3 ms·

> as there is little demand for published research in journals Not sure what you mean by this - for advancement in academia this is 90% of what hiring or promo

> as there is little demand for published research in journals Not sure what you mean by this - for advancement in academia this is 90% of what hiring or promotion committees demand. > journals demand payment from the writers themselves From the institution, not the authors.

jbsimpson 5y ago
> From the institution, not the authors. Typically the authors pay the journal out of their own funding.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Well I'd call that institutional money. 'Writers have to pay' makes it sound like they're paying from their own personal cash.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    Sometimes they do. Regardless, if it's often coming from funding that implies the authors have to have grants or come from institutions that are willing to pay, which disadvantages individuals without resources (they often have discounts for those without resources but in my personal experience the discount is absurdly small, like 15%, which is a lot for someone who just doesn't have external resources to publish under that model, if they're asking for 2k+ per paper). Either way it creates a backward incentive structure, of pay to access.
derbOac 5y ago
Nowadays though the research is secondary to grant funding, so hiring and promotion committees don't even care about that. I was on a promotion committee where someone had a large grant but was not publishing. This went on for years and the response from significant segments of the department every year was literally something like "they have a large grant, it's fine, of course they'll publish". Publications are seen as a dime a dozen, and open access and issues about replicability and so forth have just added to the sense they're not worth much. The attitude is more along the lines of "if your ideas are really that important and high impact, it will convince the federal government to pay for them." It's very much the classic betting market idea, that true value is revealed only when money is on the line. I'm not saying this is good or bad, just my experience, in the US. I personally think the current funding system creates distorted incentive and reward systems, and that the original idea of academics was to insulate from that a bit or at least provide an alternative to traditional for-profit models. If something doesn't change I think this trend will only accelerate. Journals will maybe become seen as irrelevant, with grant or funding receipt being seen as the actually rigorous form of peer review. Everything will become a form of seeking VC funding, either from private or public funders. Again, whether that's the best model for funding anything in the US, private or public, profit or nonprofit, is a different issue.

jbsimpson 5y ago

> From the institution, not the authors. Typically the authors pay the journal out of their own funding.

chrisseaton 5y ago
Well I'd call that institutional money. 'Writers have to pay' makes it sound like they're paying from their own personal cash.
- derbOac 5y ago
  Sometimes they do. Regardless, if it's often coming from funding that implies the authors have to have grants or come from institutions that are willing to pay, which disadvantages individuals without resources (they often have discounts for those without resources but in my personal experience the discount is absurdly small, like 15%, which is a lot for someone who just doesn't have external resources to publish under that model, if they're asking for 2k+ per paper). Either way it creates a backward incentive structure, of pay to access.

derbOac 5y ago

Nowadays though the research is secondary to grant funding, so hiring and promotion committees don't even care about that. I was on a promotion committee where someone had a large grant but was not publishing. This went on for years and the response from significant segments of the department every year was literally something like "they have a large grant, it's fine, of course they'll publish". Publications are seen as a dime a dozen, and open access and issues about replicability and so forth have just added to the sense they're not worth much. The attitude is more along the lines of "if your ideas are really that important and high impact, it will convince the federal government to pay for them." It's very much the classic betting market idea, that true value is revealed only when money is on the line. I'm not saying this is good or bad, just my experience, in the US. I personally think the current funding system creates distorted incentive and reward systems, and that the original idea of academics was to insulate from that a bit or at least provide an alternative to traditional for-profit models. If something doesn't change I think this trend will only accelerate. Journals will maybe become seen as irrelevant, with grant or funding receipt being seen as the actually rigorous form of peer review. Everything will become a form of seeking VC funding, either from private or public funders. Again, whether that's the best model for funding anything in the US, private or public, profit or nonprofit, is a different issue.