7 ms·

As a recovering academic, I believe it would be good to examine why you want to publish in an academic journal. Are you a consultant, for example, and you thin

by cultus 8y ago

As a recovering academic, I believe it would be good to examine why you want to publish in an academic journal. Are you a consultant, for example, and you think it help you get clients? Are you trying to get a better job and you think the paper would help your resume? Or do you just want to increase the sum of human knowledge? Peer review is a highly flawed process that has an empirically small effect on paper quality [0]. Moreso, rejection of an article is a poor or completely useless predictor of the ultimate impact of the article if it is published. Getting a paper through peer review is slow and frustrating. You may get reviewers who reject a paper for incorrect or even bizarre reasons. If your paper casts doubts on an anonymous reviewer's work, you are going to have a hard time. It's just not fun. What are the benefits? Tech employers generally don't care about publications, just the work involved. Clients probably don't care. NGOs and government don't care either. The only people who care whether something is published are academics, in my experience. Perhaps you are in an industry where this isn't true, in which case you might have more incentive. But don't assume people will care. You might have a microscopic chance of your paper becoming highly cited, but without a well-know co-author, that is unlikely even if your paper has important content. Most scientific papers fail to make any kind of splash, with numbers of readers numbering in literally the low dozens. After all that work, chances are that nobody would care. A better solution is to put it all on a blog, and/or ArXiV or one of the other preprint services for other subjects. That way your research will be available unpaywalled for anyone. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586872/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586872/

xamuel 8y ago
Not OP, but I'm a former academic still doing research, and I appreciate peer review as gatekeeper. When I was younger, I wrote a lot of garbage on a blog that I wish had been better filtered. Worst case, if I publish a paper and it turns out to be garbage, I can pin the blame on the journal. I find it especially important if the paper has any danger of being perceived as crackpot material. For example, my paper "A type of simulation which some experimental evidence suggests we don't live in" [1], recently featured on the HN frontpage, took years to prepare and finally publish, even though it's literally less than one page in the journal. With something as 'pop' as whether we live in a simulation, I wanted to be sure what I wasn't just deceiving myself or something. [1] https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf
- cultus 8y ago
  Traditional peer review can filter out complete crackpot garbage, but it empirically is not effective at improving paper quality. Just because it may have filtered out some wrong things you said does not mean it is effective at it in general. Open, non-anonymous comments on preprint services hold much more promise. Peer review without anonymous gatekeepers.
  - xamuel 8y ago
    I've had papers greatly improved by peer review. Maybe mathematics is an outlier. All my best papers were significantly informed by reviewers. I've had cases where my initial thought was "this reviewer is an idiot!!!" When I calmed down and forced myself to give them the benefit of the doubt, I ended up realizing they were right, and they improved my papers.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- sndean 8y ago
  I've begun to appreciate peer review as gatekeeper as well. Another common situation for me is more or less arguing over a certain method/experimental design. If a colleague thinks a method is garbage, all I have to say is "yes, it's not optimal, but we published in <American Chemical Society journal> using it." It effectively ends the discussion, because ACS doesn't publish nonsense and everything is nitpicked to death. It may turn out to be garbage later on, but at the time it was sufficient.
- noobermin 8y ago
  I think it varies. As a scientist from a lesser known group, PR is essentially a way for the establishment to keep others from docking units off their genital length as well as threatening their grant funding. I find that more established scientists from the most prestigious universities make tend to be okay with PR because it seems to benefit them and they tend glowingly review each others papers. After recieving my dearth of harshness from reviewers and seeing trash (that is often rife with the same issues and worse!) from these same cats make it into Phys Rev it becomes too painfully obvious it's almost self-satricizing. I think the primary issue with PR is its fundamental assumptions are flawed. Papers authors are NEVER anonymous and can't be while reviewers make it obvious who they are. BTW, that you have a paper that took you years to prepare puts you in the far tail of the distribution.
a_t48 8y ago
> NGOs and government don't care either. This is not strictly true - if you are trying to emigrate, some visa types may be easier with a published paper (see: HSP visa for Japan).
- cultus 8y ago
  I'm thinking more in terms of usage of the research. Practitioners at places like NOAA or NGOs only care about the content, they really don't care about whether it was published. Heck, if the work you got published is paywalled, they won't even be able to see it. Government and NGOs essentially never have academic subscriptions.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
For technical people it used to be the various conferences (as opposed to journals) where you wanted to publish papers. They were peer reviewed (so some level of scrutiny pre-publication) and they definitely helped with credibility both as an organization and as an individual.
drakonka 8y ago
I've thought about this as well and for me the reason to want to publish a paper would be some kind of sense of accomplishment despite not being an academic. Producing a piece of work that is accepted as somehow useful to the world and meets the standards of academic peer review would be a great feeling. The barrier to entry is partly what makes it enticing - anyone can publish a blog, not anyone can publish a paper in anything but the lowest calibre of journals. Your comment is certainly making me stop and think twice about how much of the peer review process is legitimate criticism and how much is politics - does the author of the paper get the feedback given during the peer review process directly? If so it feels like it might still be useful.
- austinjp 8y ago
  I seriously believe that the "cachet" that traditional publishing confers is a major block that prevents innovation in this area. For the racket of academic publishing to be upended, there has to be motivation. This remains the unsolved problems. Opportunity and capability already exist in forms such as blogs, pre-print servers, etc. However, cachet is inevitably conferred by powerful monopolies. For example, some universities are trying to upset the Elsevier applecart by moving their publishing to in-house presses. But this simply shifts the power from one giant to another. Producing an open platform that avoids monopolising but still confers favourable reputation seems very hard.

