[HN Gopher] Author-paid publication fees corrupt science and sho...
___________________________________________________________________
Author-paid publication fees corrupt science and should be
abandoned
Author : anigbrowl
Score : 262 points
Date : 2024-08-23 18:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (osf.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (osf.io)
| elashri wrote:
| > Publishers need money to pay for typesetters, proof-readers,
| and editors
|
| Maybe in the past but most of the journals now will return the
| manuscript to the author or charge for revisions and any typing
| service.
|
| The margin in academic publishing industry is one of the highest
| in all industries for a reason.
|
| But I agree with the author that open source publishing
| incentives publishing more papers even if it is of lower quality.
| But also it does harm the repetition of the journal.
|
| The elephant in the room that people usually avoid is that this
| is a political problem. You cannot rely on publications and
| journals impact factor in grant selections and academic careers
| evaluations and expect to solve this problem. No scientist is
| going to choose to publish an article on their website vs a
| journal if it will not only not add but harm their careers. Yes
| people put papers on arxiv but most of who wants to continue in
| academia will submit them for a traditional journal publication.
|
| And how would we fix that? That's a policy reforms of funding
| agencies and academic institutions evaluation methodology.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| So scientists created this new publishing platform called the
| www but other scientists with no such expertise pretend it
| hurts their reputation to use it? That seems rather comical. Do
| they perhaps have a constructive argument to offer?
|
| If they desire a harsh rigorous review mechanism it doesn't
| seem very hard or expensive to build. Anon reviewers, top noch
| reviewers, they can have many tiers.
|
| It isn't the journal that has prestige but the track record of
| its reviewers.
|
| Mirror the topics on a discussion platform with separate
| sections for different skill levels. Heavy contributors earn
| bragging rights.
|
| Mirror the topics on a wiki and have experts approve edits.
| There is prestige in just approving contributions and having
| conversations.
|
| A chat client is also imaginable where one approves/adds
| contacts by type of publication.
|
| Each can run rare expensive advertising that lives up to
| unreasonable demands.
|
| But no? That would hurt the reputation - just because?
| whatshisface wrote:
| It is in nobody's individual interest to switch from an
| established journal to a new one before at least half of the
| rest have switched, so nobody does it. Scientists are also
| being squeezed within an inch of their lives by the career
| advancement / funding system leaving no time for the
| organization of this kind of change.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It's basically the prisoner's dilemma. Everyone knows what
| would be best if everyone did it, but doing it while others
| don't has a negative payoff.
| rscho wrote:
| You are clearly unfamiliar with biomed research. Journals do
| have prestige by themselves, by now. And it's not so much
| reviewers but rather the acceptance rate on cursory read by
| an (sometimes anonymous) editor that maintains it.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| The problem with gold OA is the proliferation of low-quality
| spam, and the recommended remedy is to both restore
| exclusivity (raise the barrier to entry) without supporting
| excessive (monopolistic, exploitative) journal subscription
| fees. The article's recommendation to build up society
| journals has a decent chance of accomplishing this. It won't
| prevent spam from getting published, but the only essential
| aspect is to keep the spam easily identifiable (e.g.,
| published by MDPI) so it can be safely ignored. The www seems
| to facilitate the spam business model so I don't think the
| spam will go away entirely.
| godelski wrote:
| Funny thing is I've had paper rejected where the only
| complaints were about a few spelling mistakes and grammar. They
| didn't say where but I guess that's enough
| biomcgary wrote:
| Publish or perish is yet another example of Goodhart's Law
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law).
|
| Paper count is a terribly easy metric to game when used to
| evaluate academic output because publishing low quality papers
| doesn't count against the authors.
|
| We can fix the problem in an unbiased manner by using ChatGPT to
| quantify article novelty, impact, and quality. /s
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| I almost missed the /s in my anger while reading that last
| line. It's too close to being real...
| ben_w wrote:
| You might want to get a paper bag to scream into:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06292
| OvbiousError wrote:
| You also need citations though, and those don't come with low
| quality papers, nor will they help your reputation. To get
| citations people have to actually read your stuff.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Or organize a fraudulent citation ring.
| dguest wrote:
| Some scientific collaborations put thousands of people on
| every paper, publish around 100 papers a year, and cite at
| least 10 of their own papers in each one.
|
| To some, that might be "a fraudulent citation ring". To
| others it's just business as usual.
|
| Of course a lot of academia has caught on to the ruse, but
| the mitigations are pretty ugly: some funding agencies and
| universities just stopped counting papers from large
| experiments as valid scientific contributions.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| The problem is not really author-paid fees. It's the fact that
| paper count and citation count is so important in the first
| place.
|
| Actually, if you want to fix the problem, peer-review should be
| rewarded rather than publications, with accurate peer-review and
| unbiased evaluations. Publication count should not be nearly as
| valued, and peer-review should not be anonymous.
| knighthack wrote:
| > _accurate peer-review and unbiased evaluations_
|
| And how do you even guarantee this, 'accurate' and 'unbiased'?
| Any form of peer review will always have a slant, no matter how
| 'objective' it is intended to be.
|
| Until that can be ascertained, I don't see how peer review is
| fundamentally superior. I would even argue that peer review can
| be detrimental to true science, especially those on the
| frontier.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > And how do you even guarantee this, 'accurate' and
| 'unbiased'? Any form of peer review will always have a slant,
| no matter how 'objective' it is intended to be.
|
| Peer review of peer review. Instead of a couple of scientists
| looking at it, the peer-review process should be entirely
| open. So other people can scrutinize it.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > peer-review should not be anonymous
|
| How do you prevent movement to an equilibrium where reviewers
| give favorable reviews to the reviewers of their own papers?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > How do you prevent movement to an equilibrium where
| reviewers give favorable reviews to the reviewers of their
| own papers?
|
| Peer-review of peer review. If all peer review is public,
| then people can analyse the trends.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| What about those who peer review papers that are later
| retracted?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Well, if the paper used falsified data, the authors should be
| punished. We can't expect all falsified data to be found, as
| some people are really good at falsification.
| drgo wrote:
| The entire research field needs major reform urgently. There are
| so many corrupting incentives for its practitioners that nearly
| most research findings (at least in my field: medicine) are
| suspect. Most researchers have neither the time nor energy to
| work on the important problems, to perfect their craft and to
| understand the limitations of the scientific methods. The metrics
| used in evaluating grant applications and academic promotion push
| researchers to work on short-term sensationalist and easy-to-
| publish ideas. This is sad because if there was a time we need
| solid unimpugnable science is now.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Yes, you are absolutely right, and this in turn has led to
| people disbelieving science and things which were once a
| bipartisan issue, such as climate change, has now been termed a
| conspiracy by people on the right. This has only happened
| because people do not trust scientists and science anymore.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| What if science and politics really are corrupt enough to
| corroborate the conspiracy theories? We need an
| _International Journal of Conspiracy Studies_ right now!
