2 ms·

There may be other answers to this problem. When someone posts a blog article, it usually gets submitted to an aggregator like HN and it then gets upvoted/downv

by Jedi72 8y ago

There may be other answers to this problem. When someone posts a blog article, it usually gets submitted to an aggregator like HN and it then gets upvoted/downvoted/discussed, all for free. You might say that you need to be an expert in the field to review a paper and, perhaps that is true - or perhaps new publishing constraints will lead to a trend of more readable papers with more background and thorough explanation so as to be understandable to a wider audience. I for one am not afraid to see a little classic SV disruption hitting Academia.

tetrazine 8y ago
Sorry, but you have to do the work. There's no real point to having every paper revisit the key points of the field that everyone working already knows. The introduction section, when well written, provides starting points for research if you're not completely up to speed. While cross-domain sharing of insights and knowledge is commendable and important, I'm not sure why it would make sense for review to be outsourced to non-experts in the field, as you describe (even if the paper was "readable" the domain experts would presumably be the most able to evaluate a paper). Maybe one or two reviewers on a panel of many, but otherwise it makes very little sense. All of these suggestions essentially serve to slow down the research process and have benefits for a very small portion of the potential audience. I think what is more valuable to opening academic research up is greater open education material, besides the traditional models of bachelor->masters->phd->postgrad, and more aggressively written textbooks that work on the cutting edge of the field (with appropriate disclaimers). Oh, and big disclaimer: tons of papers are badly written. That doesn't affect any of these points.
- sleavey 8y ago
  Agreed. Academia is gradually doing a better job of explaining research to the public, but this is (rightfully) separate from explaining it to other experts in the field. A good example is the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, who among other actions write publicly accessible summaries [1] and infographics [2] of most of their big detections. Some groups have a (never large enough) budget to fund flyers, posters, videos, websites, etc. for public outreach and visits to public events. It's also usually possible to ask for this kind of fund when applying for research grants - like adding an extra 3% on top of what you ask for in order to publicise the work. [1] https://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-GW150914/index.php https://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-GW150914/index.php [2] http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/~daniel/infographics.html http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/~daniel/infographics.html

by Jedi72 8y ago

tetrazine 8y ago

Sorry, but you have to do the work. There's no real point to having every paper revisit the key points of the field that everyone working already knows. The introduction section, when well written, provides starting points for research if you're not completely up to speed. While cross-domain sharing of insights and knowledge is commendable and important, I'm not sure why it would make sense for review to be outsourced to non-experts in the field, as you describe (even if the paper was "readable" the domain experts would presumably be the most able to evaluate a paper). Maybe one or two reviewers on a panel of many, but otherwise it makes very little sense. All of these suggestions essentially serve to slow down the research process and have benefits for a very small portion of the potential audience. I think what is more valuable to opening academic research up is greater open education material, besides the traditional models of bachelor->masters->phd->postgrad, and more aggressively written textbooks that work on the cutting edge of the field (with appropriate disclaimers). Oh, and big disclaimer: tons of papers are badly written. That doesn't affect any of these points.

sleavey 8y ago
Agreed. Academia is gradually doing a better job of explaining research to the public, but this is (rightfully) separate from explaining it to other experts in the field. A good example is the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, who among other actions write publicly accessible summaries [1] and infographics [2] of most of their big detections. Some groups have a (never large enough) budget to fund flyers, posters, videos, websites, etc. for public outreach and visits to public events. It's also usually possible to ask for this kind of fund when applying for research grants - like adding an extra 3% on top of what you ask for in order to publicise the work. [1] https://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-GW150914/index.php https://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-GW150914/index.php [2] http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/~daniel/infographics.html http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/~daniel/infographics.html