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Because the examples of self-hosted PDFs in my field that I have seen over many years now, are so horribly crackpot that even if there is a magical 1% of tenabl

Because the examples of self-hosted PDFs in my field that I have seen over many years now, are so horribly crackpot that even if there is a magical 1% of tenable self-published work out there somewhere, it is not worth people’s time looking for it when journals offer a better signal-to-noise ratio. And while it may not be true of cutting-edge STEM fields, most of the must-cite literature in my own field is not available digitally and is in fact held at only a few libraries worldwide. People are unlikely to have access to it unless they are already closely involved in academia, and in that case they will be keen on journal publication for career advancement. Consequently, self-publication strongly correlates with not having an awareness of the standard literature.

DoctorOetker 8y ago
it's still sad those 1% are being glossed over. I guess a lot of experts in their respective domain still spend a fraction of their time reading other information sources with low signal to noise ratios: news riddled with advertisement and propaganda, perhaps sports, fiction books movies or television series. EDIT: addition: If they spent a quarter of that time sorting crackpot papers the signal to noise level could be fixed, and they'd still have 3/4 of the time for their usual news binge or whatver) I'd actually be more than happy to see some tax payer money spent on the following system: authors withoud accreditation can sign up on a government hosted site, and provide their articles (or links or p2p hashes of them). Accredited domain experts can participate and earn money by getting assigned 2 or 3 random papers in the same domain but from probable cranks. They simply sort them in credibility. This way probably crank papers get scored, but the top 1% eventually floats up. Scientists/experts inbetween jobs, or out of office hours can earn money on the side, and BS gets seperated from intesting ideas or insights. Signal to noise level near the top is good. Edit: I hereby hand out the idea for free, if you feel like making a startup: Crack Crucible: - host (openly tongue in cheek) "crackpots" and their papers, self-categorizing in domains - domain experts can sign up, the site generates a unique string, the expert inserts the string on his/her researchgate profile, the site scrapes the expert's researchgate profile. (hereby delegating 'expertness' to researchgate), they too self-categorize in domains? - the site randomly selects 2 or more papers for the expert's applicable domain, weighted by inverse word count of the paper (conciseness is rewarded with opportunity to be seen) - the expert reads the 2 or more papers and is only asked to sort/rank them, without any implied support since most of the time all the papers wwere nonsense, yet the site demands sorting them by (in)credibility - the result is interesting outsider papers by domain (without the coming and going of news cycles, since the papers are selected at random, and hence undergo brownian motion up and down)
- coatmatter 8y ago
  This reminds me of Twitter mixed with a dose of slave-wage Mechanical Turk labour. Although with Twitter, the signal to noise ratio is much lower than 1% but I think you get my drift. Granted there are "gems" to be found anywhere but it's still largely far too much of a waste of time for most people. See also: "the attention economy". What can you offer that others want more of - news, publishing, self-publishing, tweets? What's the cost and reward for each party? Who is paying for the food and bills, and how?

DoctorOetker 8y ago

it's still sad those 1% are being glossed over. I guess a lot of experts in their respective domain still spend a fraction of their time reading other information sources with low signal to noise ratios: news riddled with advertisement and propaganda, perhaps sports, fiction books movies or television series. EDIT: addition: If they spent a quarter of that time sorting crackpot papers the signal to noise level could be fixed, and they'd still have 3/4 of the time for their usual news binge or whatver) I'd actually be more than happy to see some tax payer money spent on the following system: authors withoud accreditation can sign up on a government hosted site, and provide their articles (or links or p2p hashes of them). Accredited domain experts can participate and earn money by getting assigned 2 or 3 random papers in the same domain but from probable cranks. They simply sort them in credibility. This way probably crank papers get scored, but the top 1% eventually floats up. Scientists/experts inbetween jobs, or out of office hours can earn money on the side, and BS gets seperated from intesting ideas or insights. Signal to noise level near the top is good. Edit: I hereby hand out the idea for free, if you feel like making a startup: Crack Crucible: - host (openly tongue in cheek) "crackpots" and their papers, self-categorizing in domains - domain experts can sign up, the site generates a unique string, the expert inserts the string on his/her researchgate profile, the site scrapes the expert's researchgate profile. (hereby delegating 'expertness' to researchgate), they too self-categorize in domains? - the site randomly selects 2 or more papers for the expert's applicable domain, weighted by inverse word count of the paper (conciseness is rewarded with opportunity to be seen) - the expert reads the 2 or more papers and is only asked to sort/rank them, without any implied support since most of the time all the papers wwere nonsense, yet the site demands sorting them by (in)credibility - the result is interesting outsider papers by domain (without the coming and going of news cycles, since the papers are selected at random, and hence undergo brownian motion up and down)

coatmatter 8y ago
This reminds me of Twitter mixed with a dose of slave-wage Mechanical Turk labour. Although with Twitter, the signal to noise ratio is much lower than 1% but I think you get my drift. Granted there are "gems" to be found anywhere but it's still largely far too much of a waste of time for most people. See also: "the attention economy". What can you offer that others want more of - news, publishing, self-publishing, tweets? What's the cost and reward for each party? Who is paying for the food and bills, and how?