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Funny how the unabashedly partisan are the ones who make
| partisan statements in the same breath as their denouncements
| of partisanship.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Declining trust in science is not because of lack of open-
| access publications.
|
| The right is not ignoring research because it is behind a
| paywall or because it hasn't been reproduced. In fact, the
| right has chosen to willingly ignore research that _has_ been
| painstakingly reproduced, all in service of the god of greed
| and ideology.
| DataDive wrote:
| In my opinion the declining trust is science is due to
| science being far less apolitical and far less objective
| and less validated than in the past.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Yeah definitely dude. Climate disbelievers are actually
| doing good faith deep dives into the studies and
| identifying specific, real problems, and pushing for
| better science to be done.
|
| This is evidenced by... wait... what exactly?
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Which era of science was apolitical, exactly? The one
| where Galileo was prosecuted by the church? Or one where
| the US military invested billions of dollars into early
| computer science? Or one where nearly every physicist was
| staunchly anti-proliferationist ?
|
| Science has not, and will never be, apolitical. It is
| just that you are noticing that the politics of some
| scientists does not align with yours or with some
| politicians, and so you're noticing the difference.
| josephg wrote:
| Do you have any evidence for this?
|
| I suspect in the 60s and 70s science was (in the public
| imagination) wrapped up in a positive story of the
| future, full of space travel and prosperity for all. And
| now science is wrapped in a story (at least for some) of
| doom and gloom. Climate wars, or creeping authoritarian
| governments telling people what to think.
|
| I suspect the experience of actual scientists, in labs
| trying things out, hasn't changed anywhere near as much
| as the public's stories of science have changed.
| kergonath wrote:
| How is science political? I am happy to work from that
| premise, but it needs more than an assertion to be taken
| seriously.
|
| My experience is that people complaining about science
| being partisan (which they tend to mean by "political")
| do not understand much about science or how it works. I
| am willing to believe that you are not one of those
| people, but what you write is a bit close. So, could you
| give some particular examples or facts rather than empty
| phrases?
| zaik wrote:
| I'm not sure about the direction of causality here. Anti-vax
| people or climate change deniers also object to well-
| replicated results and would believe what they want to
| believe anyways.
| jononor wrote:
| It does give them some ammo for low-brow dismissal of the
| entire field of science. Which the more extreme may use to
| convince the more reasonable people. Even though the
| argument is rarely done in good faith, we do need some
| strategy for dealing with it...
|
| Being perfect is not really a realistic option though -
| mistakes will be made in such a complex endeavour as
| science. But if we can no longer legitimately say "it only
| _a few_ bad apples", then we must improve things
| drastically - or risk loosing all the credibility.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Replicable is not a synonym for correct even though some
| discourse about the science crisis treats it that way. It's
| necessary but not sufficient. The academic literature is
| full of studies that will replicate every time but the
| methods are lacking rigor or are just outright invalid. The
| classic correlation/causation fallacy pops up everywhere,
| to pick one example. A paper that shows a correlation then
| declares a causation will replicate just fine but still
| yield wrong conclusions.
| vixen99 wrote:
| Can you please define terms so that I can understand
| exactly what you mean? Meanwhile I decided to check
| Wikipedia.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial says
|
| _Climate change denial (also global warming denial) is a
| form of science denial characterized by rejecting, refusing
| to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the scientific
| consensus on climate change._
|
| I cannot assume this corresponds with your own use of the
| term which is why I suggest defining terms but I'm
| wondering if anyone reading this sees some slight problem
| in the Wiki wording? Let's assume any disputation will have
| to include peer-reviewed evidence if it's to be seriously
| considered though according to Wiki, it won't be, whatever
| the evidence. This is science - according to an anonymous
| editor of Wikipedia? As described by Wiki, this is a
| religion.
| dekken_ wrote:
| The fact that there is even a term like "Climate change
| denial", means that it feasible to deny "the science"
| (science is about doubt), because the climate scientists
| actually can't prove anything, fundamentally. They only
| have stats, and stat models, and there is no way, at our
| technological level to even model a single mole of carbon
| 12 (12 grams of atoms), so you think they can model an
| entire planetary system? Accurately? No, it's not
| possible.
|
| They also like to muddy the waters, climates change,
| because climates aren't even a thing, but an aggregate,
| obviously. Anthropogenic climate change, is what's being
| questioned, and that there is no certainty that it will
| cause disasters any more so than if there was still
| 300ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. Maybe 400ppm is bad,
| doesn't seem so tho, we are living the experiment.
|
| BUT also, I would bet Air Conditioners are far worse for
| the planet than 400ppm CO2, even if they act together.
| ACs, are, absolutely abysmal thermodynamically. Heating
| up one space to make another space colder temporarily,
| with high likelihood of CO2 release.
|
| Slight tangent. Have you heard the sixth Dimmu Borgir
| album? Good stuff.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFRwNYPsHwY
|
| I wonder will it generate any discussion, or just be
| castigated via downvotes, your choice.
| zaik wrote:
| "Psychology can't produce real results because we can't
| even model a single brain cell perfectly. They only have
| stats, and stat models."
| dekken_ wrote:
| You want people to think you're a specious disingenuous
| person? It's of your own doing.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > The fact that there is even a term like "Climate change
| denial", means that it feasible to deny "the science"
| (science is about doubt), because the climate scientists
| actually can't prove anything, fundamentally.
|
| There are people out there denying the shape of the
| planet, despite that it has been observed directly.
| dekken_ wrote:
| Am I talking about those people?
|
| You're conflating things that are empirically verifiable
| with things that are not.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I was responding to what you wrote:
|
| > The fact that there is even a term like "Climate change
| denial", means that it feasible to deny "the science"
|
| This is clearly untrue. Some people, such as the 'flat
| Earthers', deny plain facts.
| dekken_ wrote:
| Yeah good point, I'll try better
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| We also can't model every single one of the atoms
| splitting in a nuclear reactor core, but thanks to stats
| and models, we can predict how they behave to very high
| precision.
|
| Knowing whether or not anthropogenic greenhouse gas
| emissions impact global climate can be reasonably
| achieved with some modeling assumptions.
