11 ms·

How are you planning on addressing the fact that none of this matters in the slightest if academic career growth/incentives/reputation specifically revolves aro

How are you planning on addressing the fact that none of this matters in the slightest if academic career growth/incentives/reputation specifically revolves around publishing boring pdfs in established journals? What do I gain by sending my work to your platform where the first question anyone in my "target audience" will ask is "why didn't this get published in a real journal, whats wrong with it?", and I will get essentially zero resume kudos points for it? Keeping in mind that it took me at least many months to do the work, I don't exactly have an abundance of papers to throw around, and my officemate almost certainly will submit work of similar quality to a traditional journal and reap the benefits of that. Just saying, my decision to publish in traditional journals isn't as much as a decision as it is a requirement of the very career I am attempting to pursue.

iheartmemcache 10y ago
In mathematics, Perelman posted his beautiful 3 part proof to Poincare to arXiv and within a day there was allegedly hype (or so reputed professors report, while I did go into advanced alg. top. later, I was 14 at the time). Professors (the same professors who'd referee) were independently reviewing Part 1 within 24 hours and this was in 2002. Then you have a Fields Medal winner Voevodsky who also bitches about having a paper stuck in peer-review limbo for three years.[0] In cosmology (I am not a physicist in the slightest, but I have enough mathematical background s.t. I can watch lower graduate level classes without too much difficulty in a recreational capacity), pre-prints get e-mailed around daily, such that if Lenny Susskind posts something on evening-{n}, morning-{n+1} will have most of the field commenting on it. In biological sciences (again, just from hear say mind you) I understand it's different (e.g. in medicine, specifically, my uncles/father/their colleagues and students are all concerned with the impact factor of their papers and/or their doctoral students papers). I also realize some journals have a "no preprint" policy. But a lot of heavy hitters (Nature, Elsevier, Springer[1]) allow the circulation of pre-prints now. So it's not a binary decision between one or the other in some cases. (And in the instances where you are able to submit pre-prints to online, if you've made a mistake, a colleague could inform you and you can issue a retraction hopefully before the $month+1's Nature Methods hits physical press.) --- Side-bar, skip over if you don't care about proof theory, type theory, constructive logic, univalent foundations, or category theory [0] Vlad on Univalent Foundations http://www.math.ias.edu/vladimir/files/univalent_foundations_project.pdf http://www.math.ias.edu/vladimir/files/univalent_foundations... Interestingly enough, for you category theory fans, Vlad has recently become a huge proponent of Homotopy theory[0.b]. Everyone knows Wildberger has kookie ideas w/r/t infinitesimals but Vlad too shares the same 'feeling[0.a]' that analysis (and to a lesser extent axiomatic set theory) just doesn't 'feel' foundationally correct. He's a huge proponent of Coq, Agda and dependent typing instead. Princeton's IAS put out the seminal text that's worth a read. No advanced mathematics required (or even advanced CS knowledge, it's all self-contained). [0.a] I can't really put into words what the 'feeling' is any more than describing why some people find algebraic proofs more elegant than analytic or geometric. But in the same way that there's mathematical beauty [0.a.i] well agreed upon, this 'gut feeling' too is agreed upon amongst those who fall into a certain category (pun not intended) [0.a.i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty [0.b] https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ -- think of this as the best minds in aggregate sit down at Princeton to write one of the best texts on Proof theory, type theory and logic. Practical Foundations for Programming Languages (Robert Harper) is a good companion text. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_preprint_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_p...
- apathy 10y ago
  My god I love coming here and reading the travails of real scientists. The journals that have a "no preprint" policy are primarily Cell Press (link) rags and Annals of Oncology. http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/lets-talk-about-preprint-servers http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/lets-talk-about-preprint-serv... Note the insane amount of FUD. "We're fine with preprints, as long as we can control them!" But that's kind of the point, isn't it -- wrestling back control from journals with a massive inherent COI! Allowing the public (lay or scientific) to objectively determine what's real and what isn't, with visible salvos from both camps as needed, instead of the invisible and un-accountable hand of an editor or anonymous referees? (I sign my reviews.) Physics doesn't seem to have suffered from preprints -- if anything, it has thrived more than expected thanks to it. I don't hear about a replicability crisis in physics, for some reason. I hear about it all the time in biomedical sciences, perhaps because the review process is so incredibly shady for the "top" journals (in terms of impact factor, a statistically indefensible and criminally manipulated metric). Papers that are outright rejected or in need of major revisions are simply yanked and resubmitted elsewhere (I am guilty of this, by the way; rejected from Nature, so we sent it to NEJM with almost no edits and