6 ms·

Let’s Publish Everything

153 points by luu 7y ago

lifeisstillgood 7y ago
>>> Publishing in Psychological Science and PNAS has value because these journals reject a lot of papers. That seems to be the crux - scientific papers will have to fall into two camps "blogs or basically deciphering the lab notes of everyone in your field" and "look this is a real effect and worthy of your attention" People seem to want the second without wading through the first - but i don't think you can
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  > That seems to be the crux - scientific papers will have to fall into two camps "blogs or basically deciphering the lab notes of everyone in your field" and "look this is a real effect and worthy of your attention" This ignores reputation and expertise. If you’re studying the sociology of Hollywood there’s Gabriel Rossman and maybe six other people who do quantitative work. They all know each other and read each other’s work. If one of this small group has a grad student who does quantitative sociology work on rich datasets from IMDB or somewhere else they’ll be introduced at some point while doing their doctorate. He also partakes of other networks within sociology, Economic sociologists and Princeton graduates. All of these networks are relatively small and reputation and gossip travel quickly. People hear that others are good or not getting tenure, etc. Sociology is a normal social science. Papers go from an idea to a sketch of an idea or maybe a poster to a conference paper or graduate seminar discussion to working paper before finally being published. The peer review step is the last one for the diffusion of knowledge about what’s good. If people stopped publishing in legacy journals tomorrow peer review would still happen, it’d just be post publication peer review of working papers, the system Einstein published all but three of his papers under. You can get the second without personally wading through the lab notes of everyone in your field because if you’re trying to get attention you need to present your results and advertise them so people will care, unless they already care because you have a reputation.
- mirimir 7y ago
  For PNAS, I've heard, getting sponsored by a NAS member greatly increases chances for publication. So it seems an odd example to cite for "value".
  - zwaps 7y ago
    Its more that NAS members can publish some articles basically for free, so co-authoring with them is a good way to get in easier. That being said, NAS members I know do not want to erode their reputation by publishing junk.
dwheeler 7y ago
The lede got buried here. This article does not just propose "let's publish everything", it proposes "let's publish everything and have endorsement as a completely separate step." I think that is a far more rational approach than the current model. The current model assumes that the only way to distribute information is by printing on paper. That is clearly no longer the case, in fact it is a laughable assumption. So let's get the papers published online, and then separately have discussions leading to various kinds of endorsements. Or not, depending on the strength of the arguments.
rdiddly 7y ago
The same thing is trying to happen in scientific publication that's been happening in every other published medium: scarcity is gone. So why not embrace the abundance? Well if there's any contrary case to be made, it's that the explosion in quantity inevitably reduces the average quality. In the arts, low quality corresponds to that ineffable quality of shittiness. In news, it's fakeness. In science, it's irreproducibility. So what do you do? All the former built-in scarcity-based ways of filtering for quality went out the window along with the scarcity itself. You can no longer use the limited space on physical sheets of papyrus (or vinyl LP records, or celluloid) as an excuse to exclude things. So you need new ways of sorting out good quality work from the (suddenly vast) quantities of mediocre work. Seems like you're doing pretty well if you're lucky enough to have a whole new class of people step in to help with the filtering part. Unless of course you believe a scientific discovery is fundamentally the work of a person, an ego, rather than a fact that existed long before that particular person happened to discover it. Democratization ends elitism; unfortunately elites sometimes really do consist of the best of a given thing. Especially newer elites. Every elite starts out as a meritocracy and ends up some kind of weird legacy-based cabal/cartel that deserves to be overthrown (that's the one you're probably accustomed to thinking of when you hear the term "elitism").
- petschge 7y ago
  (I agree with the parent poster, but this seems like the right place to add the following.) One thing that people who claim "the scarcity is gone, let's just publish everything" do miss is that there still is a scarcity: The time and attention of researchers. Let me expand a bit on that from my own field of studying reconnection in astrophysical plasma. As you can tell from the description it is not a well defined closed topic. Instead there is tons of more or less adjacent fields. The study of solar flares (which might be triggered by reconnection), the study of coronal heating (the heat might be due to magnetic field getting converted to heat by reconnection), astronomical observations of AGN jets (reconnection might be what produces energetic particles there that we see in the SDE of those sources), observations of pulsar wind nebulae (the energetic particles there might have been accelerated at the termination shock. or due to reconnection), observations of giant pulses in (some) pulsars (that might be due to reconnection at the Y point of the current sheet just outside the light cylinder) and so on. On top of the related physical topics I need to keep on top of development methods in the simulation method I use (particle in cell codes) and in several related simulation methods (either because improvements there might make them viable to study reconnection which wasn't possible before, or because the neat new trick in method X might also improve the characteristics in PiC codes). If I wanted to I could spend easily 100 hours per week just reading papers. But staying current with the field is just 5 or maybe 10 percent of my job. So what I do is the following: Papers that fall close enough to my special topic I will read. All of them. I will actually print them out, annotate them, go over them with a fine toothed comb. For many other papers I will read the abstracts (10 to 50 each morning) to find the 1 or 2 paper that are worth reading. And this is where selection by the editors and limitations to publications come in. They rank important papers. I am much more likely to read "a novel approach to plasma simulation" if it was accepted into the Astrophysical Journal than if it just appears on ArXiv. Because ApJ does not like pure code papers. So if it made the cut 2 or 3 experts in the field deemed it worth the time of the community. Now that doesn't mean that all ArXiv papers are bad, that we should publish less or anything like that. When I talk to a colleague and ask about a technical detail I am SOOOO happy when they say "it's in the Arxiv paper ID 1906.bla". And on the other hand there is the notion of "it was in Nature but it still might be right". Bottom line is: Do not discount the sorting by topic (numerical vs observational vs theoretical), impact ("here is one data point" vs "here is a completely new approach") and quality ("I'm not too convinced, but maybe it gives somebody an idea" vs "holy smokes how did we all miss that!") that journals provide. Any better, future alternative needs this sorting and ranking. Just dumping it onto the internet is not the solution.
