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Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals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Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#131

Post by j45 »

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.…

Maybe studies could be dual published in open access publications and private.

Then you get the private branded badge social proof and access can continue.

Also, til anyone can publish to arxiv.org?

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#132

Post by bglazer »

armoredkitten wrote: post #106
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.…

I've long wished that "journals" and academic societies would transition from a publishing model to a cultivation model. If everything is available on arXiv, that's great, but it also means the best of the best is mixed in with all the rest. Journals (in the sense of whoever is on the editorial board) don't need to cease to exist; they just need to transition to "here's our list this month of what the best new articl…

This is quite similar to how eLife does publishing. You still have to submit to them but they basically just add reviewer comments and an “eLife Assessment” that serves as the quality/curation signal rather than a binary publish/reject

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#133

Post by don_esteban »

tikhonj wrote: post #77

Worth pointing out a success story: all ACM publications have gone open access starting this year[1]. Papers are now going to be CC licensed, with either the very open CC-BY[2] license or the pretty restrictive (but still better than nothing!) CC-BY-NC-ND[3] license. Computer science as a discipline has always been relatively open and has had its own norms on publication that are different from most other fields (the…

That works nicely if your institution participates in ACM Open (no such institution in my country, and no, my country is not in the list of lower-middle income countries).

The combination of 'publish or perish' with 'pay for publication' and 'miserly grant money' is deadly.

While in theory the idea is nice, in practice this is a problem (maybe not in most rich countries, but here definitely).

Nowadays, you could always get the article you are interested in, even if it is beyond a paywall. Hence, perversely, the old model (which I hate, for reasons well explained in the original post) worked better for me. :-(

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

#134

Post by azan_ »

amluto wrote: post #27
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…

> I think charging money is a necessary signal that this particular gatekeeper is doing a good job. I’ve never seen the slightest relationship between the charge to read a paper and the quality of review.

I tend to agree, but keep in mind that most likely you just don't even bother reading the shittiest of the shittiest papers just based on title and abstract. And for every good article there are like 10 unindexed shitty ones.

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

#135

Post by bonsai_spool »

D-Machine wrote: post #37
bonsai_spool wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument depends on worse peer review at top journals - but fundamentally, you fail to show how doing any peer review is strictly worse than doing no peer review. I understand that we want arxiv to exist, and it does, and it’s growing. That doesn’t mean we don’t want Nature or Science to triage the most compelling stories. Importantly, we can already begin the search for these ‘cheaper’ review strategies while n…

> Your argument depends on worse peer review at top journals - but fundamentally, you fail to show how doing any peer review is strictly worse than doing no peer review. No, it doesn't. The argument is that peer review is incompetent gatekeeping in general, and so slows things down and makes thing expensive. Also, I am countering the argument "we need journals because journals do peer review" by arguing "peer review…

> I want actual organic review by the community, not by tiny groups of gatekeepers.

But this happens—and good work is cited and talked about. I can't tell if you work in science, but this latter part is obvious.

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

#137

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

bjackman wrote: post #3

I have had so many "why don't you just" conversations with academics about this. I know the "why don't you just" guy is such an annoying person to talk to, but I still don't really understand why they don't just. This article pointed to a few cases where people tried to do the thing, i.e. the pledge taken by individual researchers, and the requirements placed by certain funding channels, and those sound like a solid…

I explain here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47250811) but tl;dr it's because Universities need this system to get money and to give money. Nobody has yet proposed a solution which solves the money/prestige problem. With no money there's no research.

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

#138

Post by avadodin »

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.…

I just checked in case it had changed, but Arxiv is nowhere near as free-for-all as you imply.

Any crank who learned to use LaTeX is not allowed to post articles willy-nilly. You need endorsements in the field.

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

#139

Post by D-Machine »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #135
D-Machine wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your argument depends on worse peer review at top journals - but fundamentally, you fail to show how doing any peer review is strictly worse than doing no peer review. No, it doesn't. The argument is that peer review is incompetent gatekeeping in general, and so slows things down and makes thing expensive. Also, I am countering the argument "we need journals because journals do peer review" by arguing "peer review…

> I want actual organic review by the community, not by tiny groups of gatekeepers. But this happens—and good work is cited and talked about. I can't tell if you work in science, but this latter part is obvious.

I do work in science, I am claiming that pre-publication / journalistic peer review is limiting (and biasing) the amount of post-publication / non-journalistic peer review that can happen, and it is not limiting this in a very reliable or even IMO particularly desirable way.

There is definitely a problem with the over-production of junk science, and we definitely need a way to filter this out somehow. I am just claiming journalistic / pre-publication peer review does not do this effectively or reliably at all anymore (if it ever did).

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

#140

Post by WalterBright »

bdangubic wrote: post #114
WalterBright wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The laundromats around here closed down years ago. Not a characteristic of extremely profitable businesses.

There are a couple of strip malls nearby that have vacant rentables, vacant for years and years. Nobody has thought to put an extremely profitable laundromat in any of them.

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