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I agree with everything except for the jab at (paid) open access, which looks quite gratuitous to me. It may be true that "authors are willing to pay more to ge
by Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
I agree with everything except for the jab at (paid) open access, which looks quite gratuitous to me. It may be true that "authors are willing to pay more to get their articles published in more prestigious journals. So, the more exciting the findings a journal publishes, the more references, the higher the impact the journal, the more submissions they get, the more money they make". But this is also true of non-open-access journals. Journals live off their prestige, and before paid open access was a thing, publishers still wanted to have high-impact journals so that university libraries would subscribe to them. It was a very distorted market (as it is now), but a market nevertheless.
While I often bash for-profit journals for being parasites that do little actual work and profit from withholding access to science that should be public, and for this I would open a bottle of champagne if they disappeared, I don't think journals have much to do with this particular problem of incentivization of bad science. Journals just respond to the demand of publishing more, and shallower, papers. That demand comes from hypercompetitivity in academia, where researchers need to fight for scarce positions and scraps of funding, often paired with too much bureaucratization (selection processes that look at "objective" and "verifiable" metrics like number of papers published at a given impact factor quartile, etc., instead of just asking a bunch of neutral experts whether the person is doing good research, which may be more opaque but also much more meaningful).
As evidence that journals are not the problem in this particular case, in fields like machine learning, where publication happens mostly in arXiv and conferences that don't charge for publishing or reading papers, the problems pointed out in the post also exist. Published models that only beat previous ones because they were lucky with random seeds or data splits are widespread.
- gowld 7y ago> researchers need to fight for scarce positions and scraps of funding there is quite a lot of funding > often paired with too much bureaucratization (selection processes that look at "objective" and "verifiable" metrics this is the problem. The whole OP reads like a bizarre hit piece on open access. How could scientists paying to publish their work incentivize them to publish more? How would spamming the world with more publications inflate a scientist's impact factor? (It wouldn't -- impact factor would be diluted by the spam) It was always possible to self-publish and to cite self-published work, and even without journals, a modern scientist can publish on a free webhost for even cheaper than an open-access journal.
- lutorm 7y agoHow could scientists paying to publish their work incentivize them to publish more? I assumed that the point was that the journal is incentivized to publish as many articles as possible, and hence to lower review standards.
- cbkeller 7y agoSure, but if the journal publishes too many articles it'll lose prestige. Nature publishes what, 8% of submissions? And that's apparently what they consider financially optimal -- they're a for-profit corporation, they could publish more if they wanted to. I guess the question is just whether this applies equally to open-access and traditional subscription journals.
- lutorm 7y agoBut Nature doesn't make its living by publishing articles, it does it by selling subscriptions. This requires having high "prestige" so people want to subscribe to it. If you're just charging for publishing articles, you don't care about whether anyone reads them or about what your "prestige" is, since you don't make any money off of that. It's true that if I publish a paper it's better for me if it's read and thus cited, but that's much less of a difference compared to published vs not published at all. The entire problem starts with authors not being incentivized to publish a few good articles over churning out as many as possible.