Academic publishing as ruinous competition: Is there a way out?

http://33bits.org/2013/07/15/academic-publishing-as-ruinous-competition-is-there-a-way-out/

by randomwalker • 13 years ago

71 33 13 years ago

ekm22• 13 years ago

We need to have HN for academic research papers:Karma counts as the citation index,or something similar.

Bjoern• 13 years ago

Interestingly, Mendeley [1] tried to be (one of many) social platform with the specific aim to find more easily relevant papers for you. Unfortuantely, (or fortuantely for the founders?) it was bought recently by Elsevier, so I'm curious to see what will happen to it. Finding good relevant papers is still a difficult task imo.

[1] http://www.mendeley.com/

tensor• 13 years ago

A big problem with this is that academics tend to avoid social networking platforms like the plague.

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

I want to work on a website for all sorts of publishers, invite / interview process to post as to have no shitposting. Users will be able to register and set a monthly reading budget, which will be divided equally amongst all the authors you read in X time period.

I want this service to have an API so you can easily push content to other platforms like Tumblr, facebook, or your own personal website, housing all your content on my site.

I would use this. I believe in paying people for their hard work and I want the money to go directly into their pockets. No overhead.

czr802• 13 years ago

Good != Popular

betterunix2• 13 years ago

I see a bigger problem: the fact that things like citation counts are being used as a metric. We should be judging researchers by whether or not they are solving problems (or if they are helping other researchers solve problems -- like developing new research tools and techniques, or publishing negative results that tell other researchers what to avoid). It makes no difference whether a paper is cited one time or a hundred times. It makes no difference if a research publishes one big paper or ten smaller papers. What matters is whether or not progress is being made.

czr802• 13 years ago

But this avoids the central issue - how can we know if a paper helps people make progress on solving problems? Citation counts are just a proxy for exactly that - to move away from them you have to come up with a better proxy or evaluation method.

agilord• 13 years ago

I completely agree with this. Only if there was a way to translate this into politics (e.g. not just the popularity should decide where we are going).

ekm22• 13 years ago

I agree with you that using citation counts as a metric is flawed.But I was primarily suggesting that we need "HN for science research papers ",not a particular way that it should be implemented.

ryguytilidie2• 13 years ago

There would be an insanely high correlation between school prestige and karma though :\

acadien• 13 years ago

I've never noticed a correlation between school prestige and paper citation in my field, of course that doesn't mean there isn't one. I'm curious if you have anything to back up this statement or if its just anecdotal?

rmc• 13 years ago

You need to find a way to prevent people from hacking it. Google page rank is similar, and people were motivated to hack it

SapphireSun• 13 years ago

This happened a few years ago (~2008?). HNA (HN Academic) was launched and didn't get a lot of traffic. Reading papers just takes a lot of time.

There might be other models that work (other people mention Medley). The attention span for an HN clone is too short though.

infinity04• 13 years ago

I think academia has a lot to learn from internet-based free open source projects.

I find much easier to learn from RFCs, git-hosted documentation projects, and wikis. (Going from more professional/less open to less professional/more open - not that these are necessarily exclusive, but it seems costly to have a system that satisfies both.)

For documentation, I really love sphinx[1] and rst[2]. I know some people love markdown and it's good for light manuals/READMEs but IMO not adequate for full documentation.

[1] http://sphinx-doc.org/ [2] http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html

javert4• 13 years ago

I really disagree. Writing actual papers and having them peer reviewed is a useful model for actually doing science, and you can learn a ton from reading good academic papers.

I don't know why you bring up documentation, the current tools used to write academic papers seem fine.

As the OP states, the problem is the incentive system, not the particular set of tools and practices.

(However, I don't think his suggestions are fundamental enough to change things, and I am skeptical about his claimed expertise on the stock market and copyright.)

jbooth2• 13 years ago

Writing down your thoughts and having them read by people is indeed pretty critical for science.

What does the current publishing model do for us that a blog wouldn't? What does academia-speak accomplish? From the few CS papers I've read, generally speaking the harder the paper is to understand, the less profound the insights contained. What does the formalism get us, besides formalism itself?

infinity04• 13 years ago

The things I talked about all involve heavy peer-review, from a much wider audience instead of a few academic referees. Academic papers are definitely not good learning materials, unless one is already familiar with the subject area. You would be hugely irresponsible if your taught a class simply by pointing your students to academic papers.

By contrast, for the sorts of projects I listed, there is more structure on the background for understanding a particular document, and even without explicit structure, hyperlinks make the entire mass of content easier to navigate and teach yourself with, instead of having to spend minutes digging out a reference. This is from personal experience of reading both academic papers and working with those sorts of projects, though granted I have more in the latter.

Good tools lower the cost of creating good documentation, meaning that more positive incentives can have higher priority. If current tools are "fine" then the OP would have used them to publish a paper instead of writing a series of blog posts.

ssivark2• 13 years ago

It is quite easy to check the correctness of code excerpts, and implementing a piece of code can mostly be considered the analog of a theoretical calculation (we might make mistakes, but in principle you just have to turn the crank and do it right).

Otoh, with scientific experiments, it is critical to ensure validity and correctness so that further research may be built on a solid footing. Unlike code, it is not easy to "fork" and verify someone's work. So some form of peer review and verification are crucial.

It's not just about openness (scientists have arXiv, PLOS, etc) or about formats/systems (LaTeX is as good as anything else). It's fundamentally about the need to ensure correctness, to establish a foundation for future work.

infinity04• 13 years ago

I was not thinking primarily about code, but design documents, which are peer-reviewed for qualities beyond "correctness" - for example clarity and completeness, which are important for communicating your ideas to many people. And even code has a subjective quality beyond "correctness", so your first claim is false and has no bearing on real-world software projects.

OP was not talking about correctness and I am not talking about correctness, but the economics of collaboration and publication in academia.

frossie• 13 years ago

There's work being done in this area; whether it is going to be ultimately successful I don't know.

In terms of generating metrics better than journal publications and citations, there's projects like this:

http://impactstory.org/

(no connection, I just heard of them in this context). These kind of metrics would have addressed the OP's "blogger" problem.

Another strand, which at least my small scientific field is pursuing, is to facilitate citations of datasets, or dataset+software combinations (think of it as making a directory structure citeable). This (in theory - it's a recent development) rewards people who take their time to clean up and give open access to their datasets, instead of doing the minimum to extract a couple of papers out of it and move on.

abecedarius• 13 years ago

I would recommend the book mentioned at the bottom as well -- http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Discovery-The-Networked-Sc...

Academic publishing as ruinous competition: Is there a way out?

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