|
| We may not be able to predict the weather in each
| location for the indefinite future, but we certainly can
| and do understand the general impact of bringing billions
| of tonnes of new greenhouse gas into a system.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Similarly, "We can't even model the inside of a proton.
| How can you possibly know when a pot will boil?"
|
| Turns out you can get pretty far modeling the macro
| behavior without perfect knowledge of the micro details.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Anti-vax people or climate change deniers also object to
| well-replicated results and would believe what they want to
| believe anyways.
|
| Accusing your enemy of being beyond argument is just an
| underhanded way to avoid making an argument.
|
| There will always be bad beliefs, we will not always know
| at the time which beliefs are bad, and the response to what
| we think are bad beliefs should be good science, not
| massive fraud studies on hydroxychloroquine published in
| one the most prominent journals in the history of medicine.
| aborsy wrote:
| It has become a game of reputation, citations and the number of
| papers. It works the same way that a company does, with the
| actual work being done by students and postdocs and citations
| accumulated by management (a lot of them don't do research,
| rather spend time putting their names in different papers,
| collecting more and more students, and playing academic
| politics). After a while, they become a luminary and collect
| awards.
| nine_k wrote:
| It looks eerily similar to the problems of businesses that
| happen when all what the executives care about is the stock
| price growth in the current quarter.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| What kind of reform?
| paretoer wrote:
| I don't personally see a solution other than student loan
| money being much harder to get.
|
| There is so much bad research because there are too many
| researchers.
|
| For myself, I think I am smart enough to have worked on a PhD
| in economics but not smart enough to have done anything
| worthwhile or to have advanced the field. I am certain I
| would not have. Then in the face of this massive student loan
| debt I would have produced junk research and try to game the
| system to make the investment worthwhile. The incentives are
| all ridiculous in the current system for most.
|
| The idea politicians will cut student loan money in order to
| produce better scientific research would be a good way to
| optimize for losing an election.
|
| Personally, I don't think there is a way out. If anything it
| probably just gets worse.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| There are countries where student loans are not a thing and
| the science there arguably faces the same problem.
|
| PhD is not paid by a student even in US, it's all
| scholarships.
| sova wrote:
| Get paid to answer important questions instead of getting
| paid to provide sought-after results. I think that's the end-
| point, the "how we get there" is now the question!
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| Who decides what's important?
| rscho wrote:
| In clinical medicine, the system needs no reform, because
| almost nobody's goal is to do research. Clinical research is
| pretty unique in that it serves almost entirely hierarchical
| advancement rather than science. Be honest, when was last time
| you saw a clinical researcher formulate a consistent research
| hypothesis and constitute a solid project around it? Almost all
| projects are basically: 'I'll test that with homemade shitty
| stats because it's trendy!'
|
| So IMO, the first reform to conduct is to turn clinical
| researchers into real scientists. That won't be easy.
| firejake308 wrote:
| Interested to hear what you mean when you say "turn clinical
| researchers into real scientists." Are you thinking of
| expanding the MSTP? Or just better statistical literacy for
| physicians? Or something else entirely?
| rscho wrote:
| I don't know of any magic formula. We'd have to force the
| change somehow, because it won't correct itself. But the
| path is unclear, if there is a path at all. The current
| situation is that most clinical research is performed by
| MDs/MD-PhDs with no scientific background else than what is
| taught in medical/doctoral school, _i.e._ they lack the
| basics, and are usually more interested about advancing
| their careers rather than science. That said, systems shape
| people, and not the other way around.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I was told long ago that the first rule of evaluating a
| medical treatment is to ignore all the clinical studies
| because nothing useful comes out of them.
|
| I don't know if that's actually the case but that seems to be
| the prevailing thought. Which is awful, because it should be
| the opposite. Clinical studies _should_ be the gold standard.
| They're often conducted by people who are better doctors than
| scientists though. A zero-blind trial of n=4 might perhaps
| not be the definitive study the doctor had hoped.
|
| (Not to pick on doctors. My wife's one. Software developers
| often fall into the same common "I'm good at this one hard
| in-demand skill so I must be good at all of them" trap.)
| jpeloquin wrote:
| > So IMO, the first reform to conduct is to turn clinical
| researchers into real scientists. That won't be easy.
|
| Mostly, there are not enough hours in a life to be both a
| good doctor and a good scientist. The few MD-PhDs who give
| equal weight to both areas are both brilliant and extremely
| driven. Multidisciplinary teams seem to have a better chance
| at success.
|
| I guess if the scientific education was done early
| (undergraduate at the latest) dual training could work. Once
| medical training and practice starts there isn't a lot of
| time left over. And early / non-practicing science education,
| for whatever reason, doesn't seem to be very effective.
| hedora wrote:
| I think the scale of the problem varies wildly between
| different fields of science. For instance, in computer science,
| double blind reviewing is the norm, and the biggest issue is
| that there is an incentive to produce more papers with smaller
| contributions, instead of a mixture of larger, better, papers,
| and 1-2 column notes that describe important, but simple
| results (such notes used to be published routinely).
|
| In other fields, not only are submissions not anonymous, but
| editors sometimes override the reviewers (in both directions),
| for what appear to be political purposes.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Uhh, the elephant in the room for CS/ML publications is that
| a lot of people hardcore lie on their results page since
| almost no one tries to reproduce anything.
|
| I've witnessed folks straight out of their undergrad with
| literally 1 workshop paper at an ACL track conference get
| thrown 150K starting offers by no-name startups. Imagine how
| important it must be to get your first NeurIPS main
| conference publication. The ROI likely amounts to 300K+ per
| year, so if anything, I'm surprised that cheating/lies in the
| academy aren't even more brazen. Dynamics like this are why
| both Stanford and Harvard's presidents had to step-down for
| gross academic plagerism/misconduct.
|
| 1. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.359.6377.725
| (2018)
|
| 2. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/12/1011944/artifi
| ci... (2020)
|
| 3. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03817-6 (2023,
| Nature)
| godelski wrote:
| I've seen it happen even when source is available. I've
| also seen a lot of really terrible math mistakes in ML
| because people don't understand the underlying assumptions
| of the metrics they use.
|
| The rot is everywhere because people forgot the goal. We
| all get caught up in the metrics that are used to judge us
| that we forgot what we were proxying in the first place.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Double blind reviewing is not the norm in computer science.
| You will sometimes see it, but it depends on the subfield,
| the specific conference/journal, and even the year. In my
| experience as an author/reviewer, the submissions have been
| anonymous maybe 10% of the time.
