Slashdot Mirror
Crackpot Scandal In Mathematics
ocean_soul writes "It is well known among scientists that the impact factor of a scientific journal is not always a good indicator of the quality of the papers in the journal. An extreme example of this was recently uncovered in mathematics. The scandal is about one El Naschie, editor in chief of the 'scientific' journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, published by Elsevier. This is one of the highest impact factor journals in mathematics, but the quality of the papers in it is extremely poor. The journal has also published 322 papers with El Naschie as (co-)author, five of them in the latest issue. Like many crackpots, El Nashie has a kind of cult around him, with another journal devoted to praising his greatness. There was also a discussion about the Wikipedia entry for El Naschie, which was supposedly written by one of his followers. When it was deleted by Wikipedia, they even threatened legal actions (which never materialized)."
In the immortal words of Tom Hanks, I don't get it.
If the guy is a well known crackpot, what harm is happening? Obviously, I am not a citizen of this sub-world and could use the enlightenment.
Yeah, you really have to be careful out there... that's why I get all my astronomy and mathematical insight (as well as web design hints) from http://www.timecube.com/
And if it ain't there, then I just look it up on wikipedia
Where's the article?
Ohhh! Right right! This is the article. Slashdot is now a primary source!
At first, I thought the advertisement for Tom Cruise in Valkyrie was a related crackpot scandal story.
How do I do that?
The funny thing about this article is that it completely fails to mention the discussion about this on backreaction.blogspot.com -- even the bloggers there weren't so ignorant as to claim every paper to be rubbish.
This is the kind of blanket statement that completely self-defeats any argument. Any scientist or mathematician would know that, so what are you doing writing about science and math?
Where is the source of the info?
Wouldn't it be straightforward to adjust the impact factor to only include references to a different journal. That is, a reference to an article that you published doesn't count.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
How did El Naschie game the system?
According to Elsevier, his impact factor is 3.025, which does seem high compared to Elsevier titles like Advances in Applied Mathematics (founded by Gian-Carlo Rota, who was a respectable mathematician).
It's clear from the samples that El Naschie's articles are complete garbage, and I'm sure no respectable mathematician would want to publish in what's effectively a crackpot's vanity press. This is obviously the scientific journal version of Googlebombing.
So how did he pull this off? Is he citing himself, and if so, where?
If you want to automatically determine what constitutes a good journal purely from data, the definition is something like: is frequently cited by other good journals. Obviously, there's a circularity there. Various techniques attempt to mitigate it, but none are perfect, and indeed most are rather simplistic and easy to game. It's basically hard to distinguish, purely from citation data, a vibrant community of legitimate research from a vibrant community of crackpots.
In real life, most academics get around the circularity problem by starting with a set of "known good" journals that are determined by consensus in the field rather than algorithms (though this may sometimes be controversial). That lets them take into account more subjective things such as status of a research community (crackpots or not?). For example, as the linked article points out, the Annals of Mathematics is generally accepted as a top-quality venue for mathematics.
If you wanted, you could then construct an Annals-centric view of mathematical impact automatically by seeing how frequently other journals are cited by papers in Annals. This is what happens informally as journals gain and lose reputation: a promising new venue often first comes to a community's attention because its articles begin to be cited in "known good" journals.
But just taking all journals with no starting point, and attempting to extract from the citation graph which ones are "good" purely from the links, is doomed to failure, because there just isn't enough information in there to make the distinctions people want to make.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The problem with impact factors is that they don't measure the quality of the papers, they just measure the number of times they're referenced. The thought is that the number of times a paper is referenced is proportional to the quality. Sort of like the concept behind Google Page Rank - more inward pointing links means that the site is "better". ... Except that relying solely on incoming links doesn't work to well if people start to game the system. Google, who made it's name with the power of Page Rank, has since demoted it to "one of the factors" in determining result positioning, recognizing that simply counting incoming links leaves them wide open to manipulation. They're also ruthless about plonking anyone who is found trying to game the system. Impact factors don't have this defense - it's a straight sum-and-divide operation, with little to no adjustments or oversight.
As I understand it, this sort of "gaming" is why crappy fringe journals sometimes get huge impact factors. What happens is, deliberately or not, the authors in those journals self-reference like crazy, jacking up the references per article count. It's like a set of websites which all link to each other extensively, but have very few incoming links from outside their clique. IIRC, Google compensates for this now, while impact factors do not.
