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Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals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Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#141

Post by jltsiren »

haritha-j wrote: post #54

Arxiv isn't the solution. But i think computer science conferences are. These have the same scientific rigour and standards in the review process as journals in other scientific fields, but don't price gouge. Yes, conferences are also a bit expensive, but you get a lot for your money, and they usally aren't out to make a big profit.

The peer review process in CS is pretty bad, especially in conferences with a single round of reviews. When you combine this with high rejection rates, peer review becomes more about finding excuses to reject a submission than about trying to improve it.

Conferences also don't work that well as publication venues, as they often require that one of the authors must attend the conference physically. And it's not as much about money than about visa policies and travel restrictions. Even in the 2000s and 2010s, when international travel was easy, people from non-Western countries could often not get visas to attend conferences. And today the situation is much worse.

I've been to three international conferences in the past year. One was held in Europe. People from Russia and Israel had to present remotely, the former due to an ongoing war and the latter due to an unexpected war. Another was in the US, and there were fewer Europeans than usual, as many were not willing to take the risk. And the third one was in Japan. People from China could not attend due to increased tensions. People from Israel were there, but they were worrying if they would make it home before the next war. (They made it, and the war started a day or two later.)

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#142

Post by bdangubic »

WalterBright wrote: post #140
bdangubic wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is anecdotal - look this up outside of your strip malls. It has the some of the lowest failure rates of just about any business and 20-35% ROI

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#143

Post by jpeloquin »

shellfishgene wrote: post #127
jpeloquin wrote: post #122

Is the goal to get rid of the journals or ensure open access? Because the US already has open access mandates for federally funded research. Immediate and without embargo. https://www.lib.iastate.edu/news/upcoming-public-access-requ...

This is discussed in the article.

The article's discussion of how the open access mandate works is wrong. Federally funded research, when published (even in a closed-access journal) must be deposited in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ or a similar repository.

Edit: OA advocates have won pretty much everything we wanted, there's not much left to be outraged over.

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

#144

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

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 don't think there's really such a thing as a credible citation source. The citation just has to point to a source that hosts the genuine article; the credibility of the article comes from the articles that point to it, and the independent verifiability of the article's claims, not the location that it is hosted.

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

#145

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #26
glitcher wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the author's idea: > So the solution here is straightforward: every government grant should stipulate that the research it supports can’t be published in a for-profit journal. That’s it! If the public paid for it, it shouldn’t be paywalled. The article then acknowledges this isn't a magic solution to all the problems discussed, but it's so simple and makes so much sense as a first step. I'm no expert here and…

Imagine being a scientist and reading “if you take this grant, you cannot publish your results in any of the most prominent journals in your field.” Sounds good?

The result is that open access journals would very rapidly, perhaps instantly, become prominent.

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

#147

Post by WalterBright »

bdangubic wrote: post #142
WalterBright wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is anecdotal - look this up outside of your strip malls. It has the some of the lowest failure rates of just about any business and 20-35% ROI

I've heard that laundromats are used for money laundering. This may explain their profitability, but it's a front, not a business.

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

#148

Post by shellfishgene »

jpeloquin wrote: post #143
shellfishgene wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is discussed in the article.

The article's discussion of how the open access mandate works is wrong. Federally funded research, when published (even in a closed-access journal) must be deposited in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ or a similar repository. Edit: OA advocates have won pretty much everything we wanted, there's not much left to be outraged over.

But that's what the article says? The (correct) criticism of that system is that the publishers just replaced the subscription fees with article processing charges for OA publication, and still profit from public funding the same as before.

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

#149

Post by jhbadger »

D-Machine wrote: post #67
blululu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen more than one PI at an R1 universities with multiple Nature publications use this heuristic. I would not call them incompetent.

Do you not notice the circularity of your reasoning here? Also I didn't say incompetent, I said "not very". More competent researchers make journal rep only a very small factor, and it is not via the "high rep = more trustworthy" direction (which is the bad heuristic), it is "pay-to-publish journals = not trustworthy" (better heuristic). Once you have ruled out a publication being in a trash journal, reputation is on…

It all depends on whether the paper fits the journal. Minor journals serve a useful service as a repository for minor results. And minor results are still worth publishing because they might provide a detail or technique later needed for a major result. The thing to be wary of is when you see a stunning result that should really be in _Nature_ or _Science_ in some minor journal. Why isn't it? Was it submitted there first and rejected? It would be nice if the history of a manuscript (and its peer review) stayed with a manuscript so you could see if the authors really corrected problems brought up by peer review or were just spamming journals with a flawed manuscript until they found one that published it.

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

#150

Post by D-Machine »

jhbadger wrote: post #149
D-Machine wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not notice the circularity of your reasoning here? Also I didn't say incompetent, I said "not very". More competent researchers make journal rep only a very small factor, and it is not via the "high rep = more trustworthy" direction (which is the bad heuristic), it is "pay-to-publish journals = not trustworthy" (better heuristic). Once you have ruled out a publication being in a trash journal, reputation is on…

It all depends on whether the paper fits the journal. Minor journals serve a useful service as a repository for minor results. And minor results are still worth publishing because they might provide a detail or technique later needed for a major result. The thing to be wary of is when you see a stunning result that should really be in _Nature_ or _Science_ in some minor journal. Why isn't it? Was it submitted there f…

Agree with all this. Once you've filtered / made decisions of quality based on the more substantive criteria, journal reputation can provide useful additional information / context. The case you mentioned is a good example.
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