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I, for one, care deeply about making my papers readable. I'm outside academia and doing research as a side-hobby, so I couldn't care less about things like tenu

by xamuel 7y ago

I, for one, care deeply about making my papers readable. I'm outside academia and doing research as a side-hobby, so I couldn't care less about things like tenure etc. So for example, one of my most successful papers [1], I intentionally wrote it in 2 pages (which is quite adequate to get the key idea across), instead of ballooning it into 20 pages. As a result, I had no choice but to publish it in one of the most obscure journals in existence, because almost no-one else accepts 2-page papers in this area these days. Not that it really matters: it still benefited from useful comments by its reviewers, and it's been far more widely read than any of my other papers. But with the journal I published it in, it would never do me a lick of good in an academic job hunt or grant proposal. [1] https://philarchive.org/archive/ALEATO-6 https://philarchive.org/archive/ALEATO-6 "A type of simulation which some experimental evidence suggests we don't live in"

siliconshinobi 7y ago
Do you have an academic and/or industry background? I'd be curious to hear about what the experience of publishing in an academic journal as outsider was like.
- xamuel 7y ago
  I'm a math PhD, left academia because I have kids and I wanted to give them a better life than you can give kids with a postdoc salary ;) I can't perceive any differences as an outsider vs. insider. Probably some reviewers subconsciously let it influence their judgment, but at least in some fields you can publish in double-blind reviewed journals where your identity is hidden from the reviewers.
dekhn 7y ago
in my experience, the best papers are written by people who are not part of the academic incentive system. We had a problem at UC Berkeley where a very smart CS guy wanted to publish a paper but since he didn't have an official affiliation, major journals wouldn't publish his papers (they literally wouldn't publish a paper by a person whose correspondence address was their home address). So we gave him a title at Berkeley and the paper was published. His work is some of the best around, but the academic community wouldn't pay attention until he ran some benchmarks and had them disseminated by prominent academics.

by xamuel 7y ago

siliconshinobi 7y ago

Do you have an academic and/or industry background? I'd be curious to hear about what the experience of publishing in an academic journal as outsider was like.

xamuel 7y ago
I'm a math PhD, left academia because I have kids and I wanted to give them a better life than you can give kids with a postdoc salary ;) I can't perceive any differences as an outsider vs. insider. Probably some reviewers subconsciously let it influence their judgment, but at least in some fields you can publish in double-blind reviewed journals where your identity is hidden from the reviewers.

dekhn 7y ago

in my experience, the best papers are written by people who are not part of the academic incentive system. We had a problem at UC Berkeley where a very smart CS guy wanted to publish a paper but since he didn't have an official affiliation, major journals wouldn't publish his papers (they literally wouldn't publish a paper by a person whose correspondence address was their home address). So we gave him a title at Berkeley and the paper was published. His work is some of the best around, but the academic community wouldn't pay attention until he ran some benchmarks and had them disseminated by prominent academics.