8 ms·

The most relevant quote in the article: > the research community uses historical journal reputation to > evaluate researchers, making it harder for new

by avar 9y ago

The most relevant quote in the article: > the research community uses historical journal reputation to > evaluate researchers, making it harder for new, better run > journals to enter the market. This problem would be solved tomorrow if those allocating public money to science made funding contingent on the research being published in open access journals. Scientists can't have their cake and eat it too. Either they fund their own research and publish in prestigious expensive journals that cost the public money, or they take public money and make the research available for all. But it's not easy to migrate to that because scientist aren't just using journals as a publication platform, but as a reputation platform as a function of their exclusivity and reputation.

pdonis 9y ago
Many scientists already publish preprints on open sites like arxiv.org. Which, btw, also illustrates that the supposed gatekeeping role that journals were playing, which made them worth their fees, is largely gone now.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  And yet those fees continue to be paid...
Vinnl 9y ago
Yes, but it's not that simple. Funders don't want to be seen as trying to decide where their researchers publish. They can stipulate Open Access (and many do! [1] [2] [3]), but then authors continue to want to publish in the journals with high scores because it helps those careers, so those journals/publishers charge egregious fees to publish there (instead of subscription fees), which are once again paid from public money and raise the barrier to publish research, e.g. for universities in developing countries. [1] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Information/Open-Access-Policy https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Informat... [2] https://wellcome.ac.uk/funding/managing-grant/open-access-policy https://wellcome.ac.uk/funding/managing-grant/open-access-po... [3] https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=openaccess https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=opena...
- kfriede 9y ago
  Can the funder make a stipulation that private journals are authorized, but not to be paid for with funded money?
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    In fact, they often make special funds available to pay these charges. As long as there is strong demand by researchers to publish in these journals, they will have to pay up or accept subscriptions. And there is very strong demand, because it affects researchers' long-term career prospects: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-can-make-or-break-academic-careers-704e00ae070a https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca... That said, funders are also somewhat complicit in it by deciding who to fund based on if they published in those journals. Which is the result of those decisions being made by academics who typically cannot read all the research of all applicants: https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laureates-when-it-comes-to-career-advice-for-scientists-80079 https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea...
etrautmann 9y ago
blaming scientists is misplaced. This is a policy-level question, for which the policy IS evolving fairly rapidly. The scientists are also rapidly updating and most papers have pre-prints available via arxiv or bioRxiv, etc and the NIH and many other funding agencies require open access soon after publication. Lastly, many scientists end-run the publishers and make the print copy PDFs available on their lab websites. In no way can I imagine how blaming scientists for working within the established incentive structure to advance their careers helps advance this issue.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  Well, some of them are also complicit in maintaining that incentive structure: https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laureates-when-it-comes-to-career-advice-for-scientists-80079 https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea... But yeah, it's hard to blame anyone specifically, as the current situation is the result of so many actors: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarly-publishing-eef794937c9c https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl... (Apologies for plugging my own article repeatedly, but otherwise I'd be writing the same all the time...)
  - killjoywashere 9y ago
    You can definitely blame Elsevier. Have at it.
    - Vinnl 9y ago
      Haha, I often do, and they've definitely exploited the system most. That said, even they are accountable to a diverse set of shareholders, and if they were to disappear overnight, there'd also be quite some negative effects. But yeah, if you do want to blame any one party, Elsevier would be it.
- dkural 9y ago
  I wholly reject the type of argument where "you can't blame people for being self-interested in a given incentive structure". You certainly can. To take it to an absurd extreme, it is a bit like saying you can't blame people for not standing up to Nazis in Weimar Germany. It is indeed suicidal to have done so, yet, you can blame them. That said, I also wholly agree that it is foolish to expect change before changing their incentives. Public exposure of the racket that is scientific publishing is one such minor incentive change.
eli 9y ago
Like this? https://publicaccess.nih.gov/ https://publicaccess.nih.gov/
aaavl2821 9y ago
I second others that blaming scientists isn't the right thing, and punishing them certainly isn't. The life of a scientist is incredibly stressful and poorly paid. The average salary for a postdoc is like $45,000. These people have graduate degrees from the top schools in the nation, are often in their early to mid thirties, are doing research that can lead to blockbuster drugs that massively improve human health, are incredibly passionate about and good at their work, yet make little more than minimum wage A better solution, counterintuitive as it sounds, is to increas public funding for more research. If scientists can make a reasonable wage that doesn't force them to pursue tenure by living and dying by the whim of a few top journals, it will be much easier for them to stomach the financial, and possibly career, hit of publishing open source I wonder how robust the open source movement would be if engineers only made $45k / year
- zjaffee 9y ago
  Probably still pretty robust, much of the open sourcing that happens, especially these days, is companies open sourcing aspects of their infrastructure. People then use the fact that they built a platform that became popular to start their own companies or be a valuable candidate at all kinds of companies.
  - neuromantik8086 9y ago
