Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

newscientist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 312 posts

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#41

Post by avs733 »

avip wrote: post #37
avs733 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the short answer is I don't know, and I don't think there is a single answer. Different types of scholarship need different standards and processes in my eyes. It isn't so much 'whats the alternative' to what is really a singular step as much as it is a rethink of how scholarship is performed, evaluated, rewarded, and considered. Otherwise the incentives across the playing field don't change enough to make meaning…

The Sphenodon in the room is that the raison d'etre of the entire Academic structure is unclear. So that should be clarified first. Advancing science is one thing. Publishing as many papers as possible, breaking research into MPUs is another. Lecturing to youth completely uninterested to be taught is yet another vertical.

I think you may be confusing vague with unclear...

The inclarity, and multiple verticals seems more like an example of Goodhart's law than anything else.

Summarized, the goal of academia is and (for most of time in whatever form it took) is to produce and disseminate new knowledge for human society. Creating new knowledge is what we now call research. Publishing papers isn't a raison d'etre...it's a metric for that.

I'll note that Ernest Boyer is far more articulate on this than I am...

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#43

Post by raziel2701 »

avip wrote: post #29
smaddox wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open publishing and commenting would be a good start---having a dialog, like is done at conferences. Older academic journal articles (pre 1900) read much more like discussions than like the hundred dollar word vomits of modern academic publishing. The broken incentives are at the core of this rotten fruit, though. Just making journals open isn't enough.

We have (almost) open publishing and open commenting. Did that improve anything?

There's open commenting? I've never seen the back and forth of the review process be published. It should be published.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#44

Post by jcranmer »

avs733 wrote: post #31
Angostura wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested.

So the short answer is I don't know, and I don't think there is a single answer. Different types of scholarship need different standards and processes in my eyes. It isn't so much 'whats the alternative' to what is really a singular step as much as it is a rethink of how scholarship is performed, evaluated, rewarded, and considered. Otherwise the incentives across the playing field don't change enough to make meaning…

> -Elimination of stupid policies like 'issue lengths' The article either should be or should not be published...saying there isn't space in a given issue is insane given that >>90% of article access is online.

I'd prefer to keep article lengths in place. It's easy to write a lot of text (as quite a lot of high school students understand), but it's challenging--and very important--to be able to convey information in a very concise format. The process of trimming down the text to squeeze it under the page limit is very useful in getting the ideas contained in it to a more refined and easily-understood format.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#45

Post by int_19h »

rsa4046 wrote: post #11
justinpombrio wrote: post #5

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

In academia (at least the hard sciences), no faculty are ever paid for publishing in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals. No reviewers are ever paid either, although recently Elsevier has started to publish the names of its "star reviewers", presumably as a token for the large investment in time and expertise required to evaluate papers for publication and improve the field. Even book deals (or editorships) yield no r…

> Where they got this idea, I don't know ...

We get this idea from basic fairness within the rules of the larger system. Clearly, there are private companies that make money from publication of those papers. It follows that in a fair arrangement of some sort, they would have acquired the necessary rights from the original authors for some compensation or profit sharing agreement. That they don't actually do that is indication that arrangement is not fair.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#46

Post by TheSmiddy »

Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #10
justinpombrio wrote: post #5

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

They are paid, just not by the journal, they're paid a salary by their university and one of their responsibilities is peer reviewing papers.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#47

Post by eigenman »

There are many perverse incentives in this system, but one that tends to be overlooked is the incentive for faculty to publish in predatory journals. It's not that most want to publish there, but when even 3rd tier schools require their faculty to publish a certain number of articles a year under pain of not making tenure or an increased teaching load, submitting work to an undiscriminating journal is the easiest way to check that box.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#48

Post by davrosthedalek »

impendia wrote: post #40
oaeide wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reacted when I read this as well. I am hoping he meant that he would recommend that paper to be published/not published... ...I fear however that my hopes are in vain

by "not accepted" I mean "not published in the particular journal I was asked to review for".

The problem is the preceding if clause. You say that you do this if you find it uninteresting, or if you have no expertise in the field of the paper. Both of these are qualifiers of you, not of the paper, so indeed it seems harsh to punish the authors for the bad referee selection of the editor.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#49

Post by _delirium »

raziel2701 wrote: post #43
avip wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have (almost) open publishing and open commenting. Did that improve anything?

There's open commenting? I've never seen the back and forth of the review process be published. It should be published.

Some machine learning conferences use openreview.net for this.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#50

Post by davrosthedalek »

ylmm wrote: post #14
Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

I've only worked with professors in economics and political science but I'm under the impression that this is true more generally of academia. Some people do it to help advance the state of the field. Career incentives and standing in the field also come into play. As the poster above mentioned, a professor would be able to say more. To respond succinctly to your comments: money isn't the only incentive in life, so i…

My primary motivation in trying to do a good job as a referee is that if I write a paper, I also want a referee who tries to do a good job. This can improve the quality of a paper tremendously.
Post reply on HN