droithomme 7y ago
> the authors of the above article, and other people who present similar anti-replication arguments Study replication is good, and fairly rare.
ridaj 7y ago
It's a good idea, but without scarcity and the attendant prestige of being a reviewer for fancy publications, how do you get people to volunteer their time to review and endorse papers?
wsxcde 7y ago
I am in sympathy with the author's goals but the major problem with publishing everything on arXiv like forums is that: (i) it becomes impossible to sort out the good stuff from the nonsense produced by cranks, and (ii) it unfairly advantages "high profile" groups. Today, if I have a grad student interested in security who wants some ideas for things to work on, I could ask them to go look up papers in Oakland, CCS and NDSS over the last couple of years and see if anything catches their fancy. This works because there's a reasonable number of papers that I could reasonably expect a PhD student to look through. Asking them to look up all the stuff that ends up on arXiv or the IACR's ePrints is not reasonable. There's just too much stuff there and most of it is not worth looking at that. So, you might say the endorsements will take care of this. CCS et al. could just endorse some limited subset of the IACR ePrints. But this leads to problem (ii) above. Right now, we have a bunch of high-profile researchers (who are mostly at places like MIT and Stanford) who just put up stuff on arXiv without any peer review and they start picking-up citations right away because of their "elite" status. Some of this is deserved, because these people have done good work. But some of this is also just a publication cartel where everybody cites their friends' work and make it impossible for others to break into a field. The larger point is that in a scenario where there are so many papers that nobody could possibly look at all of them will lead to a few groups accumulating all the citations and all the awards. This will especially be unfair to researchers in the developing world -- people at places like Bilikent, Tsinghua, and the IITs -- where researchers don't have the PR muscle power to highlight unpublished stuff.
- diffserv 7y ago
  > I could ask them to go look up papers in Oakland, CCS and NDSS over the last couple of years and see if anything catches their fancy. Isn't this exactly the major thing that is wrong with research today? Limiting work/creativity to a few well known conferences done by elites for elites? I read blog posts, posted daily here on HN, that are way more informative, honest, and replicable than many papers published in the three conferences you named. > "elite" status. Some of this is deserved, because these people have done good work. But some of this is also just a publication cartel where everybody cites their friends' work and make it impossible for others to break into a field. Elite status happens exactly because there are conferences like the ones you mentioned. If you work with an advisor that publishes in Oakland, your chances of getting a paper in Oakland gets increased multiplicatively. And hint, that's not because your ideas (or papers) are better than anybody else's. > The larger point is that in a scenario where there are so many papers that nobody could possibly look at all of them will lead to a few groups accumulating all the citations and all the awards. This is already happening. Look at all the "prestigious" conferences. > where researchers don't have the PR muscle power to highlight unpublished stuff. Who cares? If the work is worth anything, people will cite it. If not, it will remain as is. Why does it matter? Why do you care if 10 people cited your work or 100 people if you are happy with the work? Unfortunately, nobody in this forsaken field (computer science) cares about the scientific aspect of the field anymore; everybody wants their name to be known and that's all there is to it. The measure of success is how many papers you publish in elite conferences ... I do actually think that by breaking down all the barriers people care less about having their name in conference X or Y and more about the scientific aspect or citation cartels. First one is good, second one can be fixed (at least more easily than giving a few elites lots of power with no checks and balances).
noname120 7y ago
I believe that there is a misunderstanding regarding the role of academic publishing. Before the Internet era, the only way to make your work known to other scientists was to publish it in a journal—prestigious if possible. Journals were a medium to spread scientific information and make it available. Nowadays the situation is very much different. For example, there are preprint repositories such as arXiv where researchers can publish papers with very little oversight[1]. The journals don't serve the role of making information available anymore. Their main role is to act as a filter for scientific information, and the reputation of a journal signals whether it's a high-pass or a low-pass filter. Researchers want to publish in prestigious journals since it signals that their work is high quality, and it gives greater exposure to their work—prestigious journals have a broader reader base than unknown journals. This considered, the author got a point. In experimental domains of science such as Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Psychology (and sometimes even Math! [2]), reproducibility is of paramount importance and publishing negative results helps both researchers save time by not doing repeated work and avoid statistical bias in meta studies. In fact, what the author of this article implicitly looks for already exists![3] But they usually fail to gain traction, and this for a precise reason: writing and publishing a paper takes a great amount of time. Publishing a paper in favor of the null hypothesis usually does not bring much recognition, and the time could instead be used to research or write the next paper. What can be done then? A solution could be to create a platform where scientific results can be made available without the whole publishing overload. No literature review, no verbose explanations, only "what we did" and "what we got". And if possible, in a machine-readable format. Any fellow HNers? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv#Controversy [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0749 https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0749 [3] http://www.jasnh.com/ http://www.jasnh.com/

