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> academics could easily disrupt it I get it, this is Hacker News and we all disrupt five industries before breakfast, but this so out of touch it's not even f
by nikitaga 5y ago
> academics could easily disrupt it
I get it, this is Hacker News and we all disrupt five industries before breakfast, but this so out of touch it's not even funny. Old journals aren't going away just because a few academics decide to start a new unknown journal.
Have you ever outcompeted a cartel that has 100 years and billions of dollars on you? Me neither. Maybe it's possible, but it's certainly neither easy nor as simple as you suggest.
Academics are playing with their own and their students' careers by defying established journals. That's infinitely higher stakes than software devs taking VC money and failing only to use this experience as a piece on their resume for the next job. It shouldn't be that way, but fixing that is hard.
- avs733 5y agoI share the sentiment of your post but as an academic, I think you are wrong and the OP is right. The older academic generations have literally built this system and then no point to it as inherent and unable to be changed. They point to socially constructed parts of our faculty experience and claim that it 'is'. It is the truest example of stupid smart people I have ever experienced. it is fundamentally, laziness and self-interest. They complain about the system that they built - they complain about administrators, who are all either faculty or people brought in to do things faculty complained about doing or turned out to be wildly bad at. I'll give a couple specific examples: 1) Faculty development offices - faculty complain ENDLESSLY about faculty development offices and programs and staff. They feel they are interfering with The reality is they were created for a bunch of reasons - largely because the many faculty had stopped investing time in mentoring their peers, and when that did happen it was often wildly sexist and racist. So it got replaced with people trained to do the job well, overseen by faculty. Much of there work is on teaching faculty to teach - because faculty doing the hiring don't bother to evaluate candidates on that core competency. Now the faculty complain about 'bloat' and about the documentation that is generated. 2) IT - I worked at an institution where the faculty senate basically called a meeting to lambast the head of IT because the laptop specification suggested for students couldn't do [thing]. The head of IT shared the history of his office...it had been a faculty member's job (they had a teaching release to do the work) and no one wanted to do it, so they hired someone and setup a faculty oversight board, then they couldn't get any faculty to participate, so then they stopped the oversight board and just sent a survey of needs to all the faculty, they got almost no responses. So the IT person did their best. Faculty had control, complained about the work, and then complained that they weren't consulted. In prior generations, tenure and academic freedom were tools that enabled faculty to work collaboratively and collegially to run a good university. Several generations of faculty have transformed tenure into a reward for doing lots of research. Unsurprisingly, once it became a reward rather than a tool it gets abused...and faculty fight so hard for things that serve themselves at the expense of the university that they find themselves standing on the outside, in the cold, with their trophy, and presume someone is out to get them.
- danaris 5y agoI have no wish to invalidate the frustrations and concerns you have with the faculty at your institution, but I hope you realize they are just that: concerns with the faculty at your institution. The small university I work at has faculty who are quite the opposite. They push for faculty development, and for support for the staff who support them. I suspect that part of the difference is that this is a small university—basically a liberal arts college with a vestigial graduate program—while I'm guessing the institution you describe is a larger one.
- avs733 5y agoI think you are right, although I'll note that I'm speaking from experience at three institutions now (two large, one small). I would highlight small liberal arts colleges as absolutely different. From working at a number of 'top ranked' (sorry...vomit) STEM focused institutions, my kid will be significantly coaxed towards a small liberal arts college no matter what they are interested in pursuing professionally.
- jimbob45 5y agoYou say that but old journals are having their existence seriously threatened by one diminutive Kazakh girl.
- nikitaga 5y agoKudos to her, she's a hero. But that can only be done by someone working outside of the (western?) legal system. That is not a lifestyle for everyone. We can't blame average scientists for not being like her. The law needs to change to require public access, so that her effort isn't needed.
- intended 5y agoThe first internet assaults on privacy started with the MPAA/RIAA to stop piracy. While it lasted Napster seriously threatened the music industry. Eventually though the music industry won, without care of the larger damage it wrought.
- registeredcorn 5y agoWhich girl are you referring to?
- mhh__ 5y agoAlso, you have to do all this, while working full time on writing papers, teaching etc.
- civilized 5y agoYou forget the editorial boards. They can mass resign, start their own journal, and ask that this successor be considered the legitimate heir. But editorial boards don't do that, and on the rare occasions they do, academics keep submitting to the old journal. Because, again, these folks don't care if anyone can read their research outside of colleagues who might cite them.