they accepted it a week later). Senior authors act rationally, so if perfecting a paper will cause a delay and potentially deny them priority on a discovery, who can argue for making the edits instead of resubmitting elsewhere? All of this goes away when preprints are the default. Priority is established by deposition, rather than publication; the discovery often (though perhaps not always) is itself enough to prompt review from rivals, even if only in self-interest; and the preprint status makes it clear that the item has not been formally reviewed. Many or most resulting referee comments are public, often submitted as related deposits. From a scholarship perspective, I cannot for the life of me see the downside, other than reticence to boldly state the truth and face retaliation from shysters. It's a shame that the latter is an issue, but given the even larger amounts of $$$ at stake in physics, it seems that biomedical researchers are mostly just cowards using this as an excuse. (JMHO)
isTravis 10y ago
Great question, and one that certainly doesn't have a straightforward or trivial answer. It's definitely more of a social challenge than a technical one - making publishing free/open won't do anything to fix incentives on its own. My hunch is that change to this system will come from the outside. It's too risky of a career decision for a tenure-track professor to start publishing on PubPub (or any open/new system). But, there are lots of people who aren't playing that game. Lots of people who are doing science outside of academia, at a corporate R&D position, or for the sake of education, etc. The most important step is to show that open publishing works. If we can work with these early adopters and show that conversations are more rich, or results more reproducible, we can start to go to universities and grant agencies and advocate for them to require open publishing. The first day that a university hires a professor or an agency rewards a grant based on the history of openly published work, will be a turning point. I hope it will be similar to the first time a software dev was hired for their Github profile, rather than their CS degree. Today, software companies hire on experience. A university degree can show that, but so can major contributions to an open-source project. I hope science can become the same. Whether you're a PhD out of a great program, or an high-school drop out that has committed her life to rigorous experimentation, your demonstrated experience should be what you're hired on, not the list of journals that have found it in their interest (many of them are for-profit) to include your work.
- zenogais 10y ago
  Perhaps offering some sort of crowdsourced funding mechanism and a reputation system would go a long way toward correcting some of these incentives? For example, giving authors / organizations a Bitcoin address where they can receive funds from individuals / organizations who want to support their research. Also, awarding reputation to authors based on the level of peer review their research has successfully undergone (number of peers, level of rigor, etc.), and conversely awarding reputation and funding to those who perform peer reviews. Allowing users to contribute to a peer review fund for individual articles or in general. All that to say this is very exciting and opens up a lot of new possibilities.
  - yayday 10y ago
kriro 10y ago
I think it's a political problem. Most researchers and professors tend to be employed by the state. Lobby the state to give very high preference to open access publication. In an ideal world I'd read a sentence like this in a hiring guideline for state universities: "only research that is available to all citizens of this state shall be considered as a contribution by the candidate" Additionally for research project funding I want to read a similar sentence in the proposed outline that you can typically download for the grant proposal. "Only list your research projects and open access publications in the Previous Related Work section" (or high preference will be given to ...) Basically state funded research that is not available to citizens should be heavily penalized. I think that is logically very consistent. In fact I'd love to GPL the process and make it a requirement to OA everything as soon as a single cent of money goes towards the research.
- apathy 10y ago
  Christ this would be brilliant. The trouble is that you have otherwise-decent people like Kirsten Gillibrand completely in the pocket of RELX. You have massive COI and crap like the PACE trial who WILL NOT, under any circumstances, release their data, and who consider academic inquiries regarding said data (the foundation of any scientific publication) as "vexatious". In short, you're better off trying to get policy changed at NIH and other, major funders of research to push openness (Google and major tech companies already are quite good about this), and only resorting to legal challenges when the satanically evil Elsevier and friends attempt to buy off legislators. If you were wondering whether academic institutions typically stand up for scholars (as opposed to faucets of grant money and indirects, who can behave as they please), kindly refer to the following. http://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/what-will-it-take-to-get-mit-t.html http://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/what-will-it-take-to-get-mi... Academia is not scholarship. The institutions of academia are in fact opposed to scholarship if it might make their senior "leaders" (often far removed from any scholarly pursuits they might once of had) look bad. Academia responds wonderfully to incentives, though, and that's where I do believe you have nailed it. Decision: Accept with Minor Revisions ;-)
