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Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)

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Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)

#41

Post by jampekka »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #40
jampekka wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peer review and editing is done free by academics. Publishers "facilitate" this by having horrible unusable sofware platforms from the 90's for this. These are actually worse than nothing, as review would be a lot easier to organize and conduct via e-mail. Publishers don't add value, they subtract it. People probably have hard time undersanding this because the system is so absurd and so obvious racket they don't thi…

Peer reviewing could be made easier by public key cryptography. You could establish a web of trust between reviewers.

I see no need for that. There are no problems with verifiying identities of reviewers.

Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)

#42

Post by relaxing »

jampekka wrote: post #39
sonzohan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does typically incorporate peer review which has significant value. Significant value which is given gratis by said peers, which journals use to boost their reputability and, by association, their profits. Publishers are profiting off of free labor from subject matter experts. Even more disappointing is this free labor is viewed as a right of passage. Don't forget that the author spent hundreds to thousands of doll…

> It's why MIT ended their Elsevier contract, and why many other R1s are following suit. I think focusing on Elsevier is/was a mistake. All the publishers are running the exact same racket. Even non-profits like IEEE. It's a disgrace.

Elsevier are the biggest and most aggressive in driving up prices.

But you’re right the others aren’t far behind.

Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)

#43

Post by renonce »

curiousfab wrote: post #14
account42 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only browsers cared about making useful infomation available.

Ctrl+i (Firefox) Not generally useful to show this by default, because nowadays most pages are dynamically generated and although it's technically easy to implement, the last modified header is typically not set to $now.

In Chrome you can F12 and go to "Network" tab and then refresh the page. Choose the first file in the list (that's the HTML itself) and you will find "Response Headers" in the "Headers" panel, which includes Last-Modified. It's a bit deep, which makes sense as it's rarely useful.

Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)

#44

Post by JBorrow »

Thankfully there are a few amazing Diamond/Platinum open access journals popping up (that are often ‘arXiv overlay’, meaning they simply provide peer review services to arXiv-hosted papers). These journals are free to publish and free to read but still provide the useful categorisation/review/cataloguing services of traditional publications. Notably this includes a post-review DOI.

Relevant for the HN crowd is the Journal of Open Source Software: joss.theoj.org.

[I am an editor at JOSS]

Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)

#45

Post by g-b-r »

impendia wrote: post #38
zero_k wrote: post #7

Publishing in Academia is a scam. Nowadays everyone puts their papers also on arxiv.org so at least we can read each other's papers for free. While of course still paying the fees to these publishers who are doing nothing but messing up the PDF (I have to fight them to fix the mistakes they add every time a paper is published), while claiming to do a value-add, which happens to add value to nobody but their own pocke…

As an academic, I agree with almost everything you say -- but I wouldn't blame policies in universities. As much as I hate all the bureaucracy, I can't blame it here. Academics are periodically called upon to pass judgment on other academics. It's an unsavory part of our job, but given that there are fewer jobs, less grant funding, etc. than the number of strong applications, it's a necessary evil. To the best we can…

Gather together and begin publishing your own journals (even just in the form of a website)?

If it's you who made the existing journals great, you probably can do it again?

Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)

#46

Post by shaky-carrousel »

jampekka wrote: post #41
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peer reviewing could be made easier by public key cryptography. You could establish a web of trust between reviewers.

I see no need for that. There are no problems with verifiying identities of reviewers.

It could enable to have a decentralised web of trust of reviewers. In the same vein it is used to verify identities, you can use it to assess the reliability of a reviewer. A reviewer could sign another reviewer's key with the confidence it has about their reviewing.

Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)

#47

Post by RobotToaster »

zero_k wrote: post #7

Publishing in Academia is a scam. Nowadays everyone puts their papers also on arxiv.org so at least we can read each other's papers for free. While of course still paying the fees to these publishers who are doing nothing but messing up the PDF (I have to fight them to fix the mistakes they add every time a paper is published), while claiming to do a value-add, which happens to add value to nobody but their own pocke…

Sounds like a form of prisoners' dilemma.

Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)

#48

Post by sonzohan »

impendia wrote: post #38
zero_k wrote: post #7

Publishing in Academia is a scam. Nowadays everyone puts their papers also on arxiv.org so at least we can read each other's papers for free. While of course still paying the fees to these publishers who are doing nothing but messing up the PDF (I have to fight them to fix the mistakes they add every time a paper is published), while claiming to do a value-add, which happens to add value to nobody but their own pocke…

As an academic, I agree with almost everything you say -- but I wouldn't blame policies in universities. As much as I hate all the bureaucracy, I can't blame it here. Academics are periodically called upon to pass judgment on other academics. It's an unsavory part of our job, but given that there are fewer jobs, less grant funding, etc. than the number of strong applications, it's a necessary evil. To the best we can…

> As much as I despise this system, if you believe that universities can change this, at the level of policy, I am very curious to hear what you propose.

MIT did not renew their contract with Elsevier in 2020, a major reason being their inequitable profit model, and refusal to honor open access agreements. They have a postmortem saying the loss had little impact to their researchers.

How about that for a policy change?

> we are paying millions to Springer, Elsevier, etc. for the use of their names.

As an academic researcher, you are (or your institution is) paying them millions in publication and subscription fees so you can keep your job. Publish or perish.

Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)

#49

Post by da_chicken »

g-b-r wrote: post #45
impendia wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an academic, I agree with almost everything you say -- but I wouldn't blame policies in universities. As much as I hate all the bureaucracy, I can't blame it here. Academics are periodically called upon to pass judgment on other academics. It's an unsavory part of our job, but given that there are fewer jobs, less grant funding, etc. than the number of strong applications, it's a necessary evil. To the best we can…

Gather together and begin publishing your own journals (even just in the form of a website)? If it's you who made the existing journals great, you probably can do it again?

That's just kicking the can down the road.

Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)

#50

Post by jampekka »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #46
jampekka wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no need for that. There are no problems with verifiying identities of reviewers.

It could enable to have a decentralised web of trust of reviewers. In the same vein it is used to verify identities, you can use it to assess the reliability of a reviewer. A reviewer could sign another reviewer's key with the confidence it has about their reviewing.

This is done via academic credentials, mostly by publishing in the same field.

I don't think there are any major technical challenges in publishing or peer review. It's not complicated at all. The problems are sociological.

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