131–140 of 254 posts
Curious what is the leading open source system being used for publication of journals where academics are trying to get out of such exploitative practices? Or is it a collection of bespoke setups with no clear leader?
https://github.com/alshedivat/al-folio
Take a look at the ICLR example in that repository. Yann Leclune popularized the open review movement years ago and everything is based on open source
Quite often, an article would be behind a paywall (and btw, @throwawaaarrgh, it was often Springer or Taylor, not Elsevier). We'd gladly pay $30 for it if it did the job, but nothing to just find out IF it did. And 99% of the time, it didn't.
So I never paid. Nearly always, the professor published something else on the same topic that was open access.
By watching the vintage TV show Miami Vice I learned that many people make a living out of selling an image (one of the cornerstones of Sonny Crockett's policing philosophy). TED comes to mind. Or WEF in Davos. They are all basically just marketing operations. (TED sells the hip/green young futurists and WEF plays the conspiracy angle.) Same with this science stuff here. Of course the professional scientists love the…
>WEF plays the conspiracy angle What, you're saying that's intentional? What's the WEF business model, anyway?
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>WEF plays the conspiracy angle What, you're saying that's intentional? What's the WEF business model, anyway?
It's funded by its members. So they basically pay to meet and promote their business to invited leaders and politicians. I guess you can make an argument that the more exclusive and mythical you can make it, the more likely are businesses to pay to participate.
They have 25% of the market. Just split them in five, mandate that no entity can have more than five percent of the market and watch their margins shrink. Maybe there is a less brutal way to do it, e.g., raise corporate tax in proportion to market share. The point is that the market system we currently have does not prevent oligopoly power and that is creating all sorts of problems.
The product they are selling isn't science/articles, it's exclusivity. Despite the rhetoric, most people don't want inclusivity. They want their stuff to be in the best/exclusive/fancy group, and only want to consume the best, most exclusive stuff. Obviously, my statement is not universal so providing some counter-examples is irrelevant.
But when you see fat margins (and if it bothers you, as it seems to be the case with those walkouts) always look for the reasons nobody can undercut them. Most of the time the "moat" (as they like to say here on HN) is some cozy arrangement.
By watching the vintage TV show Miami Vice I learned that many people make a living out of selling an image (one of the cornerstones of Sonny Crockett's policing philosophy). TED comes to mind. Or WEF in Davos. They are all basically just marketing operations. (TED sells the hip/green young futurists and WEF plays the conspiracy angle.) Same with this science stuff here. Of course the professional scientists love the…
It has been well said that academia is “show business for ugly people”.
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You're saying academic prestige is a Veblen good, like a handbag? Are you sure?
Being published in X journal doesn't make the work any better, but its apparent value is immediately increased by association. Academic institutions openly talk about this as why they use specific journals. They give positions/grants to people who have had more prestigious published articles, not to people who have done better work. The demand for a given researcher increases as their published work in increasingly p…
The problem we authors have is that nobody who has the knowledge has time to start a publishing business (and it's way less rewarding than science itself), and in the end we don't pay for publishing, but the grant (i.e. all of you) do. We authors are funneling money from the tax payer to publishers like Elsevier without asking questions, because all of our incentives are publish on the highest IF you could get, or leave academy. Also, in the hypothetical that somebody started a promising cheap journal, they would get an irresistible offer from Elsevier, Thompson, MDPI or Springer and that would be the end of it.
I've been in talks were people tells you "publish at whatever IF you want, if your research is good, people will notice". Yet, each and every time you apply to anything, they value the IF. If your paper has been cited by 7,000 Q1 papers, but was published in a Q4 journal, it worths much, much less than a paper published in Q1 journal cited by no one. The value of your paper is not made by association, but by a flawed metric that values mainly the journal.
But make no mistake: as an author I don't have to care how much a journal charges to publish, because I will get the money from you. All I care is the journal is a Q1. At Q1 level it's an oligopoly, they all charge about the same, and grants already includes the money to publish, so I don't need to compare prices. My monthly wage will be the same and my CV will get better. The publishers know this, and they prey on you... through me.
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> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? Because people can have opinions on industries they don’t work in? I don’t work in hospitality, and I have never cooked for a living. I can still confidently tell you when my food is burnt. A chef then can crawl out of the kitchen and explain the complicated process which resulted in me getting burnt food and I won’t car…
Nothing wrong with having an opinion, but having a strong opinion ("the solution is so obvious, i can solve this in 5 minutes") about an industry of which you known nothing of the inner workings come across as rather ignorant. Your example of "I can tell when my food is burnt" is a poor one. Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Do you know what's required to get tenure? To get scientific funding? All of those are…
If I’m paying for the whole thing, it behooves those in the game to either fix it quickly themselves or at least be polite while I’m offering my half baked solution.