    Yes, but you're missing the point. The point is that those developers were being paid 6 figures while they were building their platform / resume.
- ldd 9y ago
  Unbeknown to you, there are plenty of programmers, and engineers making "only" 45k / year or less. And that is already a lot of money. More money than I can think of spending and enough money to let me save 50% of my paycheque. So excuse us for making 'barely anything above minimum wage'
  - aaavl2821 9y ago
    In some areas it's definitely a lot of money. Not in the Bay Area / NYC / socal though. Especially if you have kids. Not trying to knock anyone or be condescending. The point is that like 90%+ of biology or chem phds make less than $60k. That is not true of engineers, not by a long shot. There was a recent nytimes article comparing grad student degreees awarded in various fields to jobs in that field. There were more jobs than degrees in comp sci. For life sciences, there were like 115,000 advanced degrees and like 10k jobs
dm319 9y ago
I think you're misplacing the blame here. Researchers need to publish in high impact journals, or they lose their funding. Some funding already comes with the requirement to publish open access. https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/library/research/open-access/how-can-i-publish-my-work-as-oa.aspx https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/library...
- gh02t 9y ago
  Yep, I'm required to make my work freely available when I can. Some of it is sensitive so not all of it can be, but otherwise we have to. Also all of my code and data is open source, which is not required but we have permission. Where I worked previously was totally different, it took months to get any code release approved.
- avar 9y ago
  Obviously it's implied that if public science funding is going to demand that researchers use only openly available journals, that the rules for the funding itself also be adjusted to disregard the impact of these "high impact journals" for the purposes of preferentially allocating funding. What do you imagine is going to happen? That public support of science is going to drop to zero because funding bodies forgot to update two of their internal rules, and instead just updated one, thereby creating a dependency relationship that was impossible to satisfy?
fossuser 9y ago
I wish there was a way to align these incentives, specifically the issue around reputation. I think this is a case where if you fix the incentives then the behavior changes. I think by default scientists want to discover things and collaborate - if there was a way to cause this behavior to lead to additional reputation and funding (similar to how open source software participation increases reputation) that would go a long way. It'd be cool if hypothesis, experiment design, results, data, and papers were shared and available for open access.
- neuromantik8086 9y ago
  Academia's emphasis on reputation isn't only problematic with respect to the adoption of open access. It also impedes the dissemination of important results that come out of less prestigious labs. I've often felt like science in particular would benefit from a sort of embargo period, during which time pseudonymous authorship would be obligatory, and after which researchers could collect their due credit. Too much focus is given to "rockstar" PIs and their labs rather than the substance of their findings. An interesting historical example of this was an early breakthrough in interpreting genetic code by Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthaei [1], both of whom were considered unremarkable and largely ignored by more established geneticists at the time of their discovery, who were fixated on finding a hypothetical "delimiter" between genetic instructions coded in DNA. This, however, is a digression for another day. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirenberg_and_Matthaei_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirenberg_and_Matthaei_experim...
  - mmierz 9y ago
    > I've often felt like science in particular would benefit from a sort of embargo period, during which time pseudonymous authorship would be obligatory, and after which researchers could collect their due credit. Too much focus is given to "rockstar" PIs and their labs rather than the substance of their findings. I don't think this would work because pre-publication work is usually not a secret, it gets promoted at conferences and seminars well before it's formally published.
    - 9y ago
Emma_Goldman 9y ago
Academics =/= scientists The former is a more expansive category than the latter. This is something which is true for all academics.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  It might be good to know that some languages have one word ("scientist") for everyone working in science, the humanities and social scientists. Thus, and given the context of the article, it's safe to assume that people mean academics when they say scientists.
  - Emma_Goldman 9y ago
    That explanation presumes (i) that most or all of the people who have been using 'scientist' in that way are non-English speaking; and (ii) that they have no knowledge of or fail to use the English sense of 'scientist'. I don't see why that's plausible at all. I think the likely explanation is that we're on a tech forum with a decisively scientistic outlook, and in which most of the people here have a scientific background. And of course 'people mean academics when they say scientists', but that's the point - we shouldn't sublate all academic work into the sciences.
    - Vinnl 9y ago
      The second is definitely plausible - I only recently learned this after diving really deep into the academic world. Most of the friends I have in academia don't know this distinction. The first is not necessary (although still not that implausible to me) - non-native speakers also influence native speakers. But yes, your final paragraph is definitely true too. Although I think in the comment you responded to, you can equate them.
      - Emma_Goldman 9y ago
        Well, maybe we just disagree. I think it's very unlikely that most or all the people to use 'scientist' in that way are all three of: non-English speaking; based in the sciences (for it would not be possible to conflate the two otherwise), and ignorant of the distinction, or just indisposed toward using it. How can you equate them? I don't see it personally. Science is defined by the scientific method. Most of the humanities do not use the scientific method most of the time (history, philosophy, sociology, English, etc.)
smn1234 9y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... this will make you cringe

by avar 9y ago

pdonis 9y ago

Many scientists already publish preprints on open sites like arxiv.org. Which, btw, also illustrates that the supposed gatekeeping role that journals were playing, which made them worth their fees, is largely gone now.

