3 ms·

When I worked at the Cornell Theory Center in the late 90s, I didn't know about the arXiv, but I sure as hell knew about screen readers. One of the best FORTRA

by apathy 10y ago

When I worked at the Cornell Theory Center in the late 90s, I didn't know about the arXiv, but I sure as hell knew about screen readers. One of the best FORTRAN programmers (numerical analysis/applied math research faculty I think) was blind as a bat. I learned a lot about not underestimating people there. It's a strange university but it always makes me happy to think that it (specifically Ginsparg, and to some degree strogatz and the law scholars) pushed forward what the Web was supposed to be. Not a place to buy stuff, but a place to learn stuff, without waiting for it to make its way through a hyper politicized review process so that it could be printed in a 17th century fashion and mailed to some corners of the world, eventually perhaps reaching a fraction of the people who could use it. Rather, everyone everywhere with a connection. Anyone who doesn't deposit preprints (arXiv, biorxiv, or wherever) or who doesn't agitate for their coauthors to do so is not really in it for the science. It's fine to be competitive -- deposit yours first. Make the fucking discovery instead of parasitically piggybacking on those who do the work. But that last part, that's hard. Very hard. As long as there is enough money left in academia to encourage lazy shits, those of us who care about scholarship will have to push, hard, to remove the last refuge of these scoundrels. You're either on the side of justice -- open data, open formats, open scholarship -- or you are tacitly endorsing Elsevier & Springer, who haven't the slightest problem using crap like incremental JavaScript & mangled PDFs to deny access to scholarship even to those who have paid. David (blocking on his last name) at CTC made that choice for me. He set an example that forced me to admit what was right. I hope others will do the same. It's the right thing to do.

frozenport 10y ago
The OpenAcess and self-publication has removed an important check on research papers. If nobody cared about your subject, or if a journal's peer review process resulted in boring articles, it would not be financially viable. I think advocates of sharing science should also understand that, at present, the majority of the content is asinine or incorrect. Removing checks and balances is not helping.
- apathy 10y ago
  The majority of content in most journals is asinine or incorrect. About the only thing that can fix this is quicker turnaround (cf STAP, NgAgo, the godawful GWAS paper in Neuron recently, etc). It's not at all clear to me that the checks or balances were helping beforehand. Hiring a shit ton of MBA types to administer research probably didn't help much either. Also, out of curiosity, is this open access / fast review problem what led to machine learning falling into irrelevance? Because we wouldn't want that to happen to other fields. Can you imagine if raw clinical trial data was out there, for example? (The Horror! Best keep these appallingly expensive results locked up!)
  - frozenport 10y ago
    >>fix this is quicker turnaround Why? As the first author of several publications, more than half the reviews I received were not well thought out. This part of the process doesn't happen, Open Acess and self publishing websites exploited this fact for greater throughput. >>machine learning I would argue that the machine learning bloom in recent years is because of an availability of new technology from industry, supported by industry. This is also why they were able to tolerate less conventional venues for publication - as these were not viewed as mile markers for progress. Yet, when I look at more "settled" machine learning fields like speech, I see the same plethora of academic papers filled with useless crap. Perhaps the growth of ML has nothing to do with Open Acess. There is although certainly there is an underlying profit motive for successful technologies, Google ain't going to use a technique that doesn't work. >>raw clinical trial data It would be great if it were published, and indeed many people would pay for quality trial data. I see OA and self-publishing of research results having no relation to authors withholding clinical data.
    - apathy 10y ago
      Re: 1: no shit. The turnaround is for rebuttals. I try to do thorough reviews (I have published plenty as well) but realistically I recognize that no one has the sort of free cycles required to catch everything in advance. What's worse is that an awful lot of reviews are pure political bullshit. In the end it's the people who may or may not try to build on your work (or mine!) that are the best judges of whether it's BS. Re: 2: probably, but diffusion of ideas benefits massively from readily accessible documentation. One of the things that will cause me to immediately reject a paper is if its method implementation does not work as described. I will always reject in such cases. They are alarmingly common and this is one of the few easy cases in reviewing. Lack of an implementation is also cause to reject. Re: 3: it has everything to do with it. Unless you're running and publishing trials please don't lecture me on this. See opentrials for a particularly frightening take on why published trials so poorly represent those submitted to the FDA or registered with CTEP. Meanwhile actual RCTs get buried by shitbags demanding more subjects than there are recorded cases in the past 40 years (no joke). If you're not doing trials, you may have to take my word for it (or get involved in RCTs and find out for yourself). A lot of the enterprise is actively harmful to science by omission.

by apathy 10y ago

frozenport 10y ago

The OpenAcess and self-publication has removed an important check on research papers. If nobody cared about your subject, or if a journal's peer review process resulted in boring articles, it would not be financially viable. I think advocates of sharing science should also understand that, at present, the majority of the content is asinine or incorrect. Removing checks and balances is not helping.

apathy 10y ago
The majority of content in most journals is asinine or incorrect. About the only thing that can fix this is quicker turnaround (cf STAP, NgAgo, the godawful GWAS paper in Neuron recently, etc). It's not at all clear to me that the checks or balances were helping beforehand. Hiring a shit ton of MBA types to administer research probably didn't help much either. Also, out of curiosity, is this open access / fast review problem what led to machine learning falling into irrelevance? Because we wouldn't want that to happen to other fields. Can you imagine if raw clinical trial data was out there, for example? (The Horror! Best keep these appallingly expensive results locked up!)
- frozenport 10y ago
  >>fix this is quicker turnaround Why? As the first author of several publications, more than half the reviews I received were not well thought out. This part of the process doesn't happen, Open Acess and self publishing websites exploited this fact for greater throughput. >>machine learning I would argue that the machine learning bloom in recent years is because of an availability of new technology from industry, supported by industry. This is also why they were able to tolerate less conventional venues for publication - as these were not viewed as mile markers for progress. Yet, when I look at more "settled" machine learning fields like speech, I see the same plethora of academic papers filled with useless crap. Perhaps the growth of ML has nothing to do with Open Acess. There is although certainly there is an underlying profit motive for successful technologies, Google ain't going to use a technique that doesn't work. >>raw clinical trial data It would be great if it were published, and indeed many people would pay for quality trial data. I see OA and self-publishing of research results having no relation to authors withholding clinical data.
  - apathy 10y ago
    Re: 1: no shit. The turnaround is for rebuttals. I try to do thorough reviews (I have published plenty as well) but realistically I recognize that no one has the sort of free cycles required to catch everything in advance. What's worse is that an awful lot of reviews are pure political bullshit. In the end it's the people who may or may not try to build on your work (or mine!) that are the best judges of whether it's BS. Re: 2: probably, but diffusion of ideas benefits massively from readily accessible documentation. One of the things that will cause me to immediately reject a paper is if its method implementation does not work as described. I will always reject in such cases. They are alarmingly common and this is one of the few easy cases in reviewing. Lack of an implementation is also cause to reject. Re: 3: it has everything to do with it. Unless you're running and publishing trials please don't lecture me on this. See opentrials for a particularly frightening take on why published trials so poorly represent those submitted to the FDA or registered with CTEP. Meanwhile actual RCTs get buried by shitbags demanding more subjects than there are recorded cases in the past 40 years (no joke). If you're not doing trials, you may have to take my word for it (or get involved in RCTs and find out for yourself). A lot of the enterprise is actively harmful to science by omission.