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Science is not science. There is a lot of garbage being produced, you need a way to sort through it. Hierarchies of journals or conferences will naturally emerg
by ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
Science is not science. There is a lot of garbage being produced, you need a way to sort through it. Hierarchies of journals or conferences will naturally emerge regardless of the payment model. Just check the field of machine learning where most papers are open access and yet prestige depends on where it's published. This is orthogonal to the matter at hand.
Being published by prestigious journals isn't just about ego, it's about future career opportunities, getting grants, getting to work on things you want to work on possibly with some of the most brilliant people in your field.
I think people at the top could make things change with a massive concerted effort, and I think things will change naturally as younger people who've had a taste of open acess get access to top positions but it's too reductive to put things down to researchers' greed and ego.
- fractallyte 6y ago"Publish or perish" is the most idiotic, damaging idea ever produced by modern academia. It's symptomatic of a degenerate system. If those academics had any guts, they would boycott their precious journals and strike out in a different, better direction. They're the ones perpetuating the system, just as much as the journals themselves. It's not parasitic, it's symbiotic.
- dariosalvi78 6y agoNobody benefits from this system except publishers. Academics hate it, but publications is the way they are measured by public institutions for, e.g., grants, or when being hired. There's no symbiosis, it has evolved in this way mostly because of decisions taken by non-academics (ministries, governments, administrative staff etc.) and nobody knows how to get out of it.
- fractallyte 6y agoTo avoid redundancy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25650788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25650788