Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan • Hacker News Board

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#21

Post by Coding_Cat » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 8:56 PM UTC

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #11

As a related aside: Does anyone know why arXiv has no system of public comments or (even better) a public peer review system built in? Whenever this topic comes up at a (CS) conference, everyone is for that, and yet, arXiv is functionally the same for quite a few years now.

This is actually something I have been thinking about writing myself. Look at all the major social networks, and all their metrics, analysis, ranking systems and the like.

Imaging what you could do with a social-network like publication database (research-gate sort of is, but it doesn't think big enough and the UX is confusing, imho). Every publication became a "post" so to speak. You could easily include discussions (both on the paper, as well as general discussions), ratings, user curated lists (instead of expensive journals), host links to any relevant non-paper data. Funding could be provided by Universities, or by means of a registration fee, or simply with an ad supported model. Targeted ads will probably bring in a relatively high CPM due to the target audience.

Incidentally, while we're at it, we could also get rid of strict formatting guidelines and super-formal writing, some of the best papers I've read are informal. And it's a very modern thing to do anyway, old papers by Kelvin and the like read much better than what we have to write these days.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#22

Post by bunderbunder » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 8:57 PM UTC

SiVal wrote: post #7

I would like to see the governments that fund research get together and create a rule that your government funding requires that a public version of the paper be made available online before that paper could be submitted to a private publisher. This would help to separate the public availability of useful information paid for by the public issue from the academics' career-promotion-via-publication issue. That would,…

OTOH, I'm not sure if the peer review system isn't ripe for disruption anyway.

Peer review is a system that's designed for the old dead-trees world, where space for publishing in print journals was extremely limited, publishing in a print journal was the only way to share knowledge, and you only got one shot at it because there's limited options for fixing errors after the plates are engraved. It's primarily there to ensure a minimum standard for the quality of the paper, not necessarily the research. So what it's really good for ensuring is that the paper explains the research well enough that someone who's reading it (and knows what they're doing) could attempt to replicate the work.

What it is not designed to do, though, is ensure that the research is valid. Peer review can't reliably detect fraudulent data, nor can it reliably detect fabricated data. Heck, it can't even detect p-value fishing, which is a really sobering problem when you consider how many scientists really don't seem to understand why p-value fishing is such a problem in the first place. There's supposed to be a different mechanism for detecting that stuff: replication.

Buy ironcially, replication is something the current journal system actively discourages. Space in journals is a scarce resource. Furthermore, journals are competing with each other for prestige. They've got very little reason to waste space on replicating old findings (booooooooring) when they could be publishing brand new stuff (exciting!). In turn, researchers have very little incentive to try and replicate each other's findings. It's already hard to justify spending money on replicating existing findings. But there's no way in hell a researcher is going to waste their precious resources on work that they wouldn't even be able to get published.

So the long and short of it is, people place far too much trust in peer review. In fact, peer review is a terribly low hurdle. All too often complete junk gets through it about as easily as excellent science. The trick is that it just has to be well written junk.

OTOH, a system that removes barriers to doing replication work - or better yet, starts actively encouraging it - could also do much of the work of peer review. Because then we'd have peers reviewing the actual research and not just things people write about research.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#23

Post by xiaq » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 8:58 PM UTC

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #19

xiaq wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it was intended as a repository of preprints instead of a publishing platform. It surely has the potential of becoming one, but that has not happened yet.

I would really like a more comprehensive answer from somebody close to the source; you more or less say "it does not have it because it has not happened yet". Note that arXiv has features that many previous repositories did not have, such as easy access to the original TeX files. Plus, a comment system for a repository of preprints sounds very useful to me -- you can have early birds (such as PhDs or very active scie…

Wikipedia told me this, but the homepage also advertises itself as an e-print service.

Anyway, "it does not have it because it has not happened yet" is exactly my point, because I don't see why it cannot evolve into a publishing platform.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#24

Post by Coding_Cat » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 9:02 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #18

xiaq wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it was intended as a repository of preprints instead of a publishing platform. It surely has the potential of becoming one, but that has not happened yet.

Besides, if you open up physics papers to public comments you'll be deluged by cranks who think they can prove Einstin woz teh rong!!!! with a bit of algebra and a lot of punctuation. I don't know how you'd do useful public peer review. By definition, "peer" assumes some professional domain competence. The current system is probably too restrictive, but it's hard to imagine a more open system that's at least as usefu…

My idea would be to either restrict access (to certain areas, such as comments and reviews) to verified groups. Initially I would say to verify users through universities and/or use a computer automated system to rank each user, determining whose opinion to weight heavily and whose to dismiss.

I would also make reviews public and name-and-shame any caught review fixing (if proper evidence is available), which would be the bigger problem imho. But again, I think this is something we should also be able to detect using proper algorithms. If a user Alice always rates the papers by Bob highly, even when others disagree, perhaps her opinion of Bob's work is not to trustworthy.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#25

Post by xiaq » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 9:03 PM UTC

personjerry wrote: post #14

Anyone else think that this (academia/research) sounds like an industry that could be disrupted?

