subreddit
stringclasses 11
values | text
stringlengths 246
28.5k
|
|---|---|
technology
|
In the articles and comments over the replication problem, I have not seen a consensus saying "normal, nothing to see here". If someone can make a fact driven argument that there is no replication problem (over statistical expectations), I will be exuberant and on board.
I find it hard to reconcile that position with the amount of effort that has gone into the subject. One would think researchers wouldn't waste their time over statistically obvious explanations.
As for reviewers being anonymous? Yes... I can imagine the alternative. Most other professional fields have regulatory forces without a layer of anonymity.
|
technology
|
As far as I know (work in a medical library), all articles using NIH funding are required to be made publicly available through PubMed Central. Other government agencies use PubMed Central for making biomedical publications available as well. Of course, there are plenty of hoops for publishers to jump through to get the articles into PMC, so I can’t speak to how effective this policy is. I can say there is a lot in there, though, including articles here and there from the heavy hitters like JAMA.
|
technology
|
Authors (or their institutions) already pay to publish papers. Typically there's an extra charge for making a paper open-access (which offsets the loss of pay-per-view). It seems reasonable to me that the cost of publishing research should be part of the research budget, just like the cost of test tubes and lab coats.
My objection is that science publishing is hugely profitable, typically with higher profit margins than tech companies that actually innovate. The high prices they demand make science publishing inefficient by definition. I think this is a very good reason for governments or philanthropic foundations to step in and provide this service at cost as a public utility.
|
technology
|
> research is worthless if the public can't access it
That's an unsupportable claim. Lots of research is performed by private organizations, e.g. drug companies, and the public can't access it. If it's worthless, why are drug companies paying for it?
Now, you could argue that research would be more valuable if the public could access it. But that added value should be balanced against the added costs to researchers.
Or you could argue that the public has a right to see the results of public research, even if there were minimal added value, because they paid for it. I'm sympathetic to the argument, but the fact is that the public generally *does* have access to public research. Just email the authors, they generally can and will send you a PDF of whatever paper you ask for.
True, that's not as convenient as an anonymous download. But I'm not so sympathetic to the argument that the public has a right to convenience - most government documents are freely available but not conveniently available. Particularly when public convenience infringes on scientific effectiveness.
|
technology
|
>Lots of research is performed by private organizations, e.g. drug companies., and the public can't access it.
Yes it is. A patent is a government granted (temporary) monopoly in exchange for the research. We pay extraordinary amounts of money for brand name drugs before the patent expires in order to pay for that research. When the patent expires, anyone can make a generic. Not to mention the drug trial data submitted to the FDA is public.
The author is not required to present me with a copy of their paper even if I ask nicely. The government is required to hand me a copy of public record even if I'm rude. I can then make a million copies of that document and hand them out to everyone I know. It would be a crime (violation of Copyright) to distribute copies of the author given PDF.
I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what the effects of mandatory Open Access will be in the EU. Perhaps it will lead to a research apocalypse across the Atlantic.
|
technology
|
> circle of gatekeeping
At least some of the money does indeed go to those gatekeepers, who act as a prestige/impact sorting mechanism for research. A lot of academic hiring and status is based on what journals you are publishing in, and the editorial staff of those journals must be qualified to judge the merits of the work generally, even if they can use peer review to get to the validity of the technical details.
If you don't want your research to go into an established journal with a large readership and high reputation that they work to uphold, you can always just publish your work on your blog.
|
technology
|
The peer-reviewers aren't paid. Nor do the editors receive much more than a small honoraria (if anything, as it is a CV builder to be an editor and they maintain their institutional appointments while they serve - some may decline the honoraria because of their institutional requirements). The journals might have a small number of science-trained administrators on staff but not more than 4-5. Open access journals have also begun to stop physical printing, so the only costs are content hosting and layout. So basically, the money goes to the pockets of the publishers. Probably something like 85% of it.
|
technology
|
They can collect tons of data with all those articles as well. Aiming ads for thousand dollar drugs at doctors and researchers based on their search criteria alone would be well worth it.
With all articles on 1 site, you can get really good scientific research done as well. Pubmed searches are crap in comparison to the accuracy you get on google. Meta-data would be much easier to search and analyses.
|
technology
|
Having the researchers pay to publish isn't as terrible an idea as it appears. If there is no cost (or if there is compensation) scientists will take the heavy incentive to publish and start throwing all sorts of sub par research at the wall to see what sticks. You will also see increased amounts of salami slicing of single experiments into several papers (often researchers are evaluated on quantity of research published and not the quality). Having a cost to publish incentivizes the researcher to create fewer high quality papers so they have more money to devote to research. Adding a small fee (when compared to the total cost of research) is likely saving more money in the system than it costs.
|
technology
|
It's practically impossible to do 'real' peer review because you must take the authors at their word that they indeed did what they said, performed the analyses correctly, listed 100% of the relevant things needed to reproduce etc. It's very hard to compensate for fraud, incompetence, and unknown unknowns by just reading a manuscript.
Without actually redoing the entire experiment independently a reviewer can't really know if something is wrong. All you can do is see whether everything makes sense on paper, in comparison to previous experiments and in principle. If a scientist submits a paper that could be true, and they say it is true, how can you prove them wrong without doing your own experiments?
Replication crises have less to do with the quality of review than the quality of the research in terms of understanding what is required to replicate and sharing that information. Journals can insist on some best practices that must be followed, but they're always going to be followers of the scientific community rather than trendsetters.
|
technology
|
>A Journalism undergrad major cannot vet these papers: You need Scientists to conduct the editorial process, as well as control the review process: Otherwise the science deosn't get thoroughly vetted.
Maybe it's different in other fields, and Nature and Science are a different beast altogether, but peer reviewers in Agriculture aren't paid. And the editors are barely paid.
