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> Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change. Couldn
by erikpukinskis 9y ago
> Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change.
Couldn't the top tier of Post-docs also make this happen? If they simply refuse to publish in the top tier journals, the departments who are competing for them will have to either relax their publishing requirements or take a 2nd tier candidate.
This only works if a truly top tier candidate who can continue to work without limitation in a Post-docs position. I.e. someone with the research equivalent of "fuck-you money". But it doesn't have to be all of them. When a 2nd tier institution can just make an administrative change and basically get a free 1st round draft pick, there's going to be institutions that take the deal. It doesn't even really hurt the scholar, because they really don't need to be at Yale, they can be successful anywhere with strong students and plenty of money.
- marcoperaza 9y agoThe reward for defecting is too high. It's a classic collective action problem.
- dredmorbius 9y agoTextbook case. Someone should write an article on that. And publish it ... Well, that's left as an exercise to the student.
- smallnamespace 9y agoThere's also no enforcement mechanism for punishing someone from defecting.
- jonathanstrange 9y agoIt's a classic collective decision problem. If almost all postdocs at the same time decided to boycott closed journals, then this would work. However, in practice solutions are always failing whenever they are based on the idea that a majority has to voluntarily make the right move within a short time period, if that means smaller wins for people who do not make the move. To give another example of such a problem: If in urban areas everyone switched his WIFI router to some open mesh network software at the same time, the gains from this ad hoc network would be tremendous. But if only few switch, the gains are almost nonexistent and the losses can be high. So it's never going to happen.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y agoWhat if it's "kickstarted" with people pledging to submit papers to only a select few publishers once a critical mass of pledges have been received?
- crawfordcomeaux 9y agoAnd maybe they pledge by providing a paper they're withholding from publishing? If the authors, pledging platform, and open journals collaboratively design & coordinate a process for handling the reviewing of said papers, then the process can safely be automated. Also, pledging can be done as a pledge to be available for free peer review if they aren't pledging a paper.
- dredmorbius 9y agoGood question. Finding ways to disincentivise defection would be key. You might want to look up Mancur Olson's "Logic of Collective Action", which deals with this problem, generally.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y agoThanks for the lead!
- CJefferson 9y agoThey can't by definition -- a top tier post-doc is someone who posts in these journals.