5 ms·

Where a scientist publishes papers can make or break their career. Historically for area A, journals B, C, D have the highest impact. If you want your work to b

Where a scientist publishes papers can make or break their career. Historically for area A, journals B, C, D have the highest impact. If you want your work to be recognized as high quality you will publish in those journals and whether they are "open" or "controlled by a publisher" is irrelevant. It just so happens that for most scientific areas, the high impact journals are all owned by publishers.

thirdsun 11y ago
Thanks, got it - so it's the equivalent of signing to a major label instead of releasing your album on Bandcamp. However, and I may be very naive and idealistic here, shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in?
- barkbro 11y ago
  Imagine yourself as an employer who has to go through a large amount of applications. You can either read all their publications (if you even understand them) and try to get some idea of their academic performance, or just trust that the more prestigious journals require the publications to be of importance and quality.
- studentrob 11y ago
  > shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in? Yes. I'm not familiar with all the ins and outs of the current publishing system. But it seems there is room for a more modern publishing agency that can take the best of the old publishing model and combine it with digital age thinking.
- bcook 11y ago
  Do academics have time to read every paper?
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    More to the point: do they all understand each other's area of specialty?
- jonathankoren 11y ago
  It's not the medium, but the forum that matters. There's a hierarchy to forums such as workshop, conference, journal. Then within each forum there are tiers. For instance SIGIR is better than CIKM for information retrieval. USENIX is better than FAST for file systems. The World Then even within each conference there's a tier. Posters are the least, full papers are the most. At each tier, submissions are competitive. This is where the peer review takes place.", and mostly it comes down to reading how the experiments were done and of the conclusions made sense given the experimental setup, and how well the paper is written.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
Hondor 11y ago
This is why it's a lopsided to blame the publishers. Look at the incentives: Whether publishers give away their papers openly can make or break their business. Where researchers publish in open or closed journals can make or break their careers. Which journals libraries subscribe to can make or break their .. librarian's careers? Hopefully this link in the chain gets broken by Sci-Hub. As an analogy, people who pay protection money or bribes are still part of the corruption and the mafia or corrupt politicians couldn't function without their support.

thirdsun 11y ago

Thanks, got it - so it's the equivalent of signing to a major label instead of releasing your album on Bandcamp. However, and I may be very naive and idealistic here, shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in?

barkbro 11y ago
Imagine yourself as an employer who has to go through a large amount of applications. You can either read all their publications (if you even understand them) and try to get some idea of their academic performance, or just trust that the more prestigious journals require the publications to be of importance and quality.
studentrob 11y ago
> shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in? Yes. I'm not familiar with all the ins and outs of the current publishing system. But it seems there is room for a more modern publishing agency that can take the best of the old publishing model and combine it with digital age thinking.
bcook 11y ago
Do academics have time to read every paper?
- chris_wot 11y ago
  More to the point: do they all understand each other's area of specialty?
jonathankoren 11y ago
It's not the medium, but the forum that matters. There's a hierarchy to forums such as workshop, conference, journal. Then within each forum there are tiers. For instance SIGIR is better than CIKM for information retrieval. USENIX is better than FAST for file systems. The World Then even within each conference there's a tier. Posters are the least, full papers are the most. At each tier, submissions are competitive. This is where the peer review takes place.", and mostly it comes down to reading how the experiments were done and of the conclusions made sense given the experimental setup, and how well the paper is written.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

Hondor 11y ago

This is why it's a lopsided to blame the publishers. Look at the incentives: Whether publishers give away their papers openly can make or break their business. Where researchers publish in open or closed journals can make or break their careers. Which journals libraries subscribe to can make or break their .. librarian's careers? Hopefully this link in the chain gets broken by Sci-Hub. As an analogy, people who pay protection money or bribes are still part of the corruption and the mafia or corrupt politicians couldn't function without their support.