|
| And the biggest issue I see in CS is the focus on
| gatekeeping. When many (most?) papers are published in
| conferences with a single round of reviews, peer reviewing
| becomes more about accepting/rejecting the paper than
| improving it. The average review I receive in bioinformatics
| is more useful to me than the average review in CS.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| PLOS journals are some of the least bad journals and iirc it's
| entirely author paid
| drdeca wrote:
| A thought I had: what if there were a service which maintained a
| list of arxiv identifiers (or, maybe also allow doi identifiers,
| but only if some extra conditions are met) that met their
| standards for notability/interesting-ness/quality (each URL could
| maybe be accompanied by the title and a list of the authors of
| the work).
|
| And suppose that all this organization published, was this list
| of URLs (and titles and names).
|
| It seems conceivable that, if their list became respected,
| getting one's pdf on this list could, maybe (this seems a
| stretch) prestigious.
|
| Now, if they accepted submissions of URLs to be considered for
| inclusion in a future issue of their public list of URLs, if
| being on this list was prestigious, they would presumably be
| flooded with submissions, and need to reduce the number of
| submissions they received somehow. Then, I imagine them charging
| some fee for submitting a URL for them to consider for
| evaluation.
|
| Of course, they might include a few documents that no one
| submitted, in order to make sure the list remains useful by
| having most of the most relevant papers in whatever field, in
| order to maintain prestige.
|
| Conceivably there could be multiple such organizations doing this
| for different fields and subfields.
|
| If this happened, it would seem to be essentially a replication
| of the phenomenon of author-paid publication fees in academic
| journals, but without relying on copyright or actually doing the
| publishing of the articles.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Who would pay for an article they could get for free? Who would
| pay to subscribe to a journal that just aggregates open-access
| articles?
| amatic wrote:
| The scientific community, or the ministry of science of some
| country, or a university - might find that paying for peer
| review, for example, might be more effective in promoting
| good science than paying for publication.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Perhaps that should also be compensated but you're talking
| about another cost associated with publication (and even
| non-publication). Since there's no guarantee that reviewers
| even read the crap they are assigned to read, I don't think
| paying them is the best approach. It would perhaps be
| better to publish the names of the reviewers. And if you
| reject a paper, you have to go on the record with your
| gripes. I'm sure these policies would slow reviews down an
| awful lot though. Reviews are only supposed to uncover
| blatant errors I suppose, and not offer definitive
| endorsement of results.
| drdeca wrote:
| In what I was imagining, the income was from people paying to
| be considered for inclusion on the list. Reading the list is
| free.
| Laakeri wrote:
| There are such things, they are called "arxiv overlay
| journals". Couple of examples from my research area:
| https://www.advancesincombinatorics.com/,
| https://theoretics.episciences.org/
| jbaber wrote:
| This is great! I'm trying to think of any disadvantage.
| achillesheels wrote:
| Sorry but I have to disagree. It's the only way I was able to be
| read.
| wmf wrote:
| Speaking as a published scientist, I never thought open access
| was supposed to "put an end to the era of impact-chasing, false-
| positives, and unpublished truths." The point of open access is
| to stop paywalling science by parasitic publishers and it
| accomplishes that. I also didn't predict that a flood of pay-to-
| publish journals would lower their standards, but I only pay
| attention to the top conferences anyway.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| @wmv has the correct answer.
|
| The original argument is utopian (can never happen in a free
| society) and basically proposes going back to an era of very
| few scientists, like I dunno, when most people were illiterate
| peasants and the sea of retardness was dotted here and there
| with an Euclid or a Fibonacci. Which sounds good in theory if
| all you had were Einsteins and Newtons and Kelvins but in
| practice at least some of the available places would be
| eliminated by nepotism, and most of the approved scientists
| while genuine in their effort, would still produce mediocre
| results. Science results, like LLM training, depends on scale.
|
| So I would argue rather, let anyone who wants to do science, do
| it. The cashier lady and plumber guy are unlikely to wanna do
| research but out of those who do, eventually something's gonna
| come out. Only it's not clear straight from the start out of
| whom.
| DataDive wrote:
| I never thought "open access" means that an author would need
| to pay $10K to be published in Nature ... that is a lot more
| parasitic than having a library pay for subscription fees.
| max_ wrote:
| Why can't researchers just publish something on a pre-print like
| ArXiv?
|
| Why do they have to go to Journals that require payment for both
| readers & authors?
|
| The machine learning/ml community pretty much gave up on the
| Journal model and most of the ground breaking papers are
| available for free on ArXiv.
|
| Why are these scientists complaining? Is it just a prestige
| seeking thing?
| underbooter wrote:
| They always have been able to. It's called a blog, personal or
| company.
|
| But everyone knows why "serious research" isn't mostly
| published on blogs:
|
| Corporations like Elsevier have successfully executed takeovers
| of research centers (universities) and made journal submission
| a mandatory rite of passage for academics joining the state-
| mandated academia funnel. Don't publish? No postdoc for you. No
| professorship for you. No grant approval or news coverage.
|
| Do publish in an academic journal? All the work you did, all
| the IP you invented, is assigned to the university and/or the
| grant funder. You're basically a non-shareholder: a contractor.
|
| Researchers who do publish on their own tend to be viewed as
| cranks, since they generally don't use "journalese" and aren't
| required to cite from the same pool of "officially published"
| articles. Consequently, they also can't really get cited
| outside of the blogosphere - a blog post isn't "legitimate
| literature."
|
| Researchers who don't publish in official journals and are
| labeled cranks generally can't afford to do research long term.
|
| So how do you divorce yourself from academia?
|
| Start a research company or project
|
| Get funding via grants, product sales, donations
|
| Use your research to directly build products and get a return
| on R&D invested
|
| Decide to not publish your research in the open because doing
| so would take away the information asymmetry keeping you ahead
| of the competition
|
| Oops, you are no longer publishing.
| mapt wrote:
| I lost a lot of respect for science when my advisor explained
| that it didn't matter that the cutting edge work I wanted to
| extend was being done by Some Guy On A Forum, I wasn't
| allowed to to cite them, and a pity too, because it was
| probably correct.
| elashri wrote:
| To be honest and judging by the amount and quality of
| emails I receive weekly from people claiming to have a
| discovery or sharing this last unification theory, this is
| a safe assumption. The problem that peer-review solve it
| not to waste your valuable little time seeing if this is
| following reasonable scientific methods or not. It does not
| tell you that this wrong or correct.
|
| I ready about 30 papers weekly (below average) and I spend
| 2 days out of my week reading them. This without having to
| read anything, it would be a much worse situation where I
| have to read too many just to find that many of them are
| just written by cranks.