153 points by luu 7y ago

>>> Publishing in Psychological Science and PNAS has value because these journals reject a lot of papers. That seems to be the crux - scientific papers will have to fall into two camps "blogs or basically deciphering the lab notes of everyone in your field" and "look this is a real effect and worthy of your attention" People seem to want the second without wading through the first - but i don't think you can

barry-cotter 7y ago
> That seems to be the crux - scientific papers will have to fall into two camps "blogs or basically deciphering the lab notes of everyone in your field" and "look this is a real effect and worthy of your attention" This ignores reputation and expertise. If you’re studying the sociology of Hollywood there’s Gabriel Rossman and maybe six other people who do quantitative work. They all know each other and read each other’s work. If one of this small group has a grad student who does quantitative sociology work on rich datasets from IMDB or somewhere else they’ll be introduced at some point while doing their doctorate. He also partakes of other networks within sociology, Economic sociologists and Princeton graduates. All of these networks are relatively small and reputation and gossip travel quickly. People hear that others are good or not getting tenure, etc. Sociology is a normal social science. Papers go from an idea to a sketch of an idea or maybe a poster to a conference paper or graduate seminar discussion to working paper before finally being published. The peer review step is the last one for the diffusion of knowledge about what’s good. If people stopped publishing in legacy journals tomorrow peer review would still happen, it’d just be post publication peer review of working papers, the system Einstein published all but three of his papers under. You can get the second without personally wading through the lab notes of everyone in your field because if you’re trying to get attention you need to present your results and advertise them so people will care, unless they already care because you have a reputation.
mirimir 7y ago
For PNAS, I've heard, getting sponsored by a NAS member greatly increases chances for publication. So it seems an odd example to cite for "value".
- zwaps 7y ago
  Its more that NAS members can publish some articles basically for free, so co-authoring with them is a good way to get in easier. That being said, NAS members I know do not want to erode their reputation by publishing junk.

dwheeler 7y ago

The lede got buried here. This article does not just propose "let's publish everything", it proposes "let's publish everything and have endorsement as a completely separate step." I think that is a far more rational approach than the current model. The current model assumes that the only way to distribute information is by printing on paper. That is clearly no longer the case, in fact it is a laughable assumption. So let's get the papers published online, and then separately have discussions leading to various kinds of endorsements. Or not, depending on the strength of the arguments.