Vinnl 9y ago
And yet those fees continue to be paid...

Vinnl 9y ago

Yes, but it's not that simple. Funders don't want to be seen as trying to decide where their researchers publish. They can stipulate Open Access (and many do! [1] [2] [3]), but then authors continue to want to publish in the journals with high scores because it helps those careers, so those journals/publishers charge egregious fees to publish there (instead of subscription fees), which are once again paid from public money and raise the barrier to publish research, e.g. for universities in developing countries. [1] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Information/Open-Access-Policy https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Informat... [2] https://wellcome.ac.uk/funding/managing-grant/open-access-policy https://wellcome.ac.uk/funding/managing-grant/open-access-po... [3] https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=openaccess https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=opena...

kfriede 9y ago
Can the funder make a stipulation that private journals are authorized, but not to be paid for with funded money?
- Vinnl 9y ago
  In fact, they often make special funds available to pay these charges. As long as there is strong demand by researchers to publish in these journals, they will have to pay up or accept subscriptions. And there is very strong demand, because it affects researchers' long-term career prospects: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-can-make-or-break-academic-careers-704e00ae070a https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca... That said, funders are also somewhat complicit in it by deciding who to fund based on if they published in those journals. Which is the result of those decisions being made by academics who typically cannot read all the research of all applicants: https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laureates-when-it-comes-to-career-advice-for-scientists-80079 https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea...

etrautmann 9y ago

blaming scientists is misplaced. This is a policy-level question, for which the policy IS evolving fairly rapidly. The scientists are also rapidly updating and most papers have pre-prints available via arxiv or bioRxiv, etc and the NIH and many other funding agencies require open access soon after publication. Lastly, many scientists end-run the publishers and make the print copy PDFs available on their lab websites. In no way can I imagine how blaming scientists for working within the established incentive structure to advance their careers helps advance this issue.

Vinnl 9y ago
Well, some of them are also complicit in maintaining that incentive structure: https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laureates-when-it-comes-to-career-advice-for-scientists-80079 https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea... But yeah, it's hard to blame anyone specifically, as the current situation is the result of so many actors: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarly-publishing-eef794937c9c https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl... (Apologies for plugging my own article repeatedly, but otherwise I'd be writing the same all the time...)
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  You can definitely blame Elsevier. Have at it.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    Haha, I often do, and they've definitely exploited the system most. That said, even they are accountable to a diverse set of shareholders, and if they were to disappear overnight, there'd also be quite some negative effects. But yeah, if you do want to blame any one party, Elsevier would be it.
dkural 9y ago
I wholly reject the type of argument where "you can't blame people for being self-interested in a given incentive structure". You certainly can. To take it to an absurd extreme, it is a bit like saying you can't blame people for not standing up to Nazis in Weimar Germany. It is indeed suicidal to have done so, yet, you can blame them. That said, I also wholly agree that it is foolish to expect change before changing their incentives. Public exposure of the racket that is scientific publishing is one such minor incentive change.

eli 9y ago

Like this? https://publicaccess.nih.gov/ https://publicaccess.nih.gov/

aaavl2821 9y ago

I second others that blaming scientists isn't the right thing, and punishing them certainly isn't. The life of a scientist is incredibly stressful and poorly paid. The average salary for a postdoc is like $45,000. These people have graduate degrees from the top schools in the nation, are often in their early to mid thirties, are doing research that can lead to blockbuster drugs that massively improve human health, are incredibly passionate about and good at their work, yet make little more than minimum wage A better solution, counterintuitive as it sounds, is to increas public funding for more research. If scientists can make a reasonable wage that doesn't force them to pursue tenure by living and dying by the whim of a few top journals, it will be much easier for them to stomach the financial, and possibly career, hit of publishing open source I wonder how robust the open source movement would be if engineers only made $45k / year

