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Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

newscientist.com

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

#61

Post by Y7ZCQtNo39 »

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…

In my experience, academia is largely driven by money. Professors at my university were recognized for the money they brought to the university first and foremost it seemed, rather than for any discoveries/innovations in a particular field.

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

#62

Post by moultano »

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?

I think so. I've followed the back and forth on a few papers on openreview.net and I found the comments nearly as interesting and informative as the paper they were commenting on.

There are a lot of things that only exist as suspicions and intuitions inside of a researcher's head, and that sort of information is much more likely to come out in a back and forth reviewing a paper than in actual published literature.

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

#63

Post by westurner »

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.

https://hypothes.is supports threaded comments on anything with a URI; including PDFs and specific sentences or figures thereof. All you have to do is register an account and install the browser extension or include the JS in the HTML.

It's based on open standards and an open platform.

W3C Web Annotations: http://w3.org/annotation

About Hypothesis: https://web.hypothes.is/about/

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

#64

Post by Something1234 »

avs733 wrote: post #60
Angostura wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually I came up with one... The top 50 research universities could get together and decide to no longer give consideration to pay-walled articles. It wouldn't affect them AT ALL...the research they do is already treated as pretty much cannon no matter where it appears. Everyone else would follow, and the journals would quickly respond with change. Yeah I know it's unlikely but they have enough social capital to ac…

That's not an alternative to peer review. It's a solution to remove the journals from the research, and it has a lot if's.

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

#65

Post by Nasrudith »

avs733 wrote: post #35
lumost wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It strikes me that the challenge of peer review is that it is non-transparent, and gate-keeping. It is impossible for one to read the peer review feedback related to a published paper, and it's similarly difficult to publish controversial pieces that break established norms. Contrast this to the peer review culture of popular open source projects - major pull requests have extensive and transparent dialogue, and disa…

gatekeeping in science is a theoretical good...the difficulty in practice is highlighted by the general 'three paths' for citations...articles that never get cited, articles that get cited a lot at first and then are forgotten, and articles that aren't cited until much later and then cited en masse. That last category is really the 'good science' because it does what we want foundational research to do - disrupt curr…

Here is a question what is the sort of theoretical good for the gatekeeping? What is the functional purpose of it? I think that answer would prove insightful for determining the future.

I can see two noncynical reasons for it one. One is educational purposes. Two would be quality control - if it is already debunkable or widely known there is no point in publishing in Nature "thinking done in the brain".

The cynical abuses and perverse incentives however are myraid and academic politicking is already infamous. I don't know what solution will work but understanding the system goals and functions should help decide what to replace and what to keep.

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

#66

Post by [deleted] »

avs733 wrote: post #60
Angostura wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually I came up with one... The top 50 research universities could get together and decide to no longer give consideration to pay-walled articles. It wouldn't affect them AT ALL...the research they do is already treated as pretty much cannon no matter where it appears. Everyone else would follow, and the journals would quickly respond with change. Yeah I know it's unlikely but they have enough social capital to ac…

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by justinclift »

impendia wrote: post #39
justinclift wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I get asked to peer-review a paper that looks uninteresting to me, or something outside my interests and expertise, ... or write a quick report recommending that the paper not be accepted . That seems kind of harsh?

Often (but definitely not always), requests to peer-review are accompanied by statements like "We consider our Journal X to be on par with Journals Y and Z, and aim to be extremely selective. Please only recommend publication if blah-blah-blah...." I'll then read the introduction. If I don't have sufficient expertise to referee the paper, I'll decline the request. If I do, then I'll see what the authors have accompli…

Thanks. With that added context it doesn't sound harsh after all. :)

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

#68

Post by specialp »

lumost wrote: post #23
Angostura wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It strikes me that the challenge of peer review is that it is non-transparent, and gate-keeping. It is impossible for one to read the peer review feedback related to a published paper, and it's similarly difficult to publish controversial pieces that break established norms. Contrast this to the peer review culture of popular open source projects - major pull requests have extensive and transparent dialogue, and disa…

There's a difference with scientific publishing for most disciplines. I work for a non-profit scientific publisher. Much of the research today that is coming out is extremely specialized. Thus there aren't many people in the world that have the expertise to referee a paper. So the review is anonymous in order to get a more frank and honest review (we hope).

I am also a developer. There are far more people that can give feedback on most code, and also it doesn't take a lot of apparatus or money to get good at coding. Also CS/OSS is relatively young when compared to other disciplines. We've almost always done things with honest and sometimes brutal feedback. Even academic research is usually announced/shared at conferences. Look at what happened when Nature tried to make an AI journal.... [1] I think there is still value in someone getting paid to manage research and referees and ensure a high quality product. Open peer review is just going to be a lot harder for some of these disciplines with limited experts.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/why-are-ai-researche...

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

#69

Post by pcurve »

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.)

I have half a dozen post doc friends in science. All of them are honest and exceedingly hard workers, but they became disillusioned after 10 years in academia. Despite their PHD and advanced degrees that they worked so hard to earn, they now work in completely different fields, most very low paying. I really hope you have better outcome.

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

#70

Post by sitkack »

While we are at it, lets change the format from .pdf to .zip to include source, data and other information that a hypothesis and test and resulting analysis can encompass.

First step is to put the pdf into the zip and have existing tools be able to navigate the hierarchy. Could include notebooks, bibtex, tex, data, images, etc.

And semantic scholar is in exactly the right place to institute this evolution.

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