Slashdot Mirror
It's Time For Academics To Take Back Control Of Research Journals (theguardian.com)
Stephen Curry, a professor of structural biology at Imperial College London, has a piece on The Guardian today in which he outlines the history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research. An excerpt from the article: "Publish or perish" has long been the mantra of seeking to make a success of their research career. Reputations are built on the ability to communicate something new to the world. Increasingly, however, they are determined by numbers, not by words, as universities are caught in a tangle of management targets composed of academic journal impact factors, university rankings and scores in the government's research excellence framework. The chase for metricised success has been further exacerbated by the takeover of scholarly publishing by profit-seeking commercial companies, which pose as partners but no longer seem properly in tune with academia. Evidence of the growing divergence between academic and commercial interests is visible in the secrecy around negotiations on subscription and open access charges. It's also clear from the popularity among academics of the controversial site Sci-Hub, which has made over 60m research articles freely available on the internet. Over-worked researchers could be forgiven for thinking that the time-honoured mantra has morphed to "publish, and perish anyway."
There seem to be several "open source" journals, but I'm wondering how seriously they are taken, especially to the University Gods that dish out tenure? I don't know...
But also, how about some of these "prestigious" universities publish their own damn journals?
In the end, the for-profit journals that one apparently has to be published in will continue to flourish as long as the university communities themselves publish in them, judge peers by them, and pay the astronomical subscriptions to them.
In other words, these people complaining about the state of "professional; journals are in control of the entire situation.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I mean, really, why do they need them? Other than putting stuff onto actual paper, which these days seems somewhat pointless since most of this will actually be consumed digitally anyway. Are you telling me the academic world can't work out a way to coordinate peer review and put out papers without the help of massive commercial academic publishers?
And if they do, how the hell has Amazon not stepped into the field and undercut everyone? About the only thing I can see the publishers have going for them is momentum and legacy at this point.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
I guess from the perspective of an academic:
1) They got into science presumably because they want to do science, not run a journal.
2) Running a journal is a lot of work for no extra pay
3) The university pays for their Elsevier subscription anyway, so they get access to all the other papers already (and non-PhDs don't do science anyway).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Translation: "I need more one-syllable words!"
You are welcome on my lawn.
The issue here is less about greedy journals and more about the fact that universities are being run like businesses which results in the "publish or perish" expectation. The system has become completely mismanaged into being a capitalist nightmare where you do what they want or you lose what you love. I believe this could be remedied if it became exceptionally difficult to revoke tenure, requiring that colleagues agree to it. The greedy journals problem can easily be done away with by freely releasing the research and only allowing non-profit journals to publish their work.
TL;DR: The problem is the culture of university administrations, not with the researchers themselves.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Sci-Hub is not the solution. The issue is twofold: First, scientists (still) believe they must publish; they don't -- do achieve something in your field of research, and the world will know.
It is the new researchers who need to publish. Yes, once you've established a reputation in your field, people will know who you are. But that very often takes decades. Until then, you need publications to show you have a track record of good work.
(And even then, the reputation is usually phrased in terms of what you published: "e.g., "X published one of the seminal papers on bismith selenide semiconductors." And it will be two decades between when you published your paper and when the rest of the world starts putting bismuth selenide in their high-end devices.)
There seem to be several "open source" journals, but I'm wondering how seriously they are taken, especially to the University Gods that dish out tenure?
Some are, some aren't.
The problem is, the entry barrier to putting up a website and giving it a prestigious journal title is pretty much zero. So there are literally thousands of "open source journals" that have no redeeming merit whatsoever, and the ones which are actually real tend to get buried in the clutter.
As we look around the world, though, it's clear that there are many thousands of academics in universities of varying quality who would also like to have their work published, even if it's not in, for example, one of the ACM's or IEEE's Transactions journals. So we now have a slew of journals focused on computer science, some of which are, to be polite, not very selective about what they publish, as long as the authors pay the publication fee. There are also more and more low-quality journals that publish online using an open access approach. Many of these journals use highly credible names, and it's easy for a novice to confuse them with well-known and higher-quality journals. If you do a search on "fake journals in computer science', you will see that there are hundreds of such journals; if you go to the web page for such a journal, it looks real, complete with editorial board members who hold academic positions. Life would be simpler if these fake journals didn't exist, but most of them seem to find enough paying authors to put out new volumes of their journals. If your papers are continually rejected by the program committees for various conferences, this may be the only way to publish your work, even if it's not very good. Indeed, some of these journals have published papers that were generated by bots.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with submitting your work to be published in one of these fake journals. You can tell your Mom that you are a published author, and you can include this "publication" on your CV, but it won't help you to become a full Professor at a reputable university.
If you are not an academic at an institution that evaluates your publication record for promotion, then this whole process probably seems silly to you. In that case, you can view the promotion process as a game where you play by certain established rules, just as people in industry tend to play by a different set of rules to get promoted and earn raises.
But speaking as an actual laboratory scientist: I read. My colleagues read. Conferences presentations are either "work in progress" or "broad summary of everything in our lab for the last 5 years", depending on the venue. There is no way that a half hour talk or a single poster can actually provide the detail necessary to understand and evaluate cutting edge research.
do achieve something in your field of research, and the world will know.
How? Are they psychic? You may not have noticed but most academics (at least in the fields I'm familiar with) would rather pull out their own fingernails than hold a press conference (or network for that matter), and the ones that do enjoy big-noting themselves are not necessarily the ones with anything worth saying.
Second, publications must be controlled by researchers and only stuff that really matters should be published.
We do this already. It's called peer review and impact factor. It's relatively easy to get crap published in a low impact-factor journal that no-one will read or care about. It's really freakin' hard to get anything but work that really matters in a high impact factor journal. Want to read the "stuff that really matters" then go high impact. Want to read work in progress that might turn into something that really matters (or help you come up with something that really matters)? Read medium impact factor and conference proceedings. Want to read any random shit? Congrats, you have way too much spare time on your hands.
So what is the part of for-profit journals that is worth the money that they're paid, if they're not editing and they're not paying reviewers and they're not producing paper versions that anyone cares about?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Computer scientist here. Computer scientists read too, communication is not by word of mouth. It is true, however, that conference proceedings for good conferences are considered at least as good, if not better, than most journals. The pattern is more that you publish and give talks on original work, then develop a synthesis of multiple pieces of work + new data into journal articles (which is substantively different than other fields). My understanding of this is that it came about due to the speed at which the field came into existence and the need for faster publishing models, though that's not entirely the case anymore.
Now if you'll excuse me, I just pulled 10 papers to my tablet that I need to read. :P
I agree with you about all of that, except your conflation of editing and proofreading.
For-profit journals are a scam. Not the journal part, but the for-profit part. Where there is a need for journals, there's no reason they should be for-profit. But then, I agree with Pierre-Joseph Proudon that all profits are little more than a tax on productivity.
You are welcome on my lawn.