I've noticed a disturbing trend towards reliance on impact factors in judging the importance of work (say in tenure evaluations, etc.). The more importance people attach to such a flimsy system, the more frequently you'll hear such cases of gaming the system.
The summary claims Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, has a high impact factor. The blog linked to, however, does not assert this, and I see no source for it. He does also co-edit the International Journal of Nonlinear Sciences and Numerical Simulation, which the blog asserts "flaunt its high 'impact factor'." The link to the IJNSNS praising him is broken, so I can't confirm that.
It looks to me like some crackpot got a journal. However, it doesn't seem particularly devastating. Nobody has based work on his articles purely on the basis of the "Impact Factor." I don't think anyone else is taking him seriously. At worst, libraries have paid to subscribe.
Slashdot is a bit late in reporting these news... I tried to submit them earlier when the news was fresher.
The problem at heart is that one of the biggest and evillest academic publishers, Elsevier, has been supporting a crackpot.
This shows that Elsevier isn't doing enough to promote the quality of research, and worse, libraries are paying huge fees with tax money for worthless journals. The problem here is bundling; university libraries have to buy in bundles journals, one of which may contain crackpot ideas as this one did.
Boycott Elsevier! Let's have open access already.
the time cube. wow. I haven't seen that in a long time. I didn't think it still existed. thanks for the flashback.
semper ubi sub ubi
This has been a fascinating case of Crackpottery. Read the blog and the subsequent replies. El Naschie seems to make it (Quantum Mechanical babble-speak) up as he goes along ,but unless you are an expert in this area, as Dr. John Baez is, it would be difficult for the casual reader to discern this. This is similar to the Bogdanov affair, another well know scientific scam. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair )I'm a little surprised it took this long for Slashdot to discover this one.
One other thing: One of Baez's beefs among others is that this bogus El Naschie journal is bundled with more respectable journals and Elsevier profits from the bogus science.
Alas, something I discovered to my sorrow over the years is that sufficiently specialized math is indistinguishable from gobbledygook (and vice versa).
they were heavily taken by "cold fusion researchers," a canard in three dimensions if ever I heard one, 20 years back. perhaps they occupy the same place in scientific literature as S&P and Moody's does in careful review of bonding and finance? down Illinois' way, they call it "pay to play."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Maybe now I'll finally get my numerology degree made.
U+F8FF
Why would you even bother posting this when /. puts the domain for the link in plain text?
If we don't protect the freedom of speech how will we know who the assholes are?
...there's a such thing as an "impact factor."
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Half their journals are top-of-their-class, the other half are low-quality or almost useless garbage (like the example in the article) that still get cited more than they should because they show up automatically in searches in any of Elsevier's other journals or search databases. Oh, and of course this part:
"The fact that this journal costs $4520 per year would be hilarious, except that libraries are actually buying it - at a reduced rate, bundled in with other Elsevier journals, but still!"
Ah, bundling. It looks like a good deal, until you realize much of what you get in the bundle amounts to the journal equivalent of crapware and simply clutters up the library. Some of those journals I wouldn't pay $100 for, but the library has them wasting space on the shelves.
People used to say about a mathematician or physicist that "what he is doing is so important that only a few people in the world can understand what he is talking about."
In a few cases it was actually true.
Also, there were mathematicians who believed that the highest form of mathematics was work that had no practical application. There was a story that the inventor of matrix theory expressed pride that he had invented a form of mathematics with absolutely no practical use. Little did he know how extensively his work could be used. He would have been appalled.
There still seems to be a feeling that the less people are able to understand a paper in a math journal, the more important the paper is likely to be.
At one time I was a subscriber to the Annals of Mathematical Statistics. Papers in math journals usually assume that you know every paper previously written by the author and the others in the field. There is often very little introductory material and no tutorial material in these papers. Even if you have a general understanding of the topic, you can't follow the papers because they are written very concisely, and assume that nothing needs to be explained if it was ever published anywhere else. You may have to backtrack for years of someone's papers and still not be able to understand the paper you are trying to read.
This is probably a combined consequence of "publish or perish" in academia and page limits in journals. It is often hard to tell if a given paper makes any sense or is useful.