|
| Someone can say we can can pay for people to have some sort
| of verified aggregate feed of articles. Yes that is
| possible and congratulations, you just reinvented peer-
| review system.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I lost a lot of respect for science when my advisor
| explained that it didn't matter that the cutting edge work
| I wanted to extend was being done by Some Guy On A Forum, I
| wasn't allowed to to cite them
|
| My strong guess is that your advisor was wrong (or you
| misunderstood him). I've often seen citations to random web
| sites. Even citations to _conversations_. The purpose of
| citation is to give credit, not rack up points.
|
| Perhaps he was saying it was too risky to base your work
| off of some blog post, as his work was not yet
| "established" because it hadn't been published.
| kergonath wrote:
| I think it depends on how the reference is used.
| Something like "here is a proof or an explanation, it's
| great and I am going to repeat it here but it came from
| that website over there so don't think I came up with it"
| is very different from "there is a proof over there so I
| will accept it as true and you should too" (i.e., how
| citations tend to be used most of the time,
| unfortunately).
|
| Even as a referee I would be happy with the former,
| provided that there is a permanent link or a pdf of the
| webpage in the supplementary material. I really would not
| let the latter fly.
| danaris wrote:
| > Corporations like Elsevier have successfully executed
| takeovers of research centers (universities) and made journal
| submission a mandatory rite of passage for academics joining
| the state-mandated academia funnel.
|
| I...think the causality on this is wrong.
|
| "Publish or perish" long predates Elsevier's rapacious
| consumption of journals. The reason they did that in the
| first place is because they already _knew_ it was, in effect,
| a captive audience.
| underbooter wrote:
| At the present moment it doesn't much matter how it
| started.
|
| Before Elsevier, journal articles or "letters" were just
| correspondence between individual researchers. The big
| publishers got into it later.
| bruce511 wrote:
| It's a filter thing.
|
| Free platforms let anyone post anything without any filter.
| Clearly that results in a lot of rubbish being included.
|
| As the signal to noise ratio increases the value of the
| platform decreases. I can publish anything I like on my blog,
| but my blog has no reputation compared to a million other
| blogs.
|
| Of course filtering is expensive, biased, sometimes wrong,
| limits access to information and so on. The current academic
| system is pretty "broken".
|
| But just making all articles free to post, free to read, isn't
| the solution. We have that already and it's terrible.
| (Facebook, YouTube et al.)
|
| Ultimately we still need filtering - and thats the hard problem
| that needs solving.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Filtering should happen after publication, and be built into
| platforms like ArXiv.
| bruce511 wrote:
| I would suggest that it's hard to do that as an
| afterthought. If the internet has shown us anything it's
| that public curating of material seldom allows quality to
| float to the top.
|
| And when filtering, or curating, is exercised then the
| argument swings between "untrue" on one side and "censored"
| on the other.
|
| Simply saying "it should all be open" without
| acknowledging, or worse without understanding, the real
| harm that approach could bring is to bring an overly
| simplistic solution to a hard problem.
| matwood wrote:
| > It's a filter thing.
|
| I'm reminded of this quote from Ben Thompson:
|
| _In short, the analog world was defined by scarcity, which
| meant distribution of scarce goods was the locus of power;
| the digital world is defined by abundance, which means
| discovery of what you actually want to see is the locus of
| power. The result is that consumers have access to anything,
| which is to say that nothing is special; everything has been
| flattened._
|
| Instead of filter, I tend to say curate. There are so many
| papers being created no institution has the time to vet and
| curate. They _want_ to use open access repositories and
| journals, but they don 't want to bring hundreds of thousands
| unvetted papers and books into their local catalogs.
|
| There's also the prestige of certain journals, but like you
| touched on, at a meta level that's just curation. Citations
| and other scorings are attempts to address this issue, but
| those end up heavily weighted towards older publications that
| it's hard for new, possibly better research to bubble up.
| EEBio wrote:
| Grant application and advancement in scientific careers. As a
| junior researcher, you either publish in impactful peer
| reviewed journals or you don't get your PhD. As a senior
| researcher, you either publish in impactful peer reviewed
| journals or your PhD student doesn't get the PhD degree (this
| hurts both of you). Moreover, you won't get grants so you can't
| even hire a PhD student in the first place.
|
| While scientists' prestige might be a part of the equation,
| it's mostly the academic leaderships and fonds that have
| brought us here.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The ML community is much less dependent on government granting
| agencies than most other fields. A typical ML paper on arXiv
| will have at least one and often many corporate funded
| researchers. Problems like h-index hacking are a disease
| created by grant giving: take away the government grants and
| people lose the incentive to engage in that kind of scientific
| fraud, as they'd only be defrauding their own employers. Who,
| you can bet, actually are reading the papers.
| elashri wrote:
| > take away the government grants and people lose the
| incentive to engage in that kind of scientific fraud
|
| And the incentives and resources to engage in scientific
| activities in case of other fields.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| On the other hand, the ML community is especially big on
| papers with cherry picked results and things that can't be
| replicated.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It's a funding thing - if you don't publish in highly-filtered
| places, you don't get grants so you can't do science; no one
| will pay for you, your students and your equipment if you only
| publish on ArXiv.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Why can't researchers just publish something on a pre-print
| like ArXiv?
|
| In my field, Arxiv has too many really suboptimal manuscripts,
| too much garbage, and is not well indexed. Looking for decent
| stuff is hard. I would really like our institution's library to
| pay someone to sift through Arxiv full time and compile lists
| of decent articles regularly. Like how they used to do when you
| had to physically go to a library to even get the titles of
| published articles. This was enough of a hassle to make
| bibliography lists valuable. But yeah in the meantime, it's too
| expensive in terms of wasted time compared to even Google
| Scholar.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| I think this can be solved (or improved) by making the option to
| pay publication fees available only after the paper is accepted.
| In fact, it could even be extended to after the official
| publication. If the author then wants the article to be free for
| readers, they can pay having already secured the paper. If this
| was also combined with an anonymizing factor to hide the identity
| of the author from the publisher, it would be perfect. But I know
| that part is impractical.
| gapan wrote:
| Am I misunderstanding something? Isn't that the way it is
| already with most open access journals? Apart from hiding the
| author's identity from the publisher of course.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| My understanding is that's how it already works, at least
| that's how it's been for the journals I've published in. When
| you submit the paper you simply promise to pay if the paper is
| accepted. Then peer review happens and if you pass, they'll ask
| you to pay.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| > The remedy is to abandon author-paid OA publishing and seek
| less harmful alternatives.
|
| That's just "No remedy is known" wearing a suit.