by cultus 8y ago

xamuel 8y ago

Not OP, but I'm a former academic still doing research, and I appreciate peer review as gatekeeper. When I was younger, I wrote a lot of garbage on a blog that I wish had been better filtered. Worst case, if I publish a paper and it turns out to be garbage, I can pin the blame on the journal. I find it especially important if the paper has any danger of being perceived as crackpot material. For example, my paper "A type of simulation which some experimental evidence suggests we don't live in" [1], recently featured on the HN frontpage, took years to prepare and finally publish, even though it's literally less than one page in the journal. With something as 'pop' as whether we live in a simulation, I wanted to be sure what I wasn't just deceiving myself or something. [1] https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf

cultus 8y ago
Traditional peer review can filter out complete crackpot garbage, but it empirically is not effective at improving paper quality. Just because it may have filtered out some wrong things you said does not mean it is effective at it in general. Open, non-anonymous comments on preprint services hold much more promise. Peer review without anonymous gatekeepers.
- xamuel 8y ago
  I've had papers greatly improved by peer review. Maybe mathematics is an outlier. All my best papers were significantly informed by reviewers. I've had cases where my initial thought was "this reviewer is an idiot!!!" When I calmed down and forced myself to give them the benefit of the doubt, I ended up realizing they were right, and they improved my papers.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
sndean 8y ago
I've begun to appreciate peer review as gatekeeper as well. Another common situation for me is more or less arguing over a certain method/experimental design. If a colleague thinks a method is garbage, all I have to say is "yes, it's not optimal, but we published in <American Chemical Society journal> using it." It effectively ends the discussion, because ACS doesn't publish nonsense and everything is nitpicked to death. It may turn out to be garbage later on, but at the time it was sufficient.
noobermin 8y ago
I think it varies. As a scientist from a lesser known group, PR is essentially a way for the establishment to keep others from docking units off their genital length as well as threatening their grant funding. I find that more established scientists from the most prestigious universities make tend to be okay with PR because it seems to benefit them and they tend glowingly review each others papers. After recieving my dearth of harshness from reviewers and seeing trash (that is often rife with the same issues and worse!) from these same cats make it into Phys Rev it becomes too painfully obvious it's almost self-satricizing. I think the primary issue with PR is its fundamental assumptions are flawed. Papers authors are NEVER anonymous and can't be while reviewers make it obvious who they are. BTW, that you have a paper that took you years to prepare puts you in the far tail of the distribution.

a_t48 8y ago

> NGOs and government don't care either. This is not strictly true - if you are trying to emigrate, some visa types may be easier with a published paper (see: HSP visa for Japan).

cultus 8y ago
I'm thinking more in terms of usage of the research. Practitioners at places like NOAA or NGOs only care about the content, they really don't care about whether it was published. Heck, if the work you got published is paywalled, they won't even be able to see it. Government and NGOs essentially never have academic subscriptions.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

For technical people it used to be the various conferences (as opposed to journals) where you wanted to publish papers. They were peer reviewed (so some level of scrutiny pre-publication) and they definitely helped with credibility both as an organization and as an individual.

drakonka 8y ago

I've thought about this as well and for me the reason to want to publish a paper would be some kind of sense of accomplishment despite not being an academic. Producing a piece of work that is accepted as somehow useful to the world and meets the standards of academic peer review would be a great feeling. The barrier to entry is partly what makes it enticing - anyone can publish a blog, not anyone can publish a paper in anything but the lowest calibre of journals. Your comment is certainly making me stop and think twice about how much of the peer review process is legitimate criticism and how much is politics - does the author of the paper get the feedback given during the peer review process directly? If so it feels like it might still be useful.

austinjp 8y ago
I seriously believe that the "cachet" that traditional publishing confers is a major block that prevents innovation in this area. For the racket of academic publishing to be upended, there has to be motivation. This remains the unsolved problems. Opportunity and capability already exist in forms such as blogs, pre-print servers, etc. However, cachet is inevitably conferred by powerful monopolies. For example, some universities are trying to upset the Elsevier applecart by moving their publishing to in-house presses. But this simply shifts the power from one giant to another. Producing an open platform that avoids monopolising but still confers favourable reputation seems very hard.