I guess you could call it job security through obscurity.
This is an example of the sort of abuse we get all the time from ignorant people. I inherited this science from my father, an ex-used-car salesman and part-time window-box, and I am very proud to be in charge of the first science with free gifts. You get this luxury tea-trolley with every new enrolment. In addition to this you can win a three-piece lounge suite, this luxury caravan, a weekend for two with Peter Bonetti and tonight's star prize, the entire Norwich City Council.
Sturgeon's Law.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The people who most directly care about especially quick-to-skim summaries of quality (like impact factor) are people judging the output of professors. If you're not familiar with a sub-field, how do you separate the professor who's published 20 lame papers in questionable venues from the professor who's published 20 high-quality papers in the top journals of his field? You look at some sort of rating for the venues he's published in.
For reading papers, I agree it's not quite as relevant. I still do do a first pass of filtering by using my subjective views of publication quality, though. I'm more likely to give some surprising-sounding claim a thorough evaluation if it was published in a reputable journal than if it was published as a PDF on the internet, or in some obscure conference. You can't read everything, and the well-known conferences and journals in my area provide one level of vetting that I can rely on.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Why not just have a second impact factor that doesn't count same author or same journal cites?
Maybe one for each I'm not sure which would be better, but it seems like impact factor is being gamed too easily and needs updating.
Also automatic tools for similarity to previous work IN THE SAME JOURNAL seems like a no-brainer. Not that an editor couldn't get around this, but it would be more obvious.
Originally, peer review meant that peers in the field would actually review the work. Researchers knew each other, and the endorsement of a well-known researcher actually meant something. As research communities have grown, journals have established themselves as the authority about what is good research, but this system was bound to deteriorate because there are conflicts of interest. It's not really always in their best interest to give good reviews, and often they are not really capable of doing the job properly.
There's an easy solution. Peers just need to start reviewing each others' works again and put things back the way they were. We read each others' papers anyway, we might as well give a review. Perhaps we could use digital signatures to make the reviews verifiable. Here's a tool that does that. If researchers started reviewing each other again, it would naturally create a decentralized social network of linked papers and reviews that we could analyze. Essentially, that network would say everything about who is central in research communities, and who is only connected with a few lucky reviews.
Mathematicians use all sorts of funky ancient Greek symbols to express their thoughts. It's like trying to read an APL program.
If mathematicians could represent their concepts in car analogies, maybe ordinary folks would be able to understand what all the fuss is about.
At least, here, on Slashdot, where the car analogy is the lingua franca.
And the mathematicians might have some fun with it. How would you express the concept of isomorphic, infinite-dimensional, separable Hilbert spaces with a car analogy?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
When the first questionable but exciting buzzwords come to life, just explain away the doubters with more buzzwords that sound even better!!
it seems that eliminating the wikipeida entry would make it easier for him to continue crackpottery - it eliminates one of the most popular sources people could look to find a critical opinion of his work.
It seems to me that part of the issue here is that you're trying to form a single ranking of all the papers/journals, and there might not be one. Netflix doesn't try to form a single ranking of all movies, they try to find the ones that a particular individual will like - a personalised definition of good.
This allows the crackpots to have their own definition of 'good', and there is nothing wrong with that.
For individual researchers this approach would probably work very well. Funding bodies would need to specify more constraints than just that they want "good research" to get a useful answer. Figuring out what those extra constraints 'should' be is an interesting question.
That always struck me as somewhat funny about the term "impact factor". Having an impact is in normal speech an impact on something. These factors seem to be trying to avoid the question of what you're measuring an impact on by choosing something really broad, like "impact on the advance of science". But it shouldn't be a surprise that that's more or less unmeasurable.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It might help if everyone asked their school library to stop subscribing to this "journal" and perhaps review other journals by this same publisher to see if they are worth keeping. At a time when worthwhile journals are being cut, it's a shame that schools are still paying for this one.
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
Impact factor? Pul-leeeze. That's nothing compared to the O'Reilly Factor!!!
Elsevier, just like other large commercial publishers of scientific journals, offers libraries a significant discount if they subscribe to their whole catalog.
By including crappy, useless and inexpensive (for them) journals, they can siphon more money out of universities and into the pockets of their shareholders, as is their god-given duty as capitalists.
