4 ms·

I'm with you on the lack of review articles, and I think they are probably the aspect of conventional publishing that this could most likely replace. I think y

I'm with you on the lack of review articles, and I think they are probably the aspect of conventional publishing that this could most likely replace. I think you'd need a very radical overhaul of how science works to replace the scorekeeping aspect. I don't think a Github CV is a good analogy to how this could work, because academic science is interested in hiring leaders (i.e. people who can get funded), not contributors. I think realistically you would need to change how science rewards/emphasizes certain activities first, and then publishing would follow. That would be a good outcome for science, but I think it'll be awfully hard to get out of this equilibrium. edit: I'm curious what you think of the PubPeer model. That's obviously different from what you're envisioning, but thematically I think there are some similarities.

jessriedel 11y ago
> I think you'd need a very radical overhaul of how science works to replace the scorekeeping aspect. I don't think a Github CV is a good analogy to how this could work, because academic science is interested in hiring leaders (i.e. people who can get funded), not contributors. I think realistically you would need to change how science rewards/emphasizes certain activities first, and then publishing would follow. I have a lot of criticisms of academic incentives, and I agree there is something of a chicken-or-the-egg problem, but at least in my field there are plenty of people who don't command big grants but have large citations. The problem comes more because people are hired based on metrics that are unusually bad at tracking what we want. > I'm curious what you think of the PubPeer model. It could be useful. Only seems to differ strongly from blogs in its centrality, but (surprisingly) I'm not sure this is actually a big issue. My immediate concern with PubPeer is that it expands and diffuses the literature rather than distilling it to excellent concise articles.

jessriedel 11y ago

> I think you'd need a very radical overhaul of how science works to replace the scorekeeping aspect. I don't think a Github CV is a good analogy to how this could work, because academic science is interested in hiring leaders (i.e. people who can get funded), not contributors. I think realistically you would need to change how science rewards/emphasizes certain activities first, and then publishing would follow. I have a lot of criticisms of academic incentives, and I agree there is something of a chicken-or-the-egg problem, but at least in my field there are plenty of people who don't command big grants but have large citations. The problem comes more because people are hired based on metrics that are unusually bad at tracking what we want. > I'm curious what you think of the PubPeer model. It could be useful. Only seems to differ strongly from blogs in its centrality, but (surprisingly) I'm not sure this is actually a big issue. My immediate concern with PubPeer is that it expands and diffuses the literature rather than distilling it to excellent concise articles.