| Y_Y wrote:
| To paraphrase Linus:
|
| "Only wimps use traditional journals. REAL men just upload
| their important stuff on arXiv and let the rest of the world
| peer review it."
| otherme123 wrote:
| Our group always pre-publish to arXiv, as a way of saying "we
| did this first/already" because we usually suspect, and half
| the times are correct, that our competitor are on a similar
| research. But as soon as we arXiv, we start the hunt to
| publish with as high Impact Factor as we can. Why? Almost
| 100% grants applications are going to evaluate you for the
| weight of your publications, and some of them doesn't even
| consider indexed publications below Quartile 1 or 2. The IF
| of the journal is a direct proxy for your work quality.
|
| In our experience, arXiv doesn't peer review at all. You get
| some twitter posts, messages of congratulations, at most a
| couple of questions. But nothing like the average peer
| seriously reviewing your paper.
|
| I wouldn't pay a dime to publish if my salary wasn't affected
| (e.g. being Linus). I would submit to arXiv, Github, Twitter
| or even a "Tell HN", and probably reach a larger audience. In
| fact, the journals ask you to promote your papers on your
| social networks, because they know theirs doesn't matter
| unless you are Science or Nature. But sadly that's not how
| the scientific world works.
| Y_Y wrote:
| You're totally right. In fact that's one of the main
| reasons I gave up on an academic career. My collaborators
| who still rely on grants are miserable, and with good
| reason.
| mapt wrote:
| Dramatically increasing the amount of scientific research
| grant funding nationwide would be a natural response to
| this part of the demographic transition and to the idea
| of promoting college education, but instead we have an
| academic pyramid scheme that drives huge amounts of raw
| researcher labor off a cliff and into Starbucks.
| matwood wrote:
| The whole grant driven, non-profit world is really an odd
| place. It's hard to explain to people who haven't
| experienced it first hand.
| raister wrote:
| I agree that being the first is important. I have had a
| paper reviewed, then rejected, only to see the same idea
| elsewhere a while after. I cannot say the reviewer "had the
| same idea" nor prove, but it is known to happen. Putting
| into arXiv remediates that. However, my personal issue with
| that is that the journal might not be that keen to want to
| publish your paper after knowing it was publicly available
| elsewhere, as they thrive "innovation" and "being the
| first" as well. It's a very difficult problem, indeed.
| otherme123 wrote:
| What we did in the past was contact the editor first and
| ask if they have any problem with it being pre-published.
| Some do (most of them in our experience), some don't. The
| paper always change between arXiv and the journal, so the
| source of truth is the journal.
|
| > I have had a paper reviewed, then rejected, only to see
| the same idea elsewhere a while after
|
| I've seen worse. A grant being rejected by the grant
| reviewer, only to be re-submitted slightly changed by a
| reviewer's friend (this is a small world, we know each
| other) the next year. The inners of science suck, most of
| us keep doing it because we are like monks: we love God
| (Science), but we hate the Church.
| PeterisP wrote:
| In some fields having it be pre-published pretty much
| disqualifies that work to be ever published in a way that
| "counts" as almost all high impact factor journals will
| only consider unpublished research, so placing it in arXiv
| means that this research will never be considered 'quality'
| by the formal criteria and the work is wasted from the
| perspective of fulfilling the obligations towards the
| funding source which required Q1 publications.
| kergonath wrote:
| The problem is that the rest of the world does not really
| like reviewing stuff. A few people hint frauds, which is a
| great service, but that's about it.
| OvbiousError wrote:
| I published papers in the past. Are the fees (too) high?
| Probably. Should publishing be free? Good luck with that,
| especially now with llms.
|
| I (my university) paid the journals, review was tough and I sank
| a ton of work in both the first draft and the revisions. And then
| upon acceptance the papers went both into the journal and to
| arxiv.
|
| Reading the new papers on arxiv was also my start of the day.
| That is only possible if that list is heavily moderated, there
| were around 30-40 of which I would read/skim 1-5.
| Luc wrote:
| It's almost like you think the fees paid by your university
| went to reviewers and moderators?
|
| That's not how academic publishers make billions of dollars of
| profit each year. They don't pay those.
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| Great idea.
|
| Now realize that academia is getting more funding with more
| citations and that's why research in a capitalist society relies
| on successful research and not on failure (which objectively 50%
| of results should be).
|
| Then iterate on the corruption idea and realize that the only way
| to fix this on a societal level is unconditional basic income.
|
| Only with basic income and legally forbidden sponsorships you can
| guarantee objectivity.
| fdej wrote:
| There's no a priori reason why the expected success rate of
| research projects should be 50% and not, say, 1% or 99%.
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| > There's no a priori reason why the expected success rate of
| research projects should be 50% and not, say, 1% or 99%.
|
| Humans are really bad at predicting the future, so I'd argue
| that the large majority should be between 49% and 51%. A 99%
| success rate would imply that humans can predict the future,
| which I think is pretty much the opposite of how science
| should work.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I would actually put it 60-80%. As there is plenty enough
| of ideas that should work. It is not really random search,
| but applying existing knowledge or expectation to some
| different area. If doing one thing with one thing works, I
| would fully expect in many cases that doing same thing with
| this other thing relatively closely related to also work.
|
| Lot of research is iterative process and there you can do
| iterations that you know could work and already ignore
| things that certainly won't.
| frankling_ wrote:
| If you're able to predict the future with 50% accuracy, you
| should start filling out some lottery tickets.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| Publications Georg, who lives in a cave and publishes over 10000
| papers a year, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
| kkfx wrote:
| Next topic: how to surpass the economic religion, because the
| current mania of making anything tradable and measurable in money
| units actually IS A FORM OF RELIGION. Of course a useful religion
| for those who know how to master it, but anyway a religion with
| serious damaging effect on society and human development.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The solution is on the funding side and the reader side, not the
| publisher side. Scientists have to publish in order to get other
| scientists to read their work and (hopefully) refer to it in
| their own work.
|
| This business of referring to other scientific work is what
| drives academic careers and the allocation of research budgets.
| Most of the better universities look at metrics that take this
| into account. The problem is all the second rate universities
| haggling for funding trying to boost their metrics.
|
| Promoting scientific work is essentially an SEO problem. How do
| you get other scientists to take your work seriously? Well, they
| need to find your work when they are doing research for their own
| work.
|
| Getting the PDF distributed is the easy part of the problem.
| That's a solved problem since the nineties. It doesn't really
| cost anything worth talking about. It's not 0$ but close enough
| that the difference isn't really worth talking about. Publishers
| don't matter for distribution any more; it's all digital now. Any
| website that Google can index will do for distribution.