It does not help the cause of the sole source of criticism, a math blog from U. Texas, to have ostensibly technical criticism asserting incorrectness but admitting ignorance (see second link in summary). The author takes issue with some points in an article of which he has some experience. However, he points out several things that he has no knowledge of and admits as much. He then asserts from this admitted position of ignorance that the material with which has is not familiar is somehow fraudulent. To make that claim valid the author would have to be able to determine that with certainty, but he can't.
This technical criticism is produced in support of a posting elsewhere in the same blog, the author of which makes the same sort of assertions, and likewise fails to support most of them. In fact he can produce partial support for only one, and then claims support from others which is not produced. Some of this supposedly comes from his own administration which he admits does not support his work pursuing the matter.
I take no position with regards to the central issue. I've seen a couple journals with very incestuous editorial policies and staffs. It makes it hard for others to get published. However, the situation evolved into this because those people did a lot of work with each other, not because any of it was fraudulent, so this can happen in an absence of any wrong doing.
Claims of wrong doing are extremely serious, as the occurrence of such things are. Such claims should be supportable. The claims made in TFA that are supportable are not of evidence wrong doing, and claims of wrong doing are unsupported, and by admission, unsupportable by those making them. As far as I can tell this is a single blog's flamefest with more crackpot value than what they claim is due their target.
In short, the accusers appear to be embedded in at least as much pot and crack as they accuse others of, failing utterly to differentiate themselves from kettle. They may have a valid point, but they fail to show it, instead making themselves look all the worse through the use of reciprocal psychoceramics.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Citation indices like citeseer distinguish self-citations from non-self-citations; if you pick some random paper that has both, you'll see a tally like "81 citations -- 7 self". Does Thomson Scientific not actually bother to do that in computing its impact factor?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Basically what's being said here is that the academic publication system is vulnerable to the sorts of SEO attacks that briefly caused search engines to be befuddled by sites full of interlinked pages full of nonsense text and viagra ads. The academic publication system just moves a little slower, so it's going to take them a little longer to update things.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
It sounds like this jack-ass is using the system that Philip M Parker developed to create "custom books" where a computer network scours publicly available sources of information and then pieces together a "book" based on the information that it picks up. To someone scanning the books, you may not notice, but it you try to understand anything in it you can't help but realize that either the person that wrote it was a complete idiot, or it was computer generated.
One never knows when one might need a rotten tomato... - King's Quest IV: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow
Unfortunately I think the problem goes beyond mathematics and extends to technical schools of thought in general. It is disappointing that a respected publisher would publish this dribble. I think this day and age people are so desperate to get their ideas out there that they put out anything and for some reason many journals are willing to publish them. I bet you this guy's next paper will be, "I've proven P=NP!"
If only i knew someone that had the unstoppable urge to explain all this to me. I'd like that.
(talking math and physics in general here)
As a programmer, i wish i was better adept in math. Its interesting even when i don't understand it at all. If only..
and then i stumbled upon the links in the article.
Hey!
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Maybe he's publishing all the papers he writes, chock full of references to his other writings, in a journal he edits so he can build an impressive citation count, thus gaining brownie points towards a promotion. You don't have to be good to be appointed dept. chair, just get your name and university plastered all over "respectable" journals more often than the other guy and you're the administration's new hero.
I looked up this guy on MathSciNet (Electronic Math reviews by the AMS). El Naschie has authored 98 articles. Many if not most say "There will be no review of this item". Some have a copy of the abstract only a few are actually reviewed.
Well-known scientific publishers tend to be well-known because of a few stand-out "gems" in their inventory that get all the attention. Most people never see the rest of the iceberg.
This is a commercial publisher who put put out 2000 different journals. That's an awful lot of iceberg.
Eric Baird
If you're a new researcher in an obscure field, one of the best ways to advance is to assemble a group of researchers interested in similar topics, hold a conference so everyone can get to know each other, publish the conference proceedings, and then you all publish like crazy citing each other's papers - this then bootstraps the whole group's rankings.
Another thing you see happening is that journals are wary of single-author papers, so it's kinda accepted that if you write a paper all by yourself, you invite a few mates to be co-authors, to make the thing look more legitimate and to improve its statistical ranking (with three authors rather than one, a paper has three times as many incoming and outgoing author links, and correspondingly greater connectivity).
