in german law it's even impossible to transfer copyright (Urheberrecht). There is but one way: inheriting. What can be transferred though is usage right - licensing.
Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
51–60 of 97 posts
Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
#52Earlier 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…
> 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 chang…
> 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.
This ultimately sounds contradictory to your comment about MIT. It seems that by not renewing the Elsevier contract a university would have more funding for jobs?
Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
#53I tend to think of science as a distributed consensus process, and that peer review is analogous to a proof of work, and publishers are gatekeeping the distribution of proof of work. I think this is a useful analogy because one can subtract (in theory) the gatekeeping entirely: distributing proof of work is required for the distributed consensus to update.
However, and, crucially, journals differ in their effect on the consensus, e.g. IEEE or PNAS have much higher impact factors, and the competition both among researchers and institutions creates a market opportunity for gatekeeping, that naturally sorts those same researchers and institutions for the next ground of grants.
Again, I think it's hard to understand what a fix would look like, if we don't first recognize how distributed consensus should work for science. Algos like Paxos require a leader, and editorial boards for journals are effectively leaders.
Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
#54Publishing 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…
> Publishing in Academia is a scam Relatively soon after starting work on my PhD, one of my more-experienced colleagues explained the affect of "impact factor" on academic publishing. Back then I was young and naive, and assumed that at least impact factor itself would be some kind of open system based on freely-available data. Many years later, I read up on this and discovered Web of Science/Clarivate :( How is it p…
My reply is that people want to live in a capitalist country, but don't want to live with the consequences of that. This is one of the consequences.
Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only browsers cared about making useful infomation available.
To be fair, the Last-Modified header is very sketchy. I use it as one of the heuristics for determining the age of a website in my search engine. It's not great. It's frequently found incorrect, both older and younger than the actual age of the document. It's a bit of a relic from back in ye olden days when websites were static .htm files in a folder, which is so rarely the case today. It doesn't help it's also got o…
Plenty of websites also play with the user-visible dates on websites to game search engines - most dates shown in Google results seem to be complete garbage. I don't think Modified-Since is really worse, and it at least gives you a chance to maybe get a date for static pages.
But you are right that If-Modified-Since forces it to be a date for the complete document rather than the content, which might not be as useful to normal users for dynamic pages.
Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
#56[deleted]
Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
#57[deleted]
Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
#58Earlier 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…
> 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 chang…
>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.
This "fact" about MIT cancelling the Elsevier subscription is often cited but in isolation, it's misleading because it makes seem like MIT students and faculty don't even need Elsevier articles. That's not true.
What happened is that MIT switched to a pay-per-article or library loan method: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/how-to-access...
MIT in providing some other access methods to the same Elsevier articles for their researchers -- at the cost of some extra inconvenient steps -- is actually proving the opposite of the anti-publisher stance: The Elsevier publisher's articles are still valuable to us.
It's the subscription they cancelled and not the articles.
Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Publishing in Academia is a scam Relatively soon after starting work on my PhD, one of my more-experienced colleagues explained the affect of "impact factor" on academic publishing. Back then I was young and naive, and assumed that at least impact factor itself would be some kind of open system based on freely-available data. Many years later, I read up on this and discovered Web of Science/Clarivate :( How is it p…
My reply is that people want to live in a capitalist country, but don't want to live with the consequences of that. This is one of the consequences.
People want to live in free and democratic countries and in that respect capitalism is the least bad of the totalitarian regimes that exists…
Re: Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well, you depend on a trustable publisher. With a web of trust you won't need that. People could publish anywhere.