rdiddly 7y ago

The same thing is trying to happen in scientific publication that's been happening in every other published medium: scarcity is gone. So why not embrace the abundance? Well if there's any contrary case to be made, it's that the explosion in quantity inevitably reduces the average quality. In the arts, low quality corresponds to that ineffable quality of shittiness. In news, it's fakeness. In science, it's irreproducibility. So what do you do? All the former built-in scarcity-based ways of filtering for quality went out the window along with the scarcity itself. You can no longer use the limited space on physical sheets of papyrus (or vinyl LP records, or celluloid) as an excuse to exclude things. So you need new ways of sorting out good quality work from the (suddenly vast) quantities of mediocre work. Seems like you're doing pretty well if you're lucky enough to have a whole new class of people step in to help with the filtering part. Unless of course you believe a scientific discovery is fundamentally the work of a person, an ego, rather than a fact that existed long before that particular person happened to discover it. Democratization ends elitism; unfortunately elites sometimes really do consist of the best of a given thing. Especially newer elites. Every elite starts out as a meritocracy and ends up some kind of weird legacy-based cabal/cartel that deserves to be overthrown (that's the one you're probably accustomed to thinking of when you hear the term "elitism").

petschge 7y ago
(I agree with the parent poster, but this seems like the right place to add the following.) One thing that people who claim "the scarcity is gone, let's just publish everything" do miss is that there still is a scarcity: The time and attention of researchers. Let me expand a bit on that from my own field of studying reconnection in astrophysical plasma. As you can tell from the description it is not a well defined closed topic. Instead there is tons of more or less adjacent fields. The study of solar flares (which might be triggered by reconnection), the study of coronal heating (the heat might be due to magnetic field getting converted to heat by reconnection), astronomical observations of AGN jets (reconnection might be what produces energetic particles there that we see in the SDE of those sources), observations of pulsar wind nebulae (the energetic particles there might have been accelerated at the termination shock. or due to reconnection), observations of giant pulses in (some) pulsars (that might be due to reconnection at the Y point of the current sheet just outside the light cylinder) and so on. On top of the related physical topics I need to keep on top of development methods in the simulation method I use (particle in cell codes) and in several related simulation methods (either because improvements there might make them viable to study reconnection which wasn't possible before, or because the neat new trick in method X might also improve the characteristics in PiC codes). If I wanted to I could spend easily 100 hours per week just reading papers. But staying current with the field is just 5 or maybe 10 percent of my job. So what I do is the following: Papers that fall close enough to my special topic I will read. All of them. I will actually print them out, annotate them, go over them with a fine toothed comb. For many other papers I will read the abstracts (10 to 50 each morning) to find the 1 or 2 paper that are worth reading. And this is where selection by the editors and limitations to publications come in. They rank important papers. I am much more likely to read "a novel approach to plasma simulation" if it was accepted into the Astrophysical Journal than if it just appears on ArXiv. Because ApJ does not like pure code papers. So if it made the cut 2 or 3 experts in the field deemed it worth the time of the community. Now that doesn't mean that all ArXiv papers are bad, that we should publish less or anything like that. When I talk to a colleague and ask about a technical detail I am SOOOO happy when they say "it's in the Arxiv paper ID 1906.bla". And on the other hand there is the notion of "it was in Nature but it still might be right". Bottom line is: Do not discount the sorting by topic (numerical vs observational vs theoretical), impact ("here is one data point" vs "here is a completely new approach") and quality ("I'm not too convinced, but maybe it gives somebody an idea" vs "holy smokes how did we all miss that!") that journals provide. Any better, future alternative needs this sorting and ranking. Just dumping it onto the internet is not the solution.

droithomme 7y ago

> the authors of the above article, and other people who present similar anti-replication arguments Study replication is good, and fairly rare.

ridaj 7y ago

It's a good idea, but without scarcity and the attendant prestige of being a reviewer for fancy publications, how do you get people to volunteer their time to review and endorse papers?