If you see a paper published in a major journal, with fifty authors, you know that each one of those fifty people probably can't personally vouch for every detail in the paper. If they could, you wouldn't need fifty of them.
You also know that when you go through the most cited authors in physics, and find that someone appears to named as a co-author on ~300 successfully-published papers a year, that that person is probably a head of department, and may not have actually read all the papers with their name on, let alone been involved in any of the scientific work.
Eric Baird
You never do know for sure, even with major journals:
Problematic physics experiments.
If someone submits an paper on experimental physics, the journal referees typically aren't in a position to say that the experiment really happened the way that the authors say. As long as the claimed results are roughly in line with what people expect, and nothing seems wrong, and the experimenters seem to have a track record, things tend to go smoothly.
Trouble is, sometimes a respected researcher's entire career turns out to be based on a succession of fraudulent papers (e.g. the Schon case) - in these cases, what makes the offenders "successful" as scientists is often their ability to get results that other people couldn't get, or to get them first ... and sometimes the reason for those notable successes turns out to be because the "successful" researcher cut more corners. When the system operates according to the "first past the post" principle, and competing teams are striving to be the first to achieve a result (and get their names in the history books), there's an incentive to take shortcuts (consciously or unconsciously).
With hindsight, a surprising number of "historically-significant" physics experiments perhaps shouldn't have been taken so seriously ... but they generated results that people liked, so they got through the system without quite as much scrutiny as they perhaps needed, and after something's been published in a major journal, it seems to be considered bad etiquette to criticise it too much while the author is still alive (provided that the results themselves are considered "right").
Peer review (in the physical sciences) has never offered any guarantees, other than that a published paper should be considered by the system to be free from identifiable error at the time.
Eric Baird
which is why academic publishing is seriously screwed up. the public pays taxes to fund most academic research, but then researchers have to pay journal publishers in order to get their papers published. and in return, the publishers retain the copyright to all public research, keeping it out of the hands of the tax payers who funded it (and charging Universities up the ass to have access to their own research).
people used to justify this commingling of academia with commercial interests by the peer-review process involved in journal publication, but the peer-review process provided by academic journals clearly isn't working here. at this point, it would be far better for Universities to publish their own research papers, allowing public research to be made freely available to students, researchers, and anyone else who might be interested in it.
research papers could be published in online databases where they would be archived for easy public access. it's easy enough for independent writers to self-publish and distribute their writings online. so it should be no problem for Universities to do the same. the peer-review process of papers submitted for publication could be handled either by the University itself, or different Universities could get together and form an agreement whereupon they would review one another's papers for free. this would keep academic research purely non-commercial and eliminate potential conflicts of interest.
eliminating/bypassing commercial publishing houses would also mean that societally beneficial projects like Google Book Search wouldn't be stonewalled by greed-driven publishers, and public good could be placed before corporate interests for once. Wikipedia is nice and all, but serious research would greatly benefit from all academic research being made freely available in a searchable online database for all to access. after all, public research isn't very useful if no one has access to it.
Looks like this El Naschie (is he a Mexican wrestler?) is using the Mathematics equivalent of SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator.
Well, why don't we look at the article and read some of these papers published on the vanity press?
Okay... The people in TFA have a lot more, but basically these papers appear to be gibberish. I hasten to mention that in spite of the odd name, there are 17 wallpaper groups, but the fact is that he comes up with all these occurances of numbers like 686 and appears to be claiming there's some kind of meaning behind it without specifying what, exactly, he's claiming.
As a biologist, I must admit mixed feelings (Was it Science or Nature who discussed El Nachie recently?). Leigh Van Valen, a biologist/paleontologist at the University of Chicago shows many of the same quirks. He self-publishes many of his writings in his own journal (Evolutionary Theory), a journal which consists almost entirely of Van Valen's work. He occasionally also publishes poems and songs in the journal.
But here's the thing... Van Valen is, well, sort of on the brilliant side. He's published several times in Science and Nature. His seminal paper, "A New Evolutionary Law" showed that log survival curves of clades were flat, providing the basis for the well known Red Queen theory. He was obly able to get it published by starting "Evolutionary Theory" out of his office. Every journal he tried rejected the paper.
That said, Evolutionary Theory is still published from Van Valen's office, and not from Elsevier.