|
| The goto scientific SEO process hasn't really changed in
| centuries. You submit your article to some exclusive groups of
| researchers, anonymous peer review is arranged, and if deemed
| acceptable the article is included in some publication. Which
| these days just means they put it on their website. Actual
| printed journals are a side show. Some publishers still do it.
| But mostly it's a waste of paper.
|
| The process beyond that is simple good old SEO. You drive traffic
| by promoting your work at conferences, workshops, writing books,
| by talking to others, etc. This is also how you become part of
| these exclusive groups. You'll be invited to take part in peer
| reviewing, editorial work, conference organizing, etc. And in
| return, you are expected to refer back to work of others in the
| same group.
|
| The odd thing is that scientists don't really do any traditional
| SEO. They aren't buying keywords from Google. They aren't messing
| with their meta data. And they aren't optimizing their pdfs for
| readability, AB testing various click baity titles. Nor are they
| using analytics tools to measure how other scientists engage with
| their work. They aren't running social media campaigns either.
| This is super odd. You do all this work and then you throw it
| over the fence and hope for the best. Why?! This is stupid.
|
| The value add of publishing to some paid publisher scam journal
| that nobody reads and where the peer review is basically bribing
| the "editor" is of course very low. The key problem is that
| universities don't scrutinize their metrics enough. That's
| because they aren't independent. Like researchers, their funding
| depends on public sources that look at metrics to judge how well
| the money is being spent. That process is super corrupt and
| bureaucratic. A lack of standards and integrity in this process
| is the root cause of the problem.
|
| Scientists referring to work from dubious publications is a giant
| red flag that they are manipulating their metrics. That giant red
| flag needs to be taken into account during grant applications for
| public funding. This isn't rocket science. Like plagiarism is
| frowned upon, referring to work from disreputable sources should
| be frowned upon as well. It signals scientists trying to mess
| with the numbers and not taking their own work and integrity
| seriously.
|
| This should be flagged by editors of reputable publications
| because it threatens their own reputability. Grant application
| reviewers should be flagging this as well. Metrics should be
| created to automate this. Simply flag some publications and
| calculate the least reputable authors based on their citation
| habits referring to work in these publications. That will sort
| things out in no time. If you can calculate an impact factor, you
| can also calculate a reputability factor.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| > The goto scientific SEO process hasn't really changed in
| centuries.
|
| > You submit your article to some exclusive groups of
| researchers,
|
| > anonymous peer review is arranged, and if deemed acceptable
| the
|
| > article is included in some publication.
|
| Barely 50 years, actually. Peer review is a latecomer to the
| party[1] and is actually part of the problem. It's
| fundamentally gatekeeping and (along with an analogous process
| in funding) serves to slow/prevent paradigm shifts by locking
| in popular models at the expense of creative thinking (e.g. the
| amyloid hypothesis[2]). It's not part of the scientific
| process, it's part of a concerted effort to tame and regularize
| it.
|
| [1] https://mitcommlab.mit.edu/broad/commkit/peer-review-a-
| histo...
|
| [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5652035/
| godelski wrote:
| There's so many worse things. Like how people think research can
| be measured by citations and h-indexes.
|
| Yes, these things help, but if you're serious about hiring or
| promoting just read the god damn papers. The numbers are no
| substitute and it's insane that so many people outsource their
| thinking to numbers when there's such rich data within arm's
| reach. No wonder why people have hacked the metrics, no one vets
| them -__-
|
| As for journals and conferences? Fuck em. Post to arxiv or
| better, open review. Engage with people who actually care about
| your work. The whole purpose of punishing is to make your work
| available and communicate with your peers. We've solved that. We
| don't need them (well it's still nice to physically meet with
| people. The conferences can stay, but they should focus on that.
| Not being "arbitrators of truth")
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| You don't strike me as someone who has hired a lot of faculty
| members... If you're hiring in your own field (which you
| should), you don't have to read the papers. You're already
| familiar with most of them, and judging by the venue their
| published in, you also know their "level", so to speak.
|
| As for open review ... You also don't strike me as someone who
| has reviewed a lot of papers.
|
| I've served on several program committees, and reviewed
| hundreds of papers. I'm happy with blind reviews.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| > If you're hiring in your own field (which you should), you
| don't have to read the papers. You're already familiar with
| most of them, and judging by the venue their published in,
| you also know their "level", so to speak.
|
| You're judging by reputation rather than substance. That
| opens up the possibility of manipulating reputation to
| achieve career goals instead of doing the hard work.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Unsurprisingly, in the vast majority of cases, substance
| and reputation tend to be at least loosely correlated, at
| least in academia. There are high-profile exceptions, but
| they are only high-profile because they are indeed
| exceptional.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| Perhaps, but it not only deviates from the practice of
| science but creates the very conditions that science has
| been developed to overcome- i.e., social status is
| accepted as the driver of research rather than the
| pursuit of knowledge. It might be considered ok for
| financial institutions to make decisions on who to fund
| or partner with based on status signals, but it is
| galling to think that is how our scientific institutions
| work. That practice seems as scientific as scientology.
| kergonath wrote:
| > You're judging by reputation rather than substance.
|
| Is there an alternative, though? When hiring someone we use
| their degrees, experience and credentials, all of which are
| indirect ways of estimating competence. We cannot
| realistically expect people to know all about someone's
| career when interviewing them, it's not realistic.
|
| It's the same thing for careers evolution. HR people don't
| have time or skills to know about the science, and good
| scientists already spend way too much time reviewing
| articles or grant proposals, and sitting in various boards
| and panels. There is no need for more administrative work.
|
| I don't think the current systems are ideal, but I think
| improving it would by fixing incentives would be more
| efficient (and that's not only for scientists, it's the
| same for any major organisation or company).
| jltsiren wrote:
| Hard work doesn't scale. If you are already an expert in
| the field, you need a few months to properly evaluate
| someone's work. And if there are 100 candidates for the
| position (which is pretty common), you have to spend
| decades evaluating them.
|
| In practice, you reject the vast majority of the candidates
| by reputation, publication venues, paper counts, grants and
| awards, and similar metrics. And then, if you are
| particularly interested, you may devote a few days on
| superficial reading of the works of the shortlisted
| candidates.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| That you're struck that this is someone who "doesn't hire
| faculty members" is exactly the best thing.