It surely is, but beware that unlike fields like social networking which makes money from idle and bored people, scientists have a lot of things to get busy and excited about and are much harder to convince, unless there is some real advantages coming up.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#26

Post by SiVal » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 9:10 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #22

SiVal wrote: post #7

I would like to see the governments that fund research get together and create a rule that your government funding requires that a public version of the paper be made available online before that paper could be submitted to a private publisher. This would help to separate the public availability of useful information paid for by the public issue from the academics' career-promotion-via-publication issue. That would,…

OTOH, I'm not sure if the peer review system isn't ripe for disruption anyway. Peer review is a system that's designed for the old dead-trees world, where space for publishing in print journals was extremely limited, publishing in a print journal was the only way to share knowledge, and you only got one shot at it because there's limited options for fixing errors after the plates are engraved. It's primarily there to…

Well said, and it explains part of what I meant when I wrote "(if peer review is of any value)" in the post. The other reason I wrote that is because of the political shenanigans inherent in the peer-reviewed journal system. "Anonymous peers" will sabotage the work of their rivals, and the journal editors will often choose them for the purpose of sabotaging research that doesn't support the causes the journal editors are working to promote.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#27

Post by xiaq » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 9:11 PM UTC

Coding_Cat wrote: post #24

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides, if you open up physics papers to public comments you'll be deluged by cranks who think they can prove Einstin woz teh rong!!!! with a bit of algebra and a lot of punctuation. I don't know how you'd do useful public peer review. By definition, "peer" assumes some professional domain competence. The current system is probably too restrictive, but it's hard to imagine a more open system that's at least as usefu…

My idea would be to either restrict access (to certain areas, such as comments and reviews) to verified groups. Initially I would say to verify users through universities and/or use a computer automated system to rank each user, determining whose opinion to weight heavily and whose to dismiss. I would also make reviews public and name-and-shame any caught review fixing (if proper evidence is available), which would b…

Hey, my idea is basically a free-market counterpart to yours: instead of restricting access to verified groups, allow anyone to create groups and let them compete for reputation.

This is how some journals come to be more prestigious than others anyway. You don't restrict the creation of journals to verified people; instead everyone gets to run a journal and they compete for reputation.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#28

Post by NotOscarWilde » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

Coding_Cat wrote: post #21

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #11

As a related aside: Does anyone know why arXiv has no system of public comments or (even better) a public peer review system built in? Whenever this topic comes up at a (CS) conference, everyone is for that, and yet, arXiv is functionally the same for quite a few years now.

This is actually something I have been thinking about writing myself. Look at all the major social networks, and all their metrics, analysis, ranking systems and the like. Imaging what you could do with a social-network like publication database (research-gate sort of is, but it doesn't think big enough and the UX is confusing, imho). Every publication became a "post" so to speak. You could easily include discussions…

Note that there are some projects that are related to this, for instance a social network for scientists [1], a Github-like site for article creation with public comments [2] and some unknown third party comment systems for arXiv [3]. (I just found this one by googling.)

For any success of such a project, the official endorsement from arXiv is crucial. Academia is a very conservative place; anything branded as a social network might hit a snag, especially if "pricing" or closed source recommendation systems pop up.

[1]: http://www.researchgate.net/

[2]: https://www.authorea.com/ -- It costs quite a lot if you have several papers and you wish to release them only after the preprint is ready.

[3]: http://pacs.gutcalc.com/

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#29

Post by cossatot » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 9:19 PM UTC

personjerry wrote: post #14

Anyone else think that this (academia/research) sounds like an industry that could be disrupted?

Don't conflate academic publishing with research. It's a facet of research, and there are those working on 'disrupting' it in some form or another (academia.edu, Mendeley (now owned by Elsevier...), Authoria, etc.). Academia, in some sense of the word, is facing MOOCs.

Research itself is a process that is basically self-disrupting, although maybe not in the original Clayton Christensen sense of a newer, shittier, cheaper product moving up-market and displacing the incumbents. Typically, it's the newer, more expensive, better product displacing the older ones and then moving down-market.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#30

Post by Coding_Cat » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 9:19 PM UTC

xiaq wrote: post #27

Coding_Cat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My idea would be to either restrict access (to certain areas, such as comments and reviews) to verified groups. Initially I would say to verify users through universities and/or use a computer automated system to rank each user, determining whose opinion to weight heavily and whose to dismiss. I would also make reviews public and name-and-shame any caught review fixing (if proper evidence is available), which would b…

Hey, my idea is basically a free-market counterpart to yours: instead of restricting access to verified groups, allow anyone to create groups and let them compete for reputation. This is how some journals come to be more prestigious than others anyway. You don't restrict the creation of journals to verified people; instead everyone gets to run a journal and they compete for reputation.

I think both ideas have merit. Which works best in practice would depend on the degree-of-shit (that's the scientific term) on your network. I fear special interest groups will, if they want, always outnumber legit researchers. If your network becomes large enough to attract the interest of these groups you might end up with "attacks" on climate research and other 'controversial' issues. Verified users could prevent this.

OTOH, I do not like excluding users, but I think public read-access and write-access trough accredited universities and research groups would be a fair balance. (Note, I also think if there is a charge associated with this process we should charge relative to the users country. Subsidizing access for developing countries by charging more in developed countries. To reduce exclusions.)