So, do we make this behavior acceptable for some and not for others?
You can totally turn off that "link in plain text" thing, if you want. Why you would want to do that, I have no idea (I set my own option to be even more pedantic about it than the default).
As a published scientific author-
Elsevier sucks!
They have bought important 'name' journals and charge for everything (including your pre-prints) that they possibly can. Many reputable departments are boycotting their publications now.
They even bought me a nice dinner once in Tokyo. I guess that was a sign they were making too much money and had no idea how to spend it.
www.biomedcentral.com does exactly this.
100's of journals. All free to access.
cool. ibiblio.org is more of a digital archive & online library provided freely in the spirit of open information exchange (they're part of the University of North Carolina, i believe), but they also maintain a collection of open access journals and allow users to submit their own research papers to the collection.
hopefully these kinds of open access archives will catch on at more universities and convince academia that commercial journals aren't necessary.
I thought most mathematics decided to no longer publish or referee for Elsevier...
You mean something like this? Arxiv
Peer review is done on a volunteer basis. The journals do not pay their reviewers. Very often they solicit the very same authors who submitted their papers to the journal to review.
The model used by academic journals is quite exploitative to all parties involved and needs to change.
According to himself:
"However if we postulate a geometry which is so wild that it looks more like a stormy ocean to be the geometry of space-time, then both Einsteinâ(TM)s theory and quantum particle physics will fit in. That is more or less what I have done."
Oh, he has only created the great unification theory. My my, how unfortunate that he hasn't received his Nobel price yet. Gee.
Source:
http://www.el-naschie.net/el-naschie-physicist-details.asp?site=248
Did anyone else get this cool popup from TFA?
"Internet Explorer does not support MathML (used here for equations) and has severely broken support for other Web Standards like CSS2 and XHTML.
Most Web designers have bent over backwards to shelter you from the failings of this wretched browser. We have not.
Aside from the equations, many things on these pages will render poorly or not at all in IE. If they do, We're sorry, but we aren't going to "fix it."
MathML support can be obtained with the aid of a new plugin. For the rest, you need to get yourself a Standards-Compliant browser, like Mozilla."
And it's not my fault. I'm at work and can't install a real brower.
1
elsiver is a for profit company
2 ,sustained by a 20 billion + endowment, buy everything, so all elsiveir has to do is say a years subscription = # librarys/cost * profit factor. And they have a pretty good idea of what # librarys is.
some librarys, think harvard
and of course, professors need to publish, so following Sturgeon's Law, see wikipedia, most of academic/science publications are not that important (empirical data: science citation index states that ~ half of all papers have one or fewer citations)
so there is this sort of game or collusion between the publishers, the funding agencys, the librarys and the academics to provide enough journals so that all the profs have some place to publish; there are a small number of journals - a handfull - that consistently have good quality stuff; most of the otheres just exist to make money for the publishers and jobs for the scientists (not to rant, but fusion power is another scam, just welfare for scientists, totally ludicrous)
On the Chaos, Solitons & Fractals web site http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaleditorialboard.cws_home/967/editorialboard#editorialboard it says Associate Editors: Nonlinear Dynamics Engineering Applications: S.R. Bishop University College London, London, UK. So one of the editors is in the same department (the Department of Mathematics, UCL) as Alan Sokal of the Sokal hoax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair It is a small world!
In grad school there were rumors of a Journal a former student had started called "The Journal of Pointless Studies". I submitted for publication to said journal a mathematical proof of the non-existence of the null hypotenuse. Since I was an Economist at the time, one Professor thought I meant "null hypothesis" and wrote me off. Another got the joke and then proved the existence of the null hypotenuse. Oh yeah. You know you wanna be me.
people used to justify this commingling of academia with commercial interests by the peer-review process involved in journal publication, but the peer-review process provided by academic journals clearly isn't working here.
Well, if you're a crackpot, it follows that at least some of your peers will be crackpots too. That's the whole problem with trust-based systems. They don't work if everyone's a nutjob.
Seriously now, I can see this business model struggling exactly on the same timescale as our friends at the RIAA, only less violently.
Hell you could even put papers on Slashdot with special restrictions on the qualifications of mods and commenters. The only real stickler is you need a world class IT manager to keep identities ultra pure, and develop the credentialed group of Peers allowed to Review.
