4 ms·

Maybe they have the cachet of "reasonable competence", but what has cachet are the journals themselves. Books are way less relevant than papers, and their publi

by KingMob 10y ago

Maybe they have the cachet of "reasonable competence", but what has cachet are the journals themselves. Books are way less relevant than papers, and their publishers are even less relevant. E.g., nobody cares who publishes Science or Nature.

socmag 10y ago
Yes you are probably right. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place in the modern world.
pmyteh 10y ago
That depends a lot on the field. At the more philosophical end of my discipline (politics) a good book published by a first-or-second-tier publisher (one of the major university presses, plus the best of the commercial publishers) is a major career progression requirement. In my part (quantitative, mainly methodology) it's all done in journals and monographs are rare. It really does depend.
- socmag 10y ago
  I get that in academia there is a standard publication path for thought and insight in the form of scientific papers. It's a cool thing. Scientific papers are not everyone's cup of tea though, and somewhat inaccessible (to publish for) for older people or those outside of academia. Surely there is a middle ground between "JavaScript for Dummies", "Studies in Global Illumination" and "Computation on the modular hypersphere" Actually, I'll be frank. Academic papers are designed to be inaccessible. Not all, but the majority. I've read plenty in Comp.Sci, and all I can say is that going out of their way to be obtuse seems like more than a fascination. I think it is called "Job Security" Heck for the longest time, academic papers were behind paywalls that were WAY more inaccessible than Elsevier. So there is that.
  - pmyteh 10y ago
    It's a problem. The incentives are for getting published, not getting read. We are somewhat rewarded for producing accessible content in the form of teaching, but anything popular in writing (even if scholarly and read by millions) just isn't quite recognised. And that deliberate obscurity is a thing, though not a universal one. And that is evil.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

by KingMob 10y ago

socmag 10y ago

Yes you are probably right. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place in the modern world.

pmyteh 10y ago

That depends a lot on the field. At the more philosophical end of my discipline (politics) a good book published by a first-or-second-tier publisher (one of the major university presses, plus the best of the commercial publishers) is a major career progression requirement. In my part (quantitative, mainly methodology) it's all done in journals and monographs are rare. It really does depend.

socmag 10y ago
I get that in academia there is a standard publication path for thought and insight in the form of scientific papers. It's a cool thing. Scientific papers are not everyone's cup of tea though, and somewhat inaccessible (to publish for) for older people or those outside of academia. Surely there is a middle ground between "JavaScript for Dummies", "Studies in Global Illumination" and "Computation on the modular hypersphere" Actually, I'll be frank. Academic papers are designed to be inaccessible. Not all, but the majority. I've read plenty in Comp.Sci, and all I can say is that going out of their way to be obtuse seems like more than a fascination. I think it is called "Job Security" Heck for the longest time, academic papers were behind paywalls that were WAY more inaccessible than Elsevier. So there is that.
- pmyteh 10y ago
  It's a problem. The incentives are for getting published, not getting read. We are somewhat rewarded for producing accessible content in the form of teaching, but anything popular in writing (even if scholarly and read by millions) just isn't quite recognised. And that deliberate obscurity is a thing, though not a universal one. And that is evil.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]