State calculated my pension somewhat over a month after 
I retired ....... 35% What!?????? That's what your spouse gets if you're a prof and you die the day 
after you're appointed. A financial catastrophe for me. I spent a couple of weeks finding a lawyer. 
It turns out there are lawyers who specialise in pension and other negotiations for civil servants 
and former civil servants (this is Germany for you). My lawyer told me right away that there was 
obviously a mistake. That was encouraging. She and I then spent a year working on gathering all the 
evidence of my career that legally fed into a pension award. That was a lot of work, helped by a lot 
of former colleagues elsewhere (e.g., US, GB). She finally got it up to 61%. And the NRW State paid 
her fee.  Still, 61% is not 71%, which is what all my colleagues get.

It was nice the last few years to leave all that behind me. But events of this month have shown that 
the bottle was not decanted and there is still plenty of residue getting shaken up. Maybe I should 
just write it all up.

My general experience is by no means unique. But having said that, I got to know the particle 
physicists at Bielefeld, because they were on my floor and were the kinds of people who wandered in 
and out of each others' offices with a new problem. A really collegial atmosphere. So the kind of 
environment I was working in was not inevitable. (It also led to the observation that if you want a 
really good programmer, go get a physicist.....)

PBL

Prof. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin
Causalis Limited/Causalis IngenieurGmbH, Bielefeld, Germany
Tel: +49 (0)521 3 29 31 00