The problem is that Good Science takes money, and money leads to political wiggling.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
While it might allow some sophisticated trolls through, I'd like to use a search engine ranked by data intelligence. No BuyMe link farms, and phenomenal discussions above random unreadable junk.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Chicken.
Your first chunk of money comes from some other job, to produce your first paper, which earns you a grant. Then you earn the time for your second paper at "normal" rather than half-speed.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I truly wish that I could have put your thoughts into words, first. Congratulations on exposing the wrong, the hoax, and the pure stink of it all. Bravo!
Excellent post! The problem here is that the professors who are holding positions in these commercial journals (and who possibly would not have so much power in deciding what gets published otherwise), to the disadvantage of all of us but theirs, will not give up their positions in favor of new, free, and open publication channels. On the other hand, there are some good examples and trends, see for example intechweb.org.
On the other hand, the sayings "You get what you pay for!" and "Pay as you go!" seem applicable. The amount of money you make per hour from publishing a paper makes the minimum wage look attractive. The fact that some people continue to publish useful papers at this pay rate is detrimental to scientific progress as it supports the societal manipulative myth that you don't need to pay researchers what they are worth.
A much more reliable journal rating criterion already exists: it is called "Cited half-life".
If you log in to ISI Web of Knowledge, choose Journal Citation Reports, select "JCR Science edition 2007", "View a group of journals by "Subject Category"", then select "PHYSICS, MATHEMATICAL", and "View Journal Data - sort by "Cited Half-Life", you will see a list of 43 journals. The top ones, with tied scores of >10.0, are COMMUNICATIONS IN MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS, JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS, JOURNAL OF STATISTICAL PHYSICS and a few more that everyone in the field knows are actually the journals of choice, while the two quack journals CHAOS SOLITONS & FRACTALS and INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NONLINEAR SCIENCES AND NUMERICAL SIMULATION appear, respectively, as nos. 35 and 38 with scores of 3 and 2.2. If you eliminate the 15-20 journals that are misclassified by Thomson-Reuters as Mathematical Physics, and a couple more that have only been in existence for 2-3 years, these two quack journals come dead last.
If, on the other hand, you "View journal data - sort by "Impact Factor", these two journals appear as nos. 2 and 1, with IF scores of 5.099 and 3.025, respectively, while, e.g., the widely used, well regarded JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS appears only as no. 26 with an IF score of 1.137.
It is not hard to explain why the Impact Factor score has little or nothing to do with actual merit or genuine impact, while the "Cited Half-Life" has everything to do with it. Just think about it. Is progress in science based upon popularity polls, self-referencing or juggling of hermetic terminology? Or on careful verification of the validity of new results, confirmed by competent experts over an extended period of time?
A much more reliable journal rating criterion already exists: it is called "Cited half-life". If you log in to ISI Web of Knowledge, choose Journal Citation Reports, select "JCR Science edition 2007", "View a group of journals by "Subject Category"", then select "PHYSICS, MATHEMATICAL", and "View Journal Data - sort by "Cited Half-Life", you will see a list of 43 journals. The top ones, with tied scores of >10.0, are COMMUNICATIONS IN MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS, JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS, JOURNAL OF STATISTICAL PHYSICS and a few more that everyone in the field knows are actually the journals of choice, while the two quack journals CHAOS SOLITONS & FRACTALS and INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NONLINEAR SCIENCES AND NUMERICAL SIMULATION appear, respectively, as nos. 35 and 38 with scores of 3 and 2.2. If you eliminate the 15-20 journals that are misclassified by Thomson-Reuters as Mathematical Physics, and a couple more that have only been in existence for 2-3 years, these two quack journals come dead last. If, on the other hand, you "View journal data - sort by "Impact Factor", these two journals appear as nos. 2 and no. 1, with IF scores of 5.099 and 3.025, respectively, while, e.g., the widely used, well regarded JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS appears only as no. 26 with an IF score of 1.137. It is not hard to explain why the Impact Factor score has little or nothing to do with actual merit or genuine impact, while the "Cited Half-Life" has everything to do with it. Just think about it. Is progress in science based upon popularity polls, self-referencing or juggling of hermetic terminology? Or on careful verification of the validity of new results, confirmed by competent experts over an extended period of time?