dluan 10y ago
I think the answer is closely tied to funding. The whole prestige of impact factor, national academy membership, etc are basic heuristics that help the current funding process. Grant review committees comprised of already established scientists and administrators are more likely to fund what will show up in boring paywalled PDFs. Given another way scientists could make a living while pursuing research, I think you'd see some would stop feeling pressured into publishing in the traditional way and experimenting with altmetrics, open access, open post-pub peer review.
untilHellbanned 10y ago
As an academic in biomedical sciences and as someone who tried to create a journal that did all the things the OP said, thank you. The old crappy system is mandatory. You can't decide to do otherwise and still have a job. The impetus for change needs to start at the funding source level, NIH. They need to make a journal that one is required to publish in order to keep your funding.
- apathy 10y ago
  They have one (several, actually). The trouble is that they're called Cell, Nature, and Science; they're all for-profit; and they answer to no one. The Wellcome Trust is walking the walk that NIH talked for the past decade. We will see how this goes. Cross fingers.
  - untilHellbanned 10y ago
    With ELife?
    - apathy 10y ago
      No, much bigger. They're going to start requiring OA.
      - untilHellbanned 10y ago
        Peer review also needs a reboot. It's epically unhelpful and slows down publishing dramatically, Think they should mandate post publication review.
        apathy 10y ago
        The review model in the WTC's new world order is open, as it currently is in the F1000 journals, and the Wellcome Trust pays the APC so there is no excuse for grantees not to publish. This slowly kicks away all the bullshit excuses that are presented for lack of scientific productivity so that the funder can objectively assess "what are these people doing with our money, and does that advance real, non-press-release science?" It's brilliant imho. https://wellcome.ac.uk/news/why-were-launching-new-publishing-platform https://wellcome.ac.uk/news/why-were-launching-new-publishin... Momentum is important. There's no reverse on a submarine. One of the biggest funders in the world has taken away a standard excuse for failing to openly report results, negative or otherwise. It is free to readers and free to authors funded by the Trust. And all of the reviewing process is out in the open. This is a huge step. The only other funding body I can think of with similar weight is NIH, and (at least internally) they're starting to move in the same direction.
SilasX 10y ago
It could work more like the open source software project model: you would get your respect from having several "accepted pull requests" to the literature. The difference is that your PRs would be better framed in terms of identifying your specific contribution. As it stands now, the publishing model is the equivalent of writing your own version of the project -- with no easy metadata about your specific innovation -- and asking it to be accepted or rejected as a whole. With that said, it's understandable why to keep doing the latter version until academia has standardized on the former.
duwease 10y ago
IMO, the change has to come from the grant financiers, and a case can be made that they get a greater more bang for their buck by adding requirements such as pre-registration, open data publishing (so long as they don't want to keep the data proprietary, of course), and publishing guaranteed regardless of outcome. The fruits of what they purchased can be of more use to the field in this manner, and even they themselves may find they spend less money if the 'failures' are documented in such a way that they don't inadvertently repeatedly fund them due to the fact that the initial results were hidden away in a filing cabinet. I think the same case could be made for placing more emphasis on funding replication -- instead of thinking 'we learned it, why revisit it?', you're checking if it's actually valuable information worth spending more on, or just a fluke.
pmarreck 10y ago
> where the first question anyone in my "target audience" will ask is "why didn't this get published in a real journal, whats wrong with it?" One would think that this wouldn't happen simply because it is (I think) a combination of two of the most well-known logical fallacies, "argumentum ad populum" and "appeal to authority" https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-authority https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-authority I am extremely dismayed by the fact that, in a career where (of ALL careers!) the evidence should ostensibly speak for itself, papers (and their information) are essentially pre-rejected or pre-accepted based on reputation
- zerohp 10y ago
  Conferences and journals are a filter. If your paper can't pass a few rounds of anonymized review (for a conference) then it probably isn't worth the readers time. As an example, arXiv is has a lot of great papers but it also has a lot of bad ones. I'm unlikely to go there to find a paper unless someone referred me to a specific one.
  - apathy 10y ago
    I've never had a paper rejected from a conference, and I've seen some pretty shitty ones at conferences. I think this statement is pretty field-specific. That said, in the CS and EE fields at least, the use of 10-12 referees for a short, dense conference paper is a really good idea. It would appear that this works primarily because of... drum roll ...the social norms and incentives in place within these specific fields.

