7 ms·

This is an impossible system to break when grant distributors completely require that you have recently published in a luxury journal in order to garner funding

by acadien 13y ago

This is an impossible system to break when grant distributors completely require that you have recently published in a luxury journal in order to garner funding. The same problem happens with tenure track committees. Most of the scientists I know are desperate for funding now, and so they have made an even bigger push to publish in a big name journal. It's an insane system, but I've never heard of a viable solution for it.

rfnslyr 13y ago
A website or service you can setup a monthly wallet with, which is distributed to X authors you read per month. That would be a cool service.
- lmm 13y ago
  Monthly wallet? Urgh. As if I always see $10-worth of content in a given month, never mind my instinctive aversion to recurring billing. A service that just made it really easy to put $1 in the tip jar, when I wanted to? That I would use.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >never mind my instinctive aversion to recurring billing. That's not an argument. Another can even have an "instictive aversion" to paying up-front.
    - lmm 13y ago
      I think there's a real correlation between "uses recurring billing" and "scummy".
      - coldtea 13y ago
        Why you'd say that? I have reccuring billing for several services, like Dropbox, Linode, Digital Ocean, AWS, auto-domain renewals, some subscriptions to digital content, etc. It's not only illegitimate businesses use recurring billing!
xerophtye 13y ago
I just want to put this thought out on the open, what about crowd-funding? Would that ever work for research? Like you can make all the papers free to read, and at the end provide a link to donate to their research. Or they can showcase that this is what we are working on, this is how far we have gotten. Now we want to do this but for that we need this amount of Money. Help us out? Would something like that work? Or the primary success of crowd sourcing is that people see it as a "pre-order market for cool new gadgets" instead of the whole "this thing should exist! I'll help!" ?
- acadien 13y ago
  This is really a problem with our government. The NSF is shrinking and is now too small to support the number of physical scientists in the US. If funding were prevalent and actually scaled with the size of academia then people wouldn't be so desperate to make a show of their research. It is common practice to claim your research will result in magical leaps in technology, such as curing cancer while making cars more fuel efficient, essentially lying to get funding. On a side note, this is one of the reasons why science news articles are often so far fetched and inaccurate. Certainly making journals free and open is a step in the right direction, it reduces the financial strain on Universities and researchers. It also the opens the doors for amateur scientists to do solid independent (predominately theoretical) work. I should be clear though, we already have a kind of crowd sourcing system in place: taxes and government funding agencies. The solution isn't to implement crowd sourcing, that would be like putting a band-aid on a leaky submarine. The solution is to correct the system we already have in place. A central problem with crowd sourcing directly to the public is that the public _cannot_ be swayed to fund science that isn't sexy. A portion of fundamental science is actually pretty dull and difficult to explain, but needs to be done for the sake of progress.
  - Anon84 13y ago
    > Certainly making journals free and open is a step in the > right direction, it reduces the financial strain on > Universities and researchers. It also the opens the doors > for amateur scientists to do solid independent > (predominately theoretical) work. Actually, open acess journals are more expensive to univeristies and scientists. Instead of the university paying for a fixed subscription fee out of the "overhead money" it collects, the scientists themselves have to py a fee per paper published out of their own grants. http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/ http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/ This clearly penalizes funding strapped researchers and even those who are more productive. Those $2900 per paper adds up quickly. Edit: formatting
ronaldx 13y ago
> This is an impossible system to break when grant distributors completely require that you have recently published in a luxury journal Agreed. This creates all sorts of false incentives which are self-reinforcing. It's good that a scientist with some influence has deliberately and publicly taken themselves out of that system.

by acadien 13y ago

rfnslyr 13y ago

A website or service you can setup a monthly wallet with, which is distributed to X authors you read per month. That would be a cool service.

lmm 13y ago
Monthly wallet? Urgh. As if I always see $10-worth of content in a given month, never mind my instinctive aversion to recurring billing. A service that just made it really easy to put $1 in the tip jar, when I wanted to? That I would use.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >never mind my instinctive aversion to recurring billing. That's not an argument. Another can even have an "instictive aversion" to paying up-front.
  - lmm 13y ago
    I think there's a real correlation between "uses recurring billing" and "scummy".
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Why you'd say that? I have reccuring billing for several services, like Dropbox, Linode, Digital Ocean, AWS, auto-domain renewals, some subscriptions to digital content, etc. It's not only illegitimate businesses use recurring billing!

xerophtye 13y ago

I just want to put this thought out on the open, what about crowd-funding? Would that ever work for research? Like you can make all the papers free to read, and at the end provide a link to donate to their research. Or they can showcase that this is what we are working on, this is how far we have gotten. Now we want to do this but for that we need this amount of Money. Help us out? Would something like that work? Or the primary success of crowd sourcing is that people see it as a "pre-order market for cool new gadgets" instead of the whole "this thing should exist! I'll help!" ?

acadien 13y ago
This is really a problem with our government. The NSF is shrinking and is now too small to support the number of physical scientists in the US. If funding were prevalent and actually scaled with the size of academia then people wouldn't be so desperate to make a show of their research. It is common practice to claim your research will result in magical leaps in technology, such as curing cancer while making cars more fuel efficient, essentially lying to get funding. On a side note, this is one of the reasons why science news articles are often so far fetched and inaccurate. Certainly making journals free and open is a step in the right direction, it reduces the financial strain on Universities and researchers. It also the opens the doors for amateur scientists to do solid independent (predominately theoretical) work. I should be clear though, we already have a kind of crowd sourcing system in place: taxes and government funding agencies. The solution isn't to implement crowd sourcing, that would be like putting a band-aid on a leaky submarine. The solution is to correct the system we already have in place. A central problem with crowd sourcing directly to the public is that the public _cannot_ be swayed to fund science that isn't sexy. A portion of fundamental science is actually pretty dull and difficult to explain, but needs to be done for the sake of progress.
- Anon84 13y ago
  > Certainly making journals free and open is a step in the > right direction, it reduces the financial strain on > Universities and researchers. It also the opens the doors > for amateur scientists to do solid independent > (predominately theoretical) work. Actually, open acess journals are more expensive to univeristies and scientists. Instead of the university paying for a fixed subscription fee out of the "overhead money" it collects, the scientists themselves have to py a fee per paper published out of their own grants. http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/ http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/ This clearly penalizes funding strapped researchers and even those who are more productive. Those $2900 per paper adds up quickly. Edit: formatting

ronaldx 13y ago

> This is an impossible system to break when grant distributors completely require that you have recently published in a luxury journal Agreed. This creates all sorts of false incentives which are self-reinforcing. It's good that a scientist with some influence has deliberately and publicly taken themselves out of that system.