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Effectively, this is a safe move for tenured professors, but not a safe move for anyone else, which represents the vast majority of active publications these da

• a3_nm 10y ago
  Yeah, but sadly, many tenured academics are not making any such moves either... There is definitely a "pyramid scheme" problem where the need to publish in unethical venues survives because of the needs of non-tenured academics, but it's not the entire story. Add to this the fact that most reviews are probably performed by tenured academics, so if all of them refused to review for unethical venues, it would have a lot of impact. I don't think unethical venues would survive if only non-tenured researchers published there.
  • grigjd3 10y ago
    "Pyramid Scheme" is a fairly apt phrase for academic careers. However, it's not true that reviews are mostly done by tenured faculty. I never ranked above post-doc and I reviewed several papers. I think the real reason for the incredible inertia in the academic world has more to do with the level of competition for jobs. When moving from one stage of your academic career to the next regularly puts you into competition with a couple hundred others for a single position, you look for every advantage. The practical effect of this is that one can easily spend a decade or two of life after college putting in 60-80 weeks as a standard. When you have to be that focused, it's hard to put energy and time into changing the system.