iheartmemcache 10y ago

In mathematics, Perelman posted his beautiful 3 part proof to Poincare to arXiv and within a day there was allegedly hype (or so reputed professors report, while I did go into advanced alg. top. later, I was 14 at the time). Professors (the same professors who'd referee) were independently reviewing Part 1 within 24 hours and this was in 2002. Then you have a Fields Medal winner Voevodsky who also bitches about having a paper stuck in peer-review limbo for three years.[0] In cosmology (I am not a physicist in the slightest, but I have enough mathematical background s.t. I can watch lower graduate level classes without too much difficulty in a recreational capacity), pre-prints get e-mailed around daily, such that if Lenny Susskind posts something on evening-{n}, morning-{n+1} will have most of the field commenting on it. In biological sciences (again, just from hear say mind you) I understand it's different (e.g. in medicine, specifically, my uncles/father/their colleagues and students are all concerned with the impact factor of their papers and/or their doctoral students papers). I also realize some journals have a "no preprint" policy. But a lot of heavy hitters (Nature, Elsevier, Springer[1]) allow the circulation of pre-prints now. So it's not a binary decision between one or the other in some cases. (And in the instances where you are able to submit pre-prints to online, if you've made a mistake, a colleague could inform you and you can issue a retraction hopefully before the $month+1's Nature Methods hits physical press.) --- Side-bar, skip over if you don't care about proof theory, type theory, constructive logic, univalent foundations, or category theory [0] Vlad on Univalent Foundations http://www.math.ias.edu/vladimir/files/univalent_foundations_project.pdf http://www.math.ias.edu/vladimir/files/univalent_foundations... Interestingly enough, for you category theory fans, Vlad has recently become a huge proponent of Homotopy theory[0.b]. Everyone knows Wildberger has kookie ideas w/r/t infinitesimals but Vlad too shares the same 'feeling[0.a]' that analysis (and to a lesser extent axiomatic set theory) just doesn't 'feel' foundationally correct. He's a huge proponent of Coq, Agda and dependent typing instead. Princeton's IAS put out the seminal text that's worth a read. No advanced mathematics required (or even advanced CS knowledge, it's all self-contained). [0.a] I can't really put into words what the 'feeling' is any more than describing why some people find algebraic proofs more elegant than analytic or geometric. But in the same way that there's mathematical beauty [0.a.i] well agreed upon, this 'gut feeling' too is agreed upon amongst those who fall into a certain category (pun not intended) [0.a.i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty [0.b] https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ -- think of this as the best minds in aggregate sit down at Princeton to write one of the best texts on Proof theory, type theory and logic. Practical Foundations for Programming Languages (Robert Harper) is a good companion text. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_preprint_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_p...

apathy 10y ago
My god I love coming here and reading the travails of real scientists. The journals that have a "no preprint" policy are primarily Cell Press (link) rags and Annals of Oncology. http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/lets-talk-about-preprint-servers http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/lets-talk-about-preprint-serv... Note the insane amount of FUD. "We're fine with preprints, as long as we can control them!" But that's kind of the point, isn't it -- wrestling back control from journals with a massive inherent COI! Allowing the public (lay or scientific) to objectively determine what's real and what isn't, with visible salvos from both camps as needed, instead of the invisible and un-accountable hand of an editor or anonymous referees? (I sign my reviews.) Physics doesn't seem to have suffered from preprints -- if anything, it has thrived more than expected thanks to it. I don't hear about a replicability crisis in physics, for some reason. I hear about it all the time in biomedical sciences, perhaps because the review process is so incredibly shady for the "top" journals (in terms of impact factor, a statistically indefensible and criminally manipulated metric). Papers that are outright rejected or in need of major revisions are simply yanked and resubmitted elsewhere (I am guilty of this, by the way; rejected from Nature, so we sent it to NEJM with almost no edits and they accepted it a week later). Senior authors act rationally, so if perfecting a paper will cause a delay and potentially deny them priority on a discovery, who can argue for making the edits instead of resubmitting elsewhere? All of this goes away when preprints are the default. Priority is established by deposition, rather than publication; the discovery often (though perhaps not always) is itself enough to prompt review from rivals, even if only in self-interest; and the preprint status makes it clear that the item has not been formally reviewed. Many or most resulting referee comments are public, often submitted as related deposits. From a scholarship perspective, I cannot for the life of me see the downside, other than reticence to boldly state the truth and face retaliation from shysters. It's a shame that the latter is an issue, but given the even larger amounts of $$$ at stake in physics, it seems that biomedical researchers are mostly just cowards using this as an excuse. (JMHO)