- larsiusprime 5y agoHow is this different than any other coordination problem?
- civilized 5y agoIt's not a coordination problem, it's an apathy problem. Boards that care can and do succeed in carrying out precisely the plan I just laid out. See for example https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-...
- solveit 5y agoI see a bunch of people who spent a lot of time and effort for collective well-being at personal cost. This is a textbook coordination problem.
- kristjansson 5y agoThis has actually succeeded before though. Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) is one of the premier journals in its field, is open access, and was formed by the mass resignation of editorial board of 'Machine Learning'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Research#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Re...
- intuitionist 5y agoYes, and ‘Machine Learning’ is still being published, as is virtually every other journal of note that’s seen a mass editorial resignation. Maybe this strategy will work in the long run—if all the high-prestige journals are open access the publishers may wither and die—but so far Springer and Elsevier and the others make their money either way.
- brumar 5y agoYep...the point is still valid though. Technically, scientific publishing is easy to replace by a sound solution. Yet, politically, it's so hard. Think also to all the students that fully realize that before commiting seriously to academia. They either leave in disgust or start to play along. The death of A. Schwartz moved me a lot during my Phd. But my supervisor forbade me to publish in a public solution based on post review only saying that it would threaten our lab reputation. I am not sure I would have stayed in academia even if the system was less ugly (nb I was in cognitive psychology), but I am fully certain that I would have been much more happy there with a better system.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoSince the journals rely so heavily on free labor, why is it so hard to dry that up? If I worked for a competitor or a supplier that is actively squeezing my employer, during work hours, getting fired would be the absolute minimum I could expect. Why don't universities impose an explicit "you are not supposed to work for any of those parasites during university-paid time"?
- goodcanadian 5y agoFrom what I hear, the free labour is drying up. Not so much for ideological reasons, but because there is very little reward for reviewing papers (even though that is a thing that needs to happen).
- native_samples 5y agoBecause universities don't have an alternative. There are two things to realize about this situation: 1. It occurs because academia is a planned, quasi-socialist economy in which there are no market signals anywhere. However even if you get rid of market economics you still need some way to allocate resources. Weird academia-specific hacks like impact factors are the result: they're basically a form of whuffie-like currency, and are used to replace price signals. 2. Academics could change it because they have tremendous freedom and nobody forces them to organize this way, but they never will, because academia is dominated by people who are very sympathetic to Marxist pseudo-economics [1]. Indeed that's how it justifies its own existence: the value of academia to society is framed in terms of negative assumptions about what market-oriented capitalist research can or will do. It's easy to illustrate the latter point in this case. The author identifies that their system is screwed up and then blames "chokepoint capitalism". Ah yes. A near totally government funded system has an absurd structure because of too much capitalism. Wrong. Corporate research doesn't have this set of problems at all. The journal system exists exactly because without capitalism academics have to come up with some alternative, and in a centrally planned economy there's no incentive for that alternative to make sense or be any good. So they've drifted into this situation where third parties sell them an alternative ideologically acceptable pseudo-currency called reputation metrics, because they weren't even capable of setting up their own, and flail around mis-diagnosing their situation. Want to get rid of journals? Sure, no problem. Go work for a private sector R&D lab where papers get published on their website and your career ladder is based on the actual market impact of your work, not the impact-factor of where you publish it. [1] http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1...
- lejoko 5y ago> Have you ever outcompeted a cartel that has 100 years and billions of dollars on you? Me neither. Maybe it's possible, but it's certainly neither easy nor as simple as you suggest. Been there, done that! In the 90s, very few believed that Free Software / Open Source could ever become what it is today. I was (a super tiny) part of it. It was hard and took long, for sure. But possible it was. I'd love to see a similar movement in the academic world.
- krageon 5y agoWhile this is cool and sort of topical, in the 90s there for sure was not a software cartel that had existed for hundreds of years. We can know this because it simply wasn't a thing for that long at that time :)
- lejoko 5y agoStrictly speaking you’re right. I mostly intended to highlight the idea that making huge social changes was possible with a lot of collective determination; but still : IBM is only 31 years younger than Elsevier...
- fsckboy 5y ago> I'd love to see a similar movement in the academic world. but computer science is an academic discipline, and FOSS didn't emerge from the academy. in fact, inasmuch as Stallman started it, though he could be said to have been in the academy, his actions were somewhat anti the academy.