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Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals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Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#71

Post by beambot »

butILoveLife wrote: post #60
beambot wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is actually what ruined my respect for Academia. Spoken like someone who never went through grad school at a competitive R1 program It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. It's about the same for professors too. We already paid our dues by helping peer review (for free) a half doze…

>It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. You know what else works really hard? A washing machine. Hard work alone doesnt create value. I could give you a spoon and tell you to dig a hole, or I can teach you how to use a Digger.

Some things are hard because you overcomplicate them. Some things are hard by their very nature.

Unless you are a Claude Shannon type, adding fundamental new knowledge to humanity's corpus is generally actually hard - at least in science & engineering. If you feel differently, I look forward to reading your groundbreaking papers!

Re: Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

#72

Post by bonsai_spool »

MarkusQ wrote: post #39
bonsai_spool wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Darwin's work wasn't peer reviewed. Nor Einstein's Except it was…? This is absurdly ahistorical and the fact that you cross disciplines in trying to make an incorrect argument questions whether you are in science at all. The structure of peer review in Darwin’s time was different, where experts wrote monographs and gave lectures at symposia that then led to letters among their peers. Which is what happens now, if y…

Sorry. I meant "peer reviewed prior to publication" as the phrase is presently used. I thought that was obvious. What you're calling "peer review" is what I would call "discussed" or "debated" which it certainly was. I dispute your claim that the new paradigm is superior.

> Sorry. I meant "peer reviewed prior to publication" as the phrase is presently used.

Accepted. But now there is Arxiv and Biorxiv and even Medrxiv—so we're back to where things were, it seems.

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

#73

Post by light_hue_1 »

bsoles wrote: post #22

> So the solution here is straightforward: every government grant should ... People who write such sentences have no idea what they are talking about or are being intentionally naive for whatever reason. Just because your one-sentence solution reads simple doesn't make the actual solution simple. Because such a solution involves changes to laws, changes to entrenched interests, changes to distribution of money involv…

This defeatist attitude is why we can't have nice things anymore.

Fun fact, all of those things happened and this is already government policy for any NSF grant: https://www.nsf.gov/policies/document/faq-public-access

So maybe consider that when you give up on obvious things that are good based on some conspiracy theory that the "man" is trying to keep you down, what you're actually doing is being part of the system and endorsing it. Changes like this do happen, they just happen despite you.

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

#74

Post by dlisboa »

bsoles wrote: post #22

> So the solution here is straightforward: every government grant should ... People who write such sentences have no idea what they are talking about or are being intentionally naive for whatever reason. Just because your one-sentence solution reads simple doesn't make the actual solution simple. Because such a solution involves changes to laws, changes to entrenched interests, changes to distribution of money involv…

A solution to a problem that doesn't change the current state of affairs, which by your definition makes it a simple solution, is not an actual solution.

There are plenty of simple solutions to real problems whose only blocker is upsetting the status quo. "We have no housing...let's build more housing" is, in fact, a very simple solution. That it doesn't happen has nothing to do with it the solution itself.

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

#75

Post by D-Machine »

tokai wrote: post #43
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.…

Just putting it on arXiv does not automatically make it OA. It needs a permissive license.

I think people in this post are using arXiv as sort of metonymy / stand-in for OA here, but, yes.

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

#76

Post by kkfx »

Science has never been free, and it isn't mostly progressive; like the bulk of the population, it is hyper-conservative without admitting it. So, the first flaw lies in the very social structure of those who practice science.

The second problem, however, is a modern one: the pure, naked, and raw commercialization of science through "publish or perish", whereby the researcher is a Ford-style assembly line worker to be managed and who must be replaceable.

Without a MENTAL paradigm shift, even before a material one, we will only be able to plug small leaks on a ship with a torn hull.

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

#77

Post by tikhonj »

Worth pointing out a success story: all ACM publications have gone open access starting this year[1]. Papers are now going to be CC licensed, with either the very open CC-BY[2] license or the pretty restrictive (but still better than nothing!) CC-BY-NC-ND[3] license.

Computer science as a discipline has always been relatively open and has had its own norms on publication that are different from most other fields (the top venues are almost always conferences rather than journals, and turn-around times on publications are relatively short), so it isn't a surprise that CS is one of the first areas to embrace open access.

Still, having a single example of how this approach works and how grass-roots efforts by CS researchers led to change in the community is useful to demonstrate that this idea is viable, and to motivate other research communities to follow suit.

[1]: https://authors.acm.org/open-access/acm-open-for-authors-hom...

[2]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

[3]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en

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

#78

Post by renewiltord »

> Academia is so cutthroat that anyone who righteously gives up an advantage will be outcompeted by someone who has fewer scruples. What we have here is a collective action problem.

And what, pray tell, is this advantage? If there is no utility to anyone in publishing in Science or Nature then how can it be an advantage.

I suspect it’s simply that these guys are a curation service. They separate the cranks from the science. They can be imperfect at this so long as important people separate the cranks from the science.

This kind of winnowing is pretty useful in general. Many universities are pretty much that and people pay to attend them.

It makes sense that a credentialing service would charge for the credential. It doesn’t make that much sense to say “no credentials allowed; you and timecube guy must be considered the same”. I want you to show your credentials. We all do because science is an empirical field and empiricism depends on facts. I cannot process your paper with pure reason.

If you looked under the microscope and saw light I don’t know that you didn’t. At scale I need someone to figure out “this wasn’t a Photoshop situation; that’s totally fluorescence”. Arguing that we should remove these organizations is similar to saying you should remove diplomas and so on. Anyone can continue to attend universities. They just can’t hand out diplomas. So no credentials. Only learning. Simple thing. Or perhaps not so.

The credential is the useful thing.

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

#79

Post by psychoslave »

snowwrestler wrote: post #15
scottndecker wrote: post #9

Based on title, I was figured it was referring to USA moving to the metric system

U.S. scientists already did, at least at work. They still drive home at imperial speeds though.

I thought it was USA custom metrics? Not less ridiculous, I guess.

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

#80

Post by Aurornis »

butILoveLife wrote: post #60
beambot wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is actually what ruined my respect for Academia. Spoken like someone who never went through grad school at a competitive R1 program It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. It's about the same for professors too. We already paid our dues by helping peer review (for free) a half doze…

>It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. You know what else works really hard? A washing machine. Hard work alone doesnt create value. I could give you a spoon and tell you to dig a hole, or I can teach you how to use a Digger.

> You know what else works really hard? A washing machine. Hard work alone doesnt create value.

My washing machine creates a lot of value for me. The time it saves me is incredibly valuable.

Most machines that work really hard are valuable because they free up time.

This wasn’t the clever burn you thought it was.

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