|
| The academy is so corrupt it should be "shattered into a
| million pieces and scattered into the wind". H Index ego, P
| hacking, lazy lies because "no one tries to reproduce",
| citation cartels, institutionalized systemic academic
| dishonesty/plagiarism at the highest levels (presidents of
| top universities and likely their underlings), "reviewer #2",
| etc. It's all bunk, and most of it is designed to take
| bright-eyed Ph.D's and grind their soul to bits before they
| can realize that they can both out-earn and out-produce (in
| an objective sense) most of their professors by simply
| leaving the academy.
|
| Being ineligible for tenure should be a badge of honor, as
| the whole system should be abolished and the world would be
| far better for it - particularly, science would advance far
| faster.
|
| Far more of HN needs to read Paul Feyerabend and actually
| internalize what "epistemological anarchism" means. The
| academy does not hold any particularly valid claim to being
| closer to observing "objective truth" than anyone else. The
| allegory of the cave/divided line (the primary justifications
| for a lot of academic wankery) was one of the original lies
| made by a nascent and authoritarian philosopher class. We
| should have abandoned these ideas long ago.
|
| Oh, and if you leave the STEM fields, the academy goes into
| full on "charlatan" mode. I go into most social sciences and
| find a wasteland of footnotes on Foucault and Lacan. That
| Situationalist International was so successful that the
| academy is still choked by an obsession with french
| fashionable nonsense is an indictment of the whole of the
| academy in the west. It's all intellectually bankrupt.
| godelski wrote:
| You sound like review 2: speaks from authority and gives
| criticism with little substance. > You're
| already familiar with most of them
|
| In what way? Their prestige? If I went about outsourcing my
| opinions of people to others I'd hold many criminals and
| objectional people in high regard while also looking down at
| many great men. Even if this works 80% of the time you trust
| *but verify*. Have some actual confidence in yourself. Stop
| outsourcing your intellectualism. > I've
| served on several program committees
|
| Then maybe stop complaining and start critiquing.
|
| You speak with an air of authority and that we should trust
| you but give no actual reason why. Use your experience and
| expertise to educate us. Don't just say I'm wrong, say why
| I'm wrong. Convince me you're right not through ethos, but
| logos. This is what everyone hates about review 2. Don't
| become him.
|
| I believe you've also missed the substance of what I
| originally suggested. You're so caught up in the standard way
| you injected it into my comment without even noticing. You
| forgot the point all of this. It to climb the ladder of
| academia, get grants, and all that. It is about advancing
| science and moving humanity forward. The way to measure this
| isn't meaningful at our disposal. You can't measure this by
| citations or indices, by publications or venues. Again, they
| can be a signal (I'm not saying to throw out the baby with
| the bath water), but I don't believe you're naive enough to
| not be aware of how frequent progress is made by those who
| fail on those measures, how frequent it comes from a dark
| horse. This should be enough to suggest that there's more to
| it than what we usually consider. Academia has always been
| about challenging the status quo, even if it is just to
| verify. The problem with academia is it's created to give
| refuge to those who want to spend their lives dreaming but
| has become so structured you can only dream a certain way. I
| get why. It's hard to differentiate useless pipe dreams from
| those that push us forward. But in creating the structure to
| prevent people from taking a free ride you created the
| monster you tried to stop. Only now it has more power.
|
| So don't just wave your hands dismissing, elaborate. Be
| academic not arrogant.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| >> You're already familiar with most of them
|
| > In what way? Their prestige?
|
| In the sense that I've read most of their papers, I've even
| reviewed several of them.
|
| I've literally just handed in a report for an expert
| committee to hire a new faculty member, and I had read
| papers from all applicants that were relevant and reviewed
| for more than half of them.
|
| >> I've served on several program committees
|
| > Then maybe stop complaining and start critiquing.
|
| I'm not complaining about anything. I just tried to lay out
| my point of view.
|
| And yes, I'm aware of the painful measures that citations
| and impact factors are, but, like any other HN reader, I'm
| aware of Goodhart's law.
|
| My point is that we're (I'm) not using citations or
| publication points to rank researchers. We know them.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| > I'm happy with blind reviews.
|
| Of course you're happy as the _reviewer_. I would be too if I
| could criticize completely anonymously and have it counted.
| Me as the reviewee? Not so much.
|
| I always thought it was funny: in the US, it's a fundamental
| right that you should not be criticized anonymously (6th
| amendment). Ostensibly this is to prevent laundered
| dictatorial rule. And in academia it's the norm lol. Makes
| you wonder doesn't it.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Of course you're happy as the reviewer. I would be too if
| I could criticize completely anonymously and have it
| counted. Me as the reviewee? Not so much.
|
| I would support double blind reviews in both roles. I don't
| think it's fair to evaluate a manuscript on the authors
| line up. I think it's irrelevant and encourages arse-
| kissing to get big names on papers and reviewers that are
| too deferential or combative just because of their personal
| history with one of the authors. I don't think it is
| healthy or productive, even when I am one of the authors.
|
| What is your perspective, why would you not like it?
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| Ask yourself why juries and prosecutors and judges and
| police are not anonymous but voting is.
|
| > What is your perspective, why would you not like it?
|
| Authors should be hidden from reviewers. Reviewers should
| be made known to authors. Why? When some reviewer dings
| me because he/she doesn't understand a fundamental
| concept, or some technical detail, _or because I didn 't
| cite their work_, I should be able to have some/any
| recourse. Right now these people are completely shielded
| by anonymity.
| fraserphysics wrote:
| I too have served on faculty search committees and reviewed
| scores of papers. Many members of the committees only counted
| publications. I read some papers and commented on them
| without much effect.
| netcan wrote:
| Was open access actually expected to " _put an end to the era of
| impact-chasing, false-positives, and unpublished truths_? "
|
| Generally speaking, I don't see how the going ons of seconds tier
| matter.
| DataDive wrote:
| Fundamentally, the problem is today science is framed as nothing
| else but a competition, an olymic event, that produces winners
| that we celebrate and losers, rather than cooperation.
|
| If you got the grant, you won; if you did not, you lost. Losing
| means you cannot hire graduate students you cannot perform your
| job at all!
|
| Now consider that around 15% of grants get funded, and it takes
| about six months to determine whether you got that grant or not.
|
| The desperate competition for money overshadows everything in
| science.
|
| Science is often thought of and presented as huge leaps, when in
| reality, it is an iterative process that builds on small
| advances.
| ynniv wrote:
| - Academia has become a paper throughput competition - Open
| access journals make it easier to game this system - Ergo,
| open access journals are bad
|
| Well, he's right that one of those things is a serious problem
| that needs to be addressed.
| typedef_struct wrote:
| Oh science. Peer review, the ultimate "LGTM", stands in for
| replication.
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