4 ms·

If someone publishes via ACM, IEEE, or one of the other places papers go to die, it just ensures that their work will be unread, unused, and more or less ignore

If someone publishes via ACM, IEEE, or one of the other places papers go to die, it just ensures that their work will be unread, unused, and more or less ignored. Which is sad, because the individuals publish there in order to move up through the academic ranks. By moving forward in their careers, they are also marginalizing their own work. The incentives are perverse, and it will be a very happy day when all CS content is freely available online, as it should be.

ecuzzillo 16y ago
This is not exactly true. Universities subscribe en masse to these things for presumably exorbitant fees, but the result is that everybody in the university has access and doesn't notice the evil in these institutions, and continues to publish in them. So what it ensures is that your work will be ignored by everyone outside the ivory tower, which is arguably worse, since it gives the impression that your work is important, when anybody who might actually do anything useful with it is screwed. Probably the one vector that work does have from the ivory tower to the real world is via people, when they transfer from one to the other, or have one foot in each side, and can transfer ideas and PDFs from the ivory tower to the real world, and can transfer motivations for new ideas from the real world to the ivory tower. Bridge-people like these are some of the most admirable people in academia, in my opinion, and also in my opinion produce by far the best papers. (I am therefore trying to be one of them, sort of, although I'm not really interested in actually writing papers, since to get it published (and therefore have it count officially as a 'paper' instead of a PDF talking about what you did) you have to write a variable amount of obfuscatory bullshit.)
jacquesm 16y ago
What bothers me most is that plenty of the research is funded with public money and then ends up behind paywalls of commercial organizations.
scott_s 16y ago
Most authors who publish in ACM and IEEE venues also put copies on their own homepage. You can see an example of this by looking in my profile. I agree there is something wrong with the model, but I think your understanding of academia is flawed.

ecuzzillo 16y ago

This is not exactly true. Universities subscribe en masse to these things for presumably exorbitant fees, but the result is that everybody in the university has access and doesn't notice the evil in these institutions, and continues to publish in them. So what it ensures is that your work will be ignored by everyone outside the ivory tower, which is arguably worse, since it gives the impression that your work is important, when anybody who might actually do anything useful with it is screwed. Probably the one vector that work does have from the ivory tower to the real world is via people, when they transfer from one to the other, or have one foot in each side, and can transfer ideas and PDFs from the ivory tower to the real world, and can transfer motivations for new ideas from the real world to the ivory tower. Bridge-people like these are some of the most admirable people in academia, in my opinion, and also in my opinion produce by far the best papers. (I am therefore trying to be one of them, sort of, although I'm not really interested in actually writing papers, since to get it published (and therefore have it count officially as a 'paper' instead of a PDF talking about what you did) you have to write a variable amount of obfuscatory bullshit.)

jacquesm 16y ago

What bothers me most is that plenty of the research is funded with public money and then ends up behind paywalls of commercial organizations.

scott_s 16y ago

Most authors who publish in ACM and IEEE venues also put copies on their own homepage. You can see an example of this by looking in my profile. I agree there is something wrong with the model, but I think your understanding of academia is flawed.