isTravis 10y ago

Great question, and one that certainly doesn't have a straightforward or trivial answer. It's definitely more of a social challenge than a technical one - making publishing free/open won't do anything to fix incentives on its own. My hunch is that change to this system will come from the outside. It's too risky of a career decision for a tenure-track professor to start publishing on PubPub (or any open/new system). But, there are lots of people who aren't playing that game. Lots of people who are doing science outside of academia, at a corporate R&D position, or for the sake of education, etc. The most important step is to show that open publishing works. If we can work with these early adopters and show that conversations are more rich, or results more reproducible, we can start to go to universities and grant agencies and advocate for them to require open publishing. The first day that a university hires a professor or an agency rewards a grant based on the history of openly published work, will be a turning point. I hope it will be similar to the first time a software dev was hired for their Github profile, rather than their CS degree. Today, software companies hire on experience. A university degree can show that, but so can major contributions to an open-source project. I hope science can become the same. Whether you're a PhD out of a great program, or an high-school drop out that has committed her life to rigorous experimentation, your demonstrated experience should be what you're hired on, not the list of journals that have found it in their interest (many of them are for-profit) to include your work.

zenogais 10y ago
Perhaps offering some sort of crowdsourced funding mechanism and a reputation system would go a long way toward correcting some of these incentives? For example, giving authors / organizations a Bitcoin address where they can receive funds from individuals / organizations who want to support their research. Also, awarding reputation to authors based on the level of peer review their research has successfully undergone (number of peers, level of rigor, etc.), and conversely awarding reputation and funding to those who perform peer reviews. Allowing users to contribute to a peer review fund for individual articles or in general. All that to say this is very exciting and opens up a lot of new possibilities.
- yayday 10y ago

kriro 10y ago

I think it's a political problem. Most researchers and professors tend to be employed by the state. Lobby the state to give very high preference to open access publication. In an ideal world I'd read a sentence like this in a hiring guideline for state universities: "only research that is available to all citizens of this state shall be considered as a contribution by the candidate" Additionally for research project funding I want to read a similar sentence in the proposed outline that you can typically download for the grant proposal. "Only list your research projects and open access publications in the Previous Related Work section" (or high preference will be given to ...) Basically state funded research that is not available to citizens should be heavily penalized. I think that is logically very consistent. In fact I'd love to GPL the process and make it a requirement to OA everything as soon as a single cent of money goes towards the research.

apathy 10y ago
Christ this would be brilliant. The trouble is that you have otherwise-decent people like Kirsten Gillibrand completely in the pocket of RELX. You have massive COI and crap like the PACE trial who WILL NOT, under any circumstances, release their data, and who consider academic inquiries regarding said data (the foundation of any scientific publication) as "vexatious". In short, you're better off trying to get policy changed at NIH and other, major funders of research to push openness (Google and major tech companies already are quite good about this), and only resorting to legal challenges when the satanically evil Elsevier and friends attempt to buy off legislators. If you were wondering whether academic institutions typically stand up for scholars (as opposed to faucets of grant money and indirects, who can behave as they please), kindly refer to the following. http://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/what-will-it-take-to-get-mit-t.html http://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/what-will-it-take-to-get-mi... Academia is not scholarship. The institutions of academia are in fact opposed to scholarship if it might make their senior "leaders" (often far removed from any scholarly pursuits they might once of had) look bad. Academia responds wonderfully to incentives, though, and that's where I do believe you have nailed it. Decision: Accept with Minor Revisions ;-)

dluan 10y ago

I think the answer is closely tied to funding. The whole prestige of impact factor, national academy membership, etc are basic heuristics that help the current funding process. Grant review committees comprised of already established scientists and administrators are more likely to fund what will show up in boring paywalled PDFs. Given another way scientists could make a living while pursuing research, I think you'd see some would stop feeling pressured into publishing in the traditional way and experimenting with altmetrics, open access, open post-pub peer review.

