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As someone who came from industry and now works with mostly academics at a scientific non-profit, I feel this. Especially the parts about publishing - there ar
by cbanek 6y ago
As someone who came from industry and now works with mostly academics at a scientific non-profit, I feel this.
Especially the parts about publishing - there are so many people who are so obsessed by publishing, and most honestly don't have anything useful to say at all. I swear most of these papers aren't even read, even if they are cited. There are whole layers of publication politics that force people to cite work that is almost completely unrelated, if not unrelated and saying so, just to inflate citation counts. It's basically a follow-for-follow system. Same for author lists.
Also totally agree that the papers are written for these referees, instead of the people reading them (which many times I think is not any). Many of these papers are also written in order to give presentations or talks at conferences where papers are expected, since it is publishing and not speaking that gives you a line on your CV.
Also how tenure doesn't save you, I feel this is the same as in tech, where they won't fire you but they will try to manage you out or make life so unpalatable that you will just leave.
- foobarian 6y agoThe comment about papers not being read resonated with me. At one point I published a paper at a large IEEE conference where the only audience in the session were the other paper presenters. And it was clear nobody wanted to be there. I didn't last long in that line of work after that :-)
- jseliger 6y agoIn the humanities, it's even worse. Academia is stuck in this negative equilibrium, and even though many individuals recognize this, few or no institutions have managed to get out of it. Tenure and publish-or-perish are both big problems. Publish-or-perish also wasn't the norm in most schools until relatively recently; today, so many schools want to be "research" schools, even when they have relatively little business doing so. https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-opportunity-costs/ https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo...
- someguydave 6y agothe only thing propping the system up is unaccountable $billions in gov spending
- someguydave 6y agomeanwhile people in industry who might want to read your paper have to pay outrageous prices, even if they are IEEE members (you need to be society members and conference attendees to download the papers)
- hyperbovine 6y ago> Also totally agree that the papers are written for these referees, instead of the people reading them Of course papers are written with the reviewer in mind. What is your suggestion? Abolish peer review? It's up to the AE to find referees who are qualified to review your paper.
- barry-cotter 6y agoYes. Abolish peer review. Bring back editorial review. If it was good enough for Planck and Einstein it’s good enough for everyone. > For instance, the Annalen der Physik, in which Einstein published his four famous papers in 1905, did not subject those papers to the same review process. The journal had a remarkably high acceptance rate (of about 90-95%). The identifiable editors were making the final decisions about what to publish. It is the storied editor Max Planck who described his editorial philosophy as: > To shun much more the reproach of having suppressed strange opinions than that of having been too gentle in evaluating them.
- canjobear 6y ago90-95% publication rate might have worked in 1905 but it would not be feasible given the huge volume of papers now. A journal must provide curation because the majority of submissions it gets are terrible, and it’s too much work for an editor to do. Hence peer review.
- barry-cotter 6y agoIt’s only too much work for an editor to do if you insist they don’t get paid, and maintain the same standards as at present. Full time editors who accept and reject, without revise and resubmit would be much faster and able to deal with many more papers. If twice as many useless papers get published as now that’s a very small price to pay. There are other possible models of editorial review but that’s one.
- hyperbovine 6y agoI suppose this full-time editing job would be in addition to their other full-time(-plus) job of actually being a scientist, which is of course necessary to ensure that they are qualified to review all these submissions ... ?
- baby 6y agoWhat’s funny is that every time I ask authors questions about their papers, they can never answer. There always seem to be a single person that really did the work.
- sn41 6y agoIt's not really that. This happens even when you're the one who worked on that paper. A paper requires intense focus on details. Mere months after that paper, you forget some of the details. It's just natural, considering that you may be working on something altogether different at that time.
- asdff 6y agoI don't remember anything about my old papers and I was the one writing them and doing the bulk of the work. I don't remember what I did last week or even this morning, how can I possibly remember experimental details from memory?