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Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

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Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#111

Post by currymj »

BeetleB wrote: post #86
beambot wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is actually what ruined my respect for Academia. Spoken like someone who never went through grad school at a competitive R1 program It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. It's about the same for professors too. We already paid our dues by helping peer review (for free) a half doze…

I went to an R1 university. Most students did not have a 60-80 hour grind. If they did, it was because of an overbearing advisor. Years later, those students are not ahead of those who had a more relaxed advisor. And chances are: Those overbearing advisors are very invested in the current system.

it varies enormously by field.

in CS you will have intense grind weeks around conference deadlines and a more manageable but challenging pace of life otherwise.

in wet lab science you live by the schedule set by your experiments, which often involves intense hours.

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#112

Post by WalterBright »

Aurornis wrote: post #80
butILoveLife wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. You know what else works really hard? A washing machine. Hard work alone doesnt create value. I could give you a spoon and tell you to dig a hole, or I can teach you how to use a Digger.

> You know what else works really hard? A washing machine. Hard work alone doesnt create value. My washing machine creates a lot of value for me. The time it saves me is incredibly valuable. Most machines that work really hard are valuable because they free up time. This wasn’t the clever burn you thought it was.

Value is what you're willing to pay for something.

Laundromats aren't particularly profitable businesses.

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#113

Post by bsoles »

the__alchemist wrote: post #55
bsoles wrote: post #22

> So the solution here is straightforward: every government grant should ... People who write such sentences have no idea what they are talking about or are being intentionally naive for whatever reason. Just because your one-sentence solution reads simple doesn't make the actual solution simple. Because such a solution involves changes to laws, changes to entrenched interests, changes to distribution of money involv…

You sound like my parents. As I get older, I drift less into this mentality, and more into "I am tired of this defeatist bullshit, and accepting corruption and stagnation". I'm going to leave the world a better place, and never give in to this. I will vote for and donate to candidates who also want to fight, and run myself.

> I will vote for and donate to candidates who also want to fight ...

Fight for what? I bet to change one or more of the things that I have mentioned above. I have said "nothing will change" unless these things change; I didn't say you/we shouldn't do anything.

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#114

Post by bdangubic »

WalterBright wrote: post #112
Aurornis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what else works really hard? A washing machine. Hard work alone doesnt create value. My washing machine creates a lot of value for me. The time it saves me is incredibly valuable. Most machines that work really hard are valuable because they free up time. This wasn’t the clever burn you thought it was.

Value is what you're willing to pay for something. Laundromats aren't particularly profitable businesses.

Laundromats are the best business there is and are extremely profitable and seldom to never go out of business - you should look this up, it is fairly fascinating.

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#115

Post by currymj »

phil21 wrote: post #89
beambot wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is actually what ruined my respect for Academia. Spoken like someone who never went through grad school at a competitive R1 program It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. It's about the same for professors too. We already paid our dues by helping peer review (for free) a half doze…

I don’t think folks in academia have come to terms with how much the above attitude has completely and nearly entirely undermined the credibility of the entire scientific and academic community in the eyes of the general public. You don’t need a degree to understand how much utter junk science is being published by those who think they are superior to you. Just read a few actual papers end to end and look at the data…

On the whole you should rarely read papers, you want to read a whole literature in an area. Academics embedded in the field can do this easily. Academics outside of an area know to do this, and to bounce things off an expert to make sure you have the context and aren't over-indexing on a flashy result. Everybody learns the painful lesson in grad school to not just read a paper and believe everything will work as it says.

Somehow the general public and policymakers got the idea that if a paper gets published in any non-fake journal, this is an official endorsement that it's 100% correct, everything in it can be read in isolation, and it's safe to use all claims in the paper to direct policy immediately.

I think academia is partially to blame for encouraging people to believe this rather than insisting on explaining the nuances of how to interpret published research. On the other hand, nobody wants to hear a message that things are nuanced, and they will have to do costly hard work to get at the truth.

I think a world where "you can take any published paper at face value...without going direct to primary sources and bouncing it off an expert in the space" would be great, but it never existed, and it's just fundamentally impossible.

