Scientific Publishing: Enough Is Enough

Scientific Publishing: Enough Is Enough
asterainstitute.substack.com

I think a lot of proof is given in the article about the claims that you suggest are "false generalizations". What "niche" field do you think the author works in, where these issues with publishing only apply there and no where else? More importantly, in what scientific fields is the publishing system actually working? Those would be effective counter-examples, and I'd genuinely be interested in learning why it works for those fields.

The whole "easy path" argument you're making is totally incomprehisible. Just say whatever it is that you're trying to say. Unless you're saying that scientists should just "care more", and their problems will be solved.

Administrative track is an established part of the academia. Many professors choose it for a variety of reasons, including interests, ambitions, and a diminished ability to contribute to research. Those people have a background in research, but they are administrators, not active researchers.

Science consists of many niches – many fields and subfields – each of which has its own norms and practices. People with limited exposure to the breadth of scientific research often assume that other fields are similar to the fields they are familiar with. The generalizations I mentioned in my last paragraph were examples of that.

Focusing on "the system" is an example of administrative thinking. It's the idea that science is a uniform centralized machine, where the administrators on top make the strategic choices and the people in the field execute them. Actual science is an unholy mess of people, formal and informal organizations, and connections between them. It works in a thousand different ways. Attempts to impose uniformity often make it worse, until people find ways to work around the system.

The system cannot be fixed, because each field works in different ways. Attempts to change it typically make it better for some fields and worse for some others. Instead of a single system, you need a thousand different systems. Instead of trying to fix science, you should ask more specific questions, such as how to make algorithm engineering, algorithmic bioinformatics or human pangenomics better.

Those are some of the niches I'm familiar with. I don't find anything particularly wrong with the formal publication system in those subfields, because it's only a small sliver of the communication. In addition to papers, we also have preprints, emails, blogs, Slacks, Zoom calls, GitHub, Twitter/Bluesky, conferences, workshops, summer schools, hackathons, and so on. People communicate in various ways, and they have always been doing that. Sure things could be better, but they could also be a lot worse. The actual issues are in the hard administrative constraints, such as funding, jobs, and visas.

On your last point about the system cannot be fixed, and it could be a lot worse - everything else you're citing is certainly a problem as well. Maybe even bigger in some cases. I still don't see how those are responses to this article's points. It's kinda like a version of "whataboutism" that you're proposing.

I just don't really get the casualness towards a problem that is widely regarded, among scientists, as something fairly serious - "publish or perish". Why do a handful of publishing houses get to have so much control over the careers of people who dedicate their lives to a field, often at great personal and financial expense (in the form of lost wages and consistently lower pay)?

I thought science was supposed to be about the discovery, and dissemination of information. Why is the process of doing capital-S Science so gatekept behind university or big corp doors? Why is the only output of most scientific research a dozen pages of virtually indecipherable material? Why can't we know about the process that was taken to arrive at those conclusions, especially when they are so incredibly consequential to all of our lives? Science is responsible for virtually all modern advances - why doesn't the public have the right to understand it fully?

That's my takeaway from the article, and I'm curious how you arrived at such a wildly different conclusion.