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Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

experimental-history.com

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Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#61

Post by stanford_labrat »

i am very glad to see others (presumably non-scientists) in this thread dunking on the false paradigm that "peer review = true". anyone who peddles this notion is naive or a moron.

while the author is correct that the for-profit publishing is definitely a negative externality, i can't help but feel they are missing the forest for the trees when it comes to all the other worse issues in academia.

a full explanation of which would be much too onerous for a hn comment, but in no particular order: rampant scientific fraud, waste of tax payer dollars, wage suppression via "students" and visa-dependent laborers (J1 visa abuse), publish or perish evaluation criteria, lack of management training, blatant and rampant racism, etc. etc. etc.

the whole system needs to burn down and be rebuilt from the ground up.

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#62

Post by arethuza »

alexwebb2 wrote: post #35

> Robert Maxwell, one of the architects of the for-profit scientific publishing scheme. When he later went into debt, he plundered hundreds of millions of pounds from his employees’ pension funds. You may be familiar with his daughter and lieutenant Ghislaine Maxwell, who went on to have a successful career in child trafficking. Wow! Surprised that hasn't been mentioned here already. Jumped out to me immediately as a…

A good biography of Maxwell - "Fall" by John Preston.

And he apparently stole £763m...

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#63

Post by Aurornis »

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.…

> The problem isn't access, it's citations. arXiV is not considered a credible citation source since anyone can publish anything

I do some due diligence work from time to time. Uploading to arXiV is becoming a favorite tactic from companies trying to look impressive for investors. I’ve read a lot of “papers” submitted by startup founders that are obviously ChatGPT written slop uploaded to arXiV. They then go to investor and show their record of “published research”. Smart investors are catching on but there are a lot of investors who associate journals with quality and filtering and assume having a paper on there means something.

The filtering and curation problem is real. It seems like academic pettiness or laziness from the outside, until you see the volume of bad “papers” that everyone is trying to publish to chase the incentives.

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

#64

Post by asdff »

snowwrestler wrote: post #36

I don’t understand why people care so much about the cost of journal subscriptions. If we add up all the revenue from all major scientific journal publishers, is that a big number in the context of the national economy? Or even compared to one major tech company? I feel like this is one of those classic local minima where a community starving for resources fights vociferously amongst itself because they have internal…

The big pain point is being between jobs where you lose your institutional access to the scientific literature.

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

#66

Post by engineer_22 »

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.…

We have a gatekeeper already in the funding source - they do the work of vetting researchers prior to funding the work.

Piggy back this system so that the funding source publishes the papers itself, and researchers can only publish their papers that are directly funded.

This system requires the cooperation of an organization to build the publishing infrastructure, but this could be a lowest capable bidder, and less drag on the system overall.

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

#67

Post by D-Machine »

blululu wrote: post #57
D-Machine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first thing an academic does is check where a paper is published, before even reading it. It's a crutch IMO, academics that do this are not very competent, because we have plenty of research suggesting that higher-profile journals are in fact less trustworthy in many ways, or that there is no correlation at all between reputation and quality (see my other post here in this thread). Yes, some trash journals publ…

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 only a very minor factor in consideration, and methodological and substantive issues are what matter.

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

#68

Post by bjackman »

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?

But IIUC there are entire fields where basically the whole US ecosystem is funded by federal grants. So if this policy gets enacted those journals are no longer prominent.

(Maybe you'd need an exception for fields where the centre of mass for funding is well outside of the US, though).

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

#69

Post by fireflash38 »

D-Machine wrote: post #32
amluto wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think charging money is a necessary signal that this particular gatekeeper is doing a good job. I’ve never seen the slightest relationship between the charge to read a paper and the quality of review.

Because there isn't such a relation. It's a thing people believe when they don't have actual experience with peer review. If anything, predatory journals and low-quality pubs can charge more, since publication is more guaranteed (and researchers reaching for these pay-to-publish journals are more desperate).

It's a reputation economy. Like review sites. They start off truthful, and then as time goes on incentives shift to bad actors to subvert it. Or they just sell out their reputation.

Yelp, TripAdvisor, wire cutter, hell even Google results themselves.

Once you start poisoning that well, it's difficult if not impossible to claw it back.

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

#70

Post by D-Machine »

emil-lp wrote: post #56
D-Machine wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first thing an academic does is check where a paper is published, before even reading it. It's a crutch IMO, academics that do this are not very competent, because we have plenty of research suggesting that higher-profile journals are in fact less trustworthy in many ways, or that there is no correlation at all between reputation and quality (see my other post here in this thread). Yes, some trash journals publ…

> IMO, academics that do this are not very competent, because ... Where's the cry-laugh emoji when I need it. Of course academics check where stuff is published. Please... There are still real journals put there, although you might not know which is which.

Ah, look, another smug sneer that ignores the evidence I presented, and makes another circular argument (i.e. that because academics look at rep, this is justified, even though I provided evidence disputing this).

I know what journals are better / not. But reputation only is helpful in letting you ignore trash journals, once you are out of trash land, rep is just not a very meaningful factor, and you have to focus on methodology and substance.

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