Is there value in a blockchain based academic journal?
have it be well distributed, and only let universities submit new articles if they prove themselves doing replication studies against other universities' submissions
Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
221–230 of 313 posts
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would imagine that Elsevier would argue that they (and their fellow for-profit journal publishers) are providing a valuable service of being the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge and without them science would collapse in a chaos of confusion and misinformation. (Not that I really believe that's the case; things like ArXiv show that science can work without the involvement of journals open or closed at all, but t…
I'm not sure arXiv is an example of doing without journals. arXiv doesn't involve peer review, so that any result published there are to be taken with a big grain of salt. On the other hand, there are open access journals that essentially act as a layer above arXiv, so that the main added value is review.
I don’t think science would suffer too much if we just abandoned peer review and committed to the arXiv route. Peer review does little to ensure research is actually rigorous. Rather, it mostly ensures the authors know how to play game: use the right language, cite the right people, and don’t stray too far from the current fad while simultaneously selling what they’ve done like it’s the hottest thing since relativity.
Once you’ve read enough papers, you don’t even have to invoke the replication crisis to see that most papers should be taken with a grain of salt.
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t tell if by “dying industry” you mean universities or journal databases.
Honest question: why do commenters here frequently seem to bear a chip on their shoulder when it comes to institutions of higher learning?
Another possibility I didn’t see below: a higher than average number of HN readers appear to have gone to grad school. My (admittedly jaded) view says that grad school produces one of two outcomes: people disgusted by academia, and people with Stockholm syndrome.
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
If by "top-tier" you mean "sufficient to impress the hiring committees at Stanford or Harvard", sorry, no. Personally, having no interest in faculty jobs to begin with, I'd vastly prefer to deal with PLOS than Elsevier, but good luck persuading the average biosciences postdoc to choose it over the Holy Triad of prestige journals.
Top tier in terms of review practices and reproducibility. If you mean Elsevier, Wiley, Springer by "Holy Triad", you can convince them to publish almost anything as a scientific article if you pay enough and format correctly. PLOS is applied medical sciences only, for now. We need more of PLOS-like journals. Do you have no academics in your academic hiring committee?
That's fine. But that isn't what top tier means in the context of career advancement.
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are few open access journals in my field, and the ones that will publish open access charge absurdly high fees for it. I have a spreadsheet for my field: $2000 to $3140 per article, average $2690. I tried to negotiate with one smaller and more specialized journal in my field on the fee without any luck. I've also tried to find journals willing to take my paper without copyright transfer, as if commonly done for…
Interesting that you did not succeed negotiating. We had a case where our open-access fund would only help out if the fee was $2000 maximum. We communicated that to the journal and they obliged without further comment. (Though this was after review and that journal really wanted our paper as it was obvious that we would raise their impact factor). I agree that $2000 still seems like a lot of money for an online-only…
Thanks for your comment. Perhaps the order matters. I asked before submitting. I'll try submitting to the same journal and see if their willingness to negotiate changes after the paper passes review.
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#226Is there value in a blockchain based academic journal? have it be well distributed, and only let universities submit new articles if they prove themselves doing replication studies against other universities' submissions
Possibly. There's rougly two problems here:
- distributing research: blockchain is useless here. Things like SciHub already solve this problem on a practical level currently. I used SciHub regularly through my undergrad because it was so much easier to use.
- tracking the "notability" of research. A blockchain might be useful here, but I think you'll have a hard time unseating the existing journals.
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#227> Traditionally, the publishers accept papers for publication for free but charge steep subscription fees To my knowledge (academic family and partner in NZ) this is false, publishers charge for both publication _and_ reading in general.
This reminds me of the time when all papers in some journals had this boilerplate at the end:
The publication costs of this article were defrayed in part by page charge payments. This article must hereby be marked “advertisement” in accordance with 18 U.S.C. §1734 solely to indicate this fact. [1]
[1] https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/01/09/history-as-ca...
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#228Sounds like everyone at UC is going to use SciHub now, and most likely won't switch back once access gets restored? This seems like a self-defeating move on Elsevier's part? Incidentally, I heard from someone who worked at Elsevier around four years ago that the working environment there was terrible, and she couldn't wait to leave. That doesn't seem surprising.
> Sounds like everyone at UC is going to use SciHub now Plenty of people already do. It's much easier to use than any kind of library proxy service if you're not on campus, and it's also far more reliable. Even if you have access, sci-hub often has things that the library doesn't.
I have access to uni libraries elsewhere, but I can provide my own anecdote. At home it's sci-hub, on uni wifi it's just via the website which usually automatically grants access seamlessly. Basically, whichever is least inconvenient.
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#229Meanwhile, everyone involved knows about the black raven in the room (the one with the reddish key in its mouth). It's just not polite to mention it.
I do wonder, though, if more academics working in the UCs know about sci-hub, than do not? In case not, start spreading the good news!
I am unsure about senior academics, but younger academics and research students are all aware of sci-hub these days, even if they don't use it that much.
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
a couple of things: 1) Much of what I advocate for is based on how many human societies have operated for millennia. Collective management on the tribal level seems pretty common historically. 2) Some innovation is possible. Our society every day does things we didn’t do for thousands of years. Technology definitely changes this, but for example we didn’t do very large representative democracies until recently. It st…
There is a huge difference between "collective management on the tribal level" and abolishing the profit incentive in an advanced industrial economy. People who've never known anything other than prosperity have a tendency to idealize pre-modern societies - they vastly underestimate how miserable life was for most people, and how much violence was involved in organizing these societies. Imagine a typical homeless cam…
You and I have very different ideas about both what is possible in the future and what is acceptable today. It’s funny that you mention homeless camps, which would not be needed in a socialist society.