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#117

Post by jcranmer »

glitchc wrote: post #10

We already have open-access publications: Just put it on arXiV. Most researchers I work with do this already. The problem isn't access, it's citations. arXiV is not considered a credible citation source since anyone can publish anything. TPCs don't use it in their list of citations, neither do grant funding agencies or government institutions. The current academic enterprise relies heavily on third-party gatekeeping.…

In the publishing world, there is this thing called the slush pile: the collection of unsolicited submissions, essentially the only way a person without an agent can break into the field. And you can find quite a few editors' experiences with the slush pile in various blog posts or articles online. And the general reaction goes from naïve wonder at the idea of finding the diamond-in-the-rough to frustration with the quality of the submissions and a realization that the actual game is to figure out how to reject submissions with as little reading as possible (because they don't have the time to do any reading!). This is before LLMs came about, which have made the slush pile problem much worse because they don't improve the quality of the submissions but the increase the amount of reading that needs to be done to reject them.

Academia has the same fundamental problem. We don't actually have the time to read every possible paper someone has for us, because keeping up with literature takes time that we don't have. And while relying on the quality of the journal or conference as a metric for "is this paper worth reading?" has issues, to be honest, it is more effective than other proposed solutions. When I have done the literature searches that delved into the unknown, low-quality tiers of journals... no, those results were not worth the time I spent reading them.

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#118

Post by currymj »

bjackman wrote: post #58
bglazer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're an influential figure at a top-5 department in your field ... you all hate $journal. That's the problem, they don't hate these journals, they love them. Generally speaking they're old people who became influential by publishing in these journals. Their reputation and influence was built on a pile of Science and Nature papers. Their presentations all include prominent text indicating which figures came fro…

Maybe I am underestimating the gap in status between the "influential figures" I imagine and the people I actually know. I see: my friend has 10-15 years of experience in their field, they have enjoyed success and basically got the equivalent of a steady stream of promotions. I map this onto my big tech/startup experience. I mentally model them as: they are "on top of the pile" of people that still do technical work.…

it has been known to happen.

For example, spearheaded by Knuth, the community effectively abandoned the Journal of Algorithms and replaced with with ACM Transactions on Algorithms.

however it's difficult. a big factor is that professors feel obligated towards their students, who need to get jobs. even if the subfield can shift to everybody publishing in a new journal, non-specialists making hiring decisions may not update for a few years which hurts students in the job market.

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#119

Post by fanf2 »

RGamma wrote: post #29
bad_haircut72 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I think charging money is a necessary signal that this particular gatekeeper is doing a good job. We should recognise that money is a necessary part of this process, else there is no gate to keep. But we shpuld reverse the economics by having people pay to get their stuff peer reviewed. Imagine if reviewing research papers was something you could get paid to do, the incentive then isnt to rubber stamp t…

Yeah review takes time and time is money. This needs to be priced in somehow. Bonus side effect: Frauds get discovered and filtered out (in theory). But who watches the watchers? I guess review fraud will need to be considered as well.

Scientific publishers do not pay for peer review. Reviews are done by researchers as part of their jobs which are paid for by their research grants.

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#120

Post by abought »

This is a fine example of where someone's understanding of the problem runs ahead of their understanding of the solution.

A few scattered thoughts:

1. There is a difference between pre and post publication peer review. These discussions almost invariably conflate the two, but part of the runaway success of spam journals is that the benefits of pre greatly outweigh the risks of post. Historically, there was some link: if an article had problems, you would open the table of contents n months later and (might) see a letter or further discussion. Now, the table of contents is google, and many readers have weaker links to the same venue over time for followup. At the metrics level, the reputational hit of bad articles is weaker. (studies have shown that retractions are often cited with the original intent years after a correction was published)

2. The phrase "for profit" is doing a lot of work in this article. Some mega publishers, like ACS, are technically non profit member societies stapled to a mega-publisher, and have been strongly opposed to OA policies in the past. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chemical_Society#Cont... [2] https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/about/aboutacs/financ...

3. Outsourcing trust to someone who isn't the current evil... will only get you so far. No matter who takes over publishing, scientists are going to need to evolve new ways of evaluating work and each other, as the field grows far beyond what a small network can handle. Journals are a bad metric, but how does your dean evaluate 50 people hired to be the world's leading experts on (new and emerging field)? I've read plenty of these publisher=bad screeds, and most stop there. PubPeer exists for some, Twitter walkthroughs of papers were a great thing for a while, or there's also talk of overlay journals that decouple the act of publication (as a preprint) from the review-and-prestige piece.

4. The current system does two things: (a) provides a record of work done by students, who may labor under graduation requirements to publish something, whether their project is successful or not, (b) a shared record of current state of human knowledge, be it from researchers at a small college, or google, or pharma. Goal (a) puts a lot of pressure on peer review in "low tier" journals that even the reviewers don't like to cite, and I've had my doubts as to whether this is the best yield for effort.

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