untilHellbanned 10y ago

As an academic in biomedical sciences and as someone who tried to create a journal that did all the things the OP said, thank you. The old crappy system is mandatory. You can't decide to do otherwise and still have a job. The impetus for change needs to start at the funding source level, NIH. They need to make a journal that one is required to publish in order to keep your funding.

apathy 10y ago
They have one (several, actually). The trouble is that they're called Cell, Nature, and Science; they're all for-profit; and they answer to no one. The Wellcome Trust is walking the walk that NIH talked for the past decade. We will see how this goes. Cross fingers.
- untilHellbanned 10y ago
  With ELife?
  - apathy 10y ago
    No, much bigger. They're going to start requiring OA.
    - untilHellbanned 10y ago
      Peer review also needs a reboot. It's epically unhelpful and slows down publishing dramatically, Think they should mandate post publication review.
      - apathy 10y ago
        The review model in the WTC's new world order is open, as it currently is in the F1000 journals, and the Wellcome Trust pays the APC so there is no excuse for grantees not to publish. This slowly kicks away all the bullshit excuses that are presented for lack of scientific productivity so that the funder can objectively assess "what are these people doing with our money, and does that advance real, non-press-release science?" It's brilliant imho. https://wellcome.ac.uk/news/why-were-launching-new-publishing-platform https://wellcome.ac.uk/news/why-were-launching-new-publishin... Momentum is important. There's no reverse on a submarine. One of the biggest funders in the world has taken away a standard excuse for failing to openly report results, negative or otherwise. It is free to readers and free to authors funded by the Trust. And all of the reviewing process is out in the open. This is a huge step. The only other funding body I can think of with similar weight is NIH, and (at least internally) they're starting to move in the same direction.

SilasX 10y ago

It could work more like the open source software project model: you would get your respect from having several "accepted pull requests" to the literature. The difference is that your PRs would be better framed in terms of identifying your specific contribution. As it stands now, the publishing model is the equivalent of writing your own version of the project -- with no easy metadata about your specific innovation -- and asking it to be accepted or rejected as a whole. With that said, it's understandable why to keep doing the latter version until academia has standardized on the former.

duwease 10y ago

IMO, the change has to come from the grant financiers, and a case can be made that they get a greater more bang for their buck by adding requirements such as pre-registration, open data publishing (so long as they don't want to keep the data proprietary, of course), and publishing guaranteed regardless of outcome. The fruits of what they purchased can be of more use to the field in this manner, and even they themselves may find they spend less money if the 'failures' are documented in such a way that they don't inadvertently repeatedly fund them due to the fact that the initial results were hidden away in a filing cabinet. I think the same case could be made for placing more emphasis on funding replication -- instead of thinking 'we learned it, why revisit it?', you're checking if it's actually valuable information worth spending more on, or just a fluke.

pmarreck 10y ago

> where the first question anyone in my "target audience" will ask is "why didn't this get published in a real journal, whats wrong with it?" One would think that this wouldn't happen simply because it is (I think) a combination of two of the most well-known logical fallacies, "argumentum ad populum" and "appeal to authority" https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-authority https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-authority I am extremely dismayed by the fact that, in a career where (of ALL careers!) the evidence should ostensibly speak for itself, papers (and their information) are essentially pre-rejected or pre-accepted based on reputation

zerohp 10y ago
Conferences and journals are a filter. If your paper can't pass a few rounds of anonymized review (for a conference) then it probably isn't worth the readers time. As an example, arXiv is has a lot of great papers but it also has a lot of bad ones. I'm unlikely to go there to find a paper unless someone referred me to a specific one.
- apathy 10y ago
  I've never had a paper rejected from a conference, and I've seen some pretty shitty ones at conferences. I think this statement is pretty field-specific. That said, in the CS and EE fields at least, the use of 10-12 referees for a short, dense conference paper is a really good idea. It would appear that this works primarily because of... drum roll ...the social norms and incentives in place within these specific fields.