zjaffee 9y ago
Probably still pretty robust, much of the open sourcing that happens, especially these days, is companies open sourcing aspects of their infrastructure. People then use the fact that they built a platform that became popular to start their own companies or be a valuable candidate at all kinds of companies.
- neuromantik8086 9y ago
  Yes, but you're missing the point. The point is that those developers were being paid 6 figures while they were building their platform / resume.
ldd 9y ago
Unbeknown to you, there are plenty of programmers, and engineers making "only" 45k / year or less. And that is already a lot of money. More money than I can think of spending and enough money to let me save 50% of my paycheque. So excuse us for making 'barely anything above minimum wage'
- aaavl2821 9y ago
  In some areas it's definitely a lot of money. Not in the Bay Area / NYC / socal though. Especially if you have kids. Not trying to knock anyone or be condescending. The point is that like 90%+ of biology or chem phds make less than $60k. That is not true of engineers, not by a long shot. There was a recent nytimes article comparing grad student degreees awarded in various fields to jobs in that field. There were more jobs than degrees in comp sci. For life sciences, there were like 115,000 advanced degrees and like 10k jobs

dm319 9y ago

I think you're misplacing the blame here. Researchers need to publish in high impact journals, or they lose their funding. Some funding already comes with the requirement to publish open access. https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/library/research/open-access/how-can-i-publish-my-work-as-oa.aspx https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/library...

gh02t 9y ago
Yep, I'm required to make my work freely available when I can. Some of it is sensitive so not all of it can be, but otherwise we have to. Also all of my code and data is open source, which is not required but we have permission. Where I worked previously was totally different, it took months to get any code release approved.
avar 9y ago
Obviously it's implied that if public science funding is going to demand that researchers use only openly available journals, that the rules for the funding itself also be adjusted to disregard the impact of these "high impact journals" for the purposes of preferentially allocating funding. What do you imagine is going to happen? That public support of science is going to drop to zero because funding bodies forgot to update two of their internal rules, and instead just updated one, thereby creating a dependency relationship that was impossible to satisfy?

fossuser 9y ago

I wish there was a way to align these incentives, specifically the issue around reputation. I think this is a case where if you fix the incentives then the behavior changes. I think by default scientists want to discover things and collaborate - if there was a way to cause this behavior to lead to additional reputation and funding (similar to how open source software participation increases reputation) that would go a long way. It'd be cool if hypothesis, experiment design, results, data, and papers were shared and available for open access.

neuromantik8086 9y ago
Academia's emphasis on reputation isn't only problematic with respect to the adoption of open access. It also impedes the dissemination of important results that come out of less prestigious labs. I've often felt like science in particular would benefit from a sort of embargo period, during which time pseudonymous authorship would be obligatory, and after which researchers could collect their due credit. Too much focus is given to "rockstar" PIs and their labs rather than the substance of their findings. An interesting historical example of this was an early breakthrough in interpreting genetic code by Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthaei [1], both of whom were considered unremarkable and largely ignored by more established geneticists at the time of their discovery, who were fixated on finding a hypothetical "delimiter" between genetic instructions coded in DNA. This, however, is a digression for another day. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirenberg_and_Matthaei_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirenberg_and_Matthaei_experim...
- mmierz 9y ago
  > I've often felt like science in particular would benefit from a sort of embargo period, during which time pseudonymous authorship would be obligatory, and after which researchers could collect their due credit. Too much focus is given to "rockstar" PIs and their labs rather than the substance of their findings. I don't think this would work because pre-publication work is usually not a secret, it gets promoted at conferences and seminars well before it's formally published.
  - 9y ago

Emma_Goldman 9y ago

Academics =/= scientists The former is a more expansive category than the latter. This is something which is true for all academics.

Vinnl 9y ago
It might be good to know that some languages have one word ("scientist") for everyone working in science, the humanities and social scientists. Thus, and given the context of the article, it's safe to assume that people mean academics when they say scientists.
- Emma_Goldman 9y ago
  That explanation presumes (i) that most or all of the people who have been using 'scientist' in that way are non-English speaking; and (ii) that they have no knowledge of or fail to use the English sense of 'scientist'. I don't see why that's plausible at all. I think the likely explanation is that we're on a tech forum with a decisively scientistic outlook, and in which most of the people here have a scientific background. And of course 'people mean academics when they say scientists', but that's the point - we shouldn't sublate all academic work into the sciences.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    The second is definitely plausible - I only recently learned this after diving really deep into the academic world. Most of the friends I have in academia don't know this distinction. The first is not necessary (although still not that implausible to me) - non-native speakers also influence native speakers. But yes, your final paragraph is definitely true too. Although I think in the comment you responded to, you can equate them.
    - Emma_Goldman 9y ago
      Well, maybe we just disagree. I think it's very unlikely that most or all the people to use 'scientist' in that way are all three of: non-English speaking; based in the sciences (for it would not be possible to conflate the two otherwise), and ignorant of the distinction, or just indisposed toward using it. How can you equate them? I don't see it personally. Science is defined by the scientific method. Most of the humanities do not use the scientific method most of the time (history, philosophy, sociology, English, etc.)

smn1234 9y ago

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... this will make you cringe