wsxcde 7y ago

I am in sympathy with the author's goals but the major problem with publishing everything on arXiv like forums is that: (i) it becomes impossible to sort out the good stuff from the nonsense produced by cranks, and (ii) it unfairly advantages "high profile" groups. Today, if I have a grad student interested in security who wants some ideas for things to work on, I could ask them to go look up papers in Oakland, CCS and NDSS over the last couple of years and see if anything catches their fancy. This works because there's a reasonable number of papers that I could reasonably expect a PhD student to look through. Asking them to look up all the stuff that ends up on arXiv or the IACR's ePrints is not reasonable. There's just too much stuff there and most of it is not worth looking at that. So, you might say the endorsements will take care of this. CCS et al. could just endorse some limited subset of the IACR ePrints. But this leads to problem (ii) above. Right now, we have a bunch of high-profile researchers (who are mostly at places like MIT and Stanford) who just put up stuff on arXiv without any peer review and they start picking-up citations right away because of their "elite" status. Some of this is deserved, because these people have done good work. But some of this is also just a publication cartel where everybody cites their friends' work and make it impossible for others to break into a field. The larger point is that in a scenario where there are so many papers that nobody could possibly look at all of them will lead to a few groups accumulating all the citations and all the awards. This will especially be unfair to researchers in the developing world -- people at places like Bilikent, Tsinghua, and the IITs -- where researchers don't have the PR muscle power to highlight unpublished stuff.

diffserv 7y ago
> I could ask them to go look up papers in Oakland, CCS and NDSS over the last couple of years and see if anything catches their fancy. Isn't this exactly the major thing that is wrong with research today? Limiting work/creativity to a few well known conferences done by elites for elites? I read blog posts, posted daily here on HN, that are way more informative, honest, and replicable than many papers published in the three conferences you named. > "elite" status. Some of this is deserved, because these people have done good work. But some of this is also just a publication cartel where everybody cites their friends' work and make it impossible for others to break into a field. Elite status happens exactly because there are conferences like the ones you mentioned. If you work with an advisor that publishes in Oakland, your chances of getting a paper in Oakland gets increased multiplicatively. And hint, that's not because your ideas (or papers) are better than anybody else's. > The larger point is that in a scenario where there are so many papers that nobody could possibly look at all of them will lead to a few groups accumulating all the citations and all the awards. This is already happening. Look at all the "prestigious" conferences. > where researchers don't have the PR muscle power to highlight unpublished stuff. Who cares? If the work is worth anything, people will cite it. If not, it will remain as is. Why does it matter? Why do you care if 10 people cited your work or 100 people if you are happy with the work? Unfortunately, nobody in this forsaken field (computer science) cares about the scientific aspect of the field anymore; everybody wants their name to be known and that's all there is to it. The measure of success is how many papers you publish in elite conferences ... I do actually think that by breaking down all the barriers people care less about having their name in conference X or Y and more about the scientific aspect or citation cartels. First one is good, second one can be fixed (at least more easily than giving a few elites lots of power with no checks and balances).

noname120 7y ago

I believe that there is a misunderstanding regarding the role of academic publishing. Before the Internet era, the only way to make your work known to other scientists was to publish it in a journal—prestigious if possible. Journals were a medium to spread scientific information and make it available. Nowadays the situation is very much different. For example, there are preprint repositories such as arXiv where researchers can publish papers with very little oversight[1]. The journals don't serve the role of making information available anymore. Their main role is to act as a filter for scientific information, and the reputation of a journal signals whether it's a high-pass or a low-pass filter. Researchers want to publish in prestigious journals since it signals that their work is high quality, and it gives greater exposure to their work—prestigious journals have a broader reader base than unknown journals. This considered, the author got a point. In experimental domains of science such as Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Psychology (and sometimes even Math! [2]), reproducibility is of paramount importance and publishing negative results helps both researchers save time by not doing repeated work and avoid statistical bias in meta studies. In fact, what the author of this article implicitly looks for already exists![3] But they usually fail to gain traction, and this for a precise reason: writing and publishing a paper takes a great amount of time. Publishing a paper in favor of the null hypothesis usually does not bring much recognition, and the time could instead be used to research or write the next paper. What can be done then? A solution could be to create a platform where scientific results can be made available without the whole publishing overload. No literature review, no verbose explanations, only "what we did" and "what we got". And if possible, in a machine-readable format. Any fellow HNers? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv#Controversy [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0749 https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0749 [3] http://www.jasnh.com/ http://www.jasnh.com/