201–210 of 254 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how much of the journal bureaucracy, such as peer-review, actually adds value. Do we really need vetted journals? Are pre-print upload sites with the ability to comment good enough?
Peer reviewers are fellow academics who are not paid. Peer review does not add any cost to publishing. The cost all goes to for-profit companies making record profits.
On one side academics are crying about outrageous fees (rightfully so, since it's us, the taxpayers who usually pay for that), and immediately after, those same people require other academics to pay those same publishers to go up the academic ladder, get tenure, etc.
I don't know how it's in other countries, but in mine, it's the university itself that decides the requirements for their teaching stuff (including the required number of articles and scores).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peer reviewers are fellow academics who are not paid. Peer review does not add any cost to publishing. The cost all goes to for-profit companies making record profits.
Peer review absolutely add costs. Finding a reviewer who's qualified, free and willing takes time and effort, and that's increasing by the day. Frankly, I think peer review is doomed. There's now a flood of AI-generated papers that journals need to weed out, and even 99% success is not good enough for peer-reviewers' workload and continued respect. On top of that, natural demographics, the cuts to university funding…
Honestly if even $1 of public money goes toward research, the work, data, journal, etc should all be public domain. End of story. That should be a basic requirement of taking public funds.
I agree to a large extent. At the same time, we have a problem in this country where scientists are paid a pittance for their fundamental work, which downstream is capitalized by corporations, paywalled, patented, and sold for a huge profit. One thing that many scientists do is start businesses using their research, which serves as an incentive in the face of meager salaries. If not for the prospect of commercializin…
Having the articles freely available is good for encouraging discovery, communication and learning.
I don't see how that would significantly change the equation for protecting your business, as we assume the article was already available for 30 dollars.
If a 30 dollars fee is the only thing that stops someone from stealing your idea, it is either a bad idea, or your competitors don't realize it's a good one.
Honestly if even $1 of public money goes toward research, the work, data, journal, etc should all be public domain. End of story. That should be a basic requirement of taking public funds.
The problem is in this case, researchers have to pay a further premium to journals (>£4,000 per paper). So this funnels further public funds to the journals
Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publisher…
> Louis Vouitton sells a handbag for $2k. Is it worth $2k? You could say no, that any other bag would be just as useful. But value isn't utility alone. People find that the bag is worth the price because of the prestige that the brand imbues the owner with. Change the analogy so that the customers design and mostly manufacture the bag.
- providing all raw data
- provided a timestamped electronic lab notebook that documented what you and when you did it... if applicable.
- working code for your data analysis and all figures/graphs.
- a write up of your work that can be commented on by the public (questions, critique, supporting information, etc.). Markdown or Latex rendered online would be great. The ability to continue updating the same 'publication' in place with new information would be really helpful; for one, this would make review articles much more useful over a longer duration [ if they were maintained regularly].
- supporting pictures, video, audio. e.g. a video walk-through of your experimental setup.
- a means for other folks in the field of study to endorse or critique your work, like "weighted Github" stars.
We need a Github for science. Benefits:
- free access for everyone. more people having access and participating will hopefully increased pace of development.
- better feedback over time on the quality of research as each 'article' or body of research would have issues raised, people commenting whether or not they we are able to duplicate the findings, revisions over time to deal with comments/issues, etc.
- Potentially easier to search and find relevant research through knowledge graphs of inter-related work, meta tags, and the "awesome X" type of publications/sites that would pop up to aggregate solid research in a particular area of study.
- Low or no barrier to publishing research, scientific community bias will not stop work from publication.
- will encourage and make it easy to publish null results: i.e. "I tried this... didn't work? Here why I think it didn't work...anyone got ideas?" Null results are very important and seldom published.
- may reduce fraud. No Science or Nature... just publish your work, if it is awesome, it will get lots of views and stars. All data and code needing to be available will limit ability to get away with stuff.
etc...
Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publisher…
There’s quite an interesting model by which the editors of a prestigious closed journal leave en masse and set up a new open-access one, hopefully transferring the prestige of the former one. Gowers wrote about it here ( https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/06/04/a-new-journal-in-com... ). I’d claim that it’s mostly inertia that’s the problem. Prestige doesn’t require profit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
We academics pay for Impact Factor (IF). The problem here is that Elsevier is buying IF left, right and center, in a tactic very close (if not equal) to Microsoft Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. If there is a small publisher that has a nice IF built over the last 50 years, and charges $1,000 per paper, Elsevier would buy the entire business or magazine and hike the prices to $2,500 the next day. E.g. The Lancet, founded…
What about university presses?
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Of course national politics would be represented by the media as vicious and high-stakes: the media needs vicious and high-stakes messages to keep up viewership as its lifeline. Not even academics are interested in academic politics beyond their own immediate purview of the next publication or deadline.
Do you have any first-hand knowledge of academic politics, or can you offer any examples that demonstrate they are particularly "vicious"? When I think of vicious politics, I think of violence, which we see on the national stage. Would you say academic politics are violent, or no? > Not even academics are interested in academic politics beyond their own immediate purview of the next publication or deadline. Can you s…
Students are shackled to dead-end projects, uprooted from their communities by careerist mentors, and generally fucked over - in at least one case, literally - by their PIs. Scooping - having work similar to yours get published by another party - is a pervasive enough fear that reviewers can block publications to guard their own moats. Publication venues choose arbitrary selectiveness criteria, e.g. conference acceptance rates around 24.3%, to maintain an aura of high quality despite most papers being useless apart from bolstering citation metrics. Large projects that require many person-years of effort can only be done by already-established hype-leading "paper mill" labs where several grad students rotate who gets first author credit - the main measure for graduating. All of this accumulates into student depression and academic burnout that leaves academics alienated from each other, let alone other departments.
As my advisor put it, academia is a pyramid scheme.