Journalism majors don't touch these papers.
So at least for my field, the only people who make money are the publishers.
|
technology
|
> As for reviewers being anonymous? Yes... I can imagine the alternative. Most other professional fields have regulatory forces without a layer of anonymity.
Are you kidding? I recently got a paper authored by many senior, well-renowned scientists, all of whom have tremendous power to influence my career trajectory. I rejected the article, and said in no uncertain terms why I felt it was unworthy of publication. You can see how important the anonymity is here, right?
|
technology
|
> OK, if the peer review process is so great, then why is there a replication crisis?
You're going to have to explain to me why my point that other experts in the field are better able to provide scientifically rigorous review than laypersons led to any discussion of the replication crisis. Are there problems with the peer review process? Sure. Is there a replication crisis? Maybe, although I'm unsure if 'crisis' is the appropriate word. But regardless, what's your point? You think reviews should be done by... who, if not other experts in the field?
|
technology
|
> who is actually making the money?
Publishers... but that alone is a bit of a red-herring. The problem here isn't that someone is profiting for providing a service. It's that those profits are derived entirely from depriving the public access to scientific research that their taxes funded.
You *should* be able to go find a scientist and offer to pay their salary + equipment + facilities + benefits, etc. as long as you then get to exclusively monetize/sell that research however you want (even if it's a $15 PDF on the website, or a $10k/year subscription service to a library, etc). That's fine. That's just how regular employment works in every industry. You **SHOULD NOT** be allowed to just be a parasite on publicly-funded research where you use copyright to squirrel-away knowledge everyone has already paid for behind a paywall.
|
technology
|
I'm not sure if you just skimmed my comments, or are purposely ignoring parts of them. I think I specifically mentioned I thought "crisis" might be too hard, although it isn't like *I* coined it.
Peer review should be done by *peers*. Just like most other regulator bodies are made up of current and past professionals (bar association being the easy example, if not a perfect comparison). I was questioning the anonymous and hidden aspects of peer review. Again, without transparency, the public is just told to "trust us", by a for profit corporation no less. All my suspicion would go away if this article never happened because all journals were NPOs or ran by universities.
The arguments for maintaining the status quo are all based on some very "free market forces" theories. "a journal has to be rigorous, otherwise it's readership and impact rating will go down, leading to less submissions"
Do I really have to get into how laughably simplistic that theory is? Even if there are no other variables at play, free markets have corrections. Many times those corrections are pretty catastrophic.
|
technology
|
>probably not as bad as it sounds
If a study can't be replicated, it might just be complete horse shit and with the proper agenda, you'll find peers that give it a nice little "review". Good studies are hard enough to find with unclear financial incentives on multiple layers involved and ideology driving way too many of them, just believing them because someone put together a PDF, does that sound smart?
|
technology
|
I think it's pretty self-evident that some very valuable research is not available to the public. Stealth aircraft design. Cryptographic methods. Nuclear submarine optimization. And so on.
As for surly researchers who won't send you a PDF: I suppose they might exist, but like a lot of things that angers the public it's more of a theoretical problem than an actual one. It's very rare for a researcher to get a PDF request from the public in the first place, and I suspect the vast majority of people who demand open access have never actually asked anyone for a PDF. But if you want to write a law that requires researchers to email pdfs to anyone who asks for one, I wouldn't object. It's certainly easier on them than the proposed solution.
And I don't think open access would lead to scientific "apocalypse", but it would be yet another strain on already thin research budgets, and yet another factor in ceding future scientific leadership to China.
|
technology
|
Ok, so basically you don't trust that the peer review process is actually occurring. As someone who does tons of peer reviewing, and who has submitted to dozens of different journals and received informed (usually) and constructive (usually) criticism every single time, let me assure you that no one in academia is concerned that some guy in a publisher's office is pretending to be several different experts in the field, just for the purpose of nefariously rejecting their manuscript.
|
technology
|
Where are you getting this $? We put publication costs in our grants, but need to cover the actual research, so the funds don’t cover a bit of it. We hope the department has mercy and finds money.
One issue at the moment is that open access means other scientists can easily access and cite your work. Publishing in a journal without paying these fees means your work is far less likely to be seen.
|
technology
|
One thing many people don’t realize is that part of this “replication crisis” is because not all scientific instruments are created equal. We work in different parts of the world, different environments and use different tools. I read a paper that says “we made this material using conditions x, y and z, then I go down to the lab and I make it using conditions a, b, and c, completely different from what they published. Does that mean they lied about their conditions? Or the reviewers were passing sloppy science? No it just means my thermocouple reads differently than theirs.
Similarly there are things that make experiments work that you may not even be aware of. Labs tend to develop their own set of protocols that might not make it into the details of the paper, like how they clean glassware. When you’re doing highly sensitive science, these things matter, but people don’t include them in papers.
At the end of the day, do you think Intel cares if their results are exactly repeatable in academic labs or vice versa? No because it doesn’t matter. If they can build fast microprocessors using their own equipment based on their own understanding than why would it matter? It’s not as if the science is false.
This isn’t to say I don’t think there are problems with the publication culture. But the replication crisis is something people tend to use to suggest that scientists’ work is false, when really I think many people not in the field don’t quite understand how research is carried out.
|
technology
|
Scientific Journals are one of the most profitable businesses out there. That’s why you constantly see people starting new journals and spamming scientists to ask them to publish with them. I’m talking about daily emails with new journals. It’s insane.
When I worked on a journal, there was:
-Editor in chief, a scientist. Sometimes paid an honorarium, but not a salary. Primarily responsible for choosing appropriate scientists to review the papers for free.
-Managing editor: organized incoming manuscripts and mailed them to reviewers, then back to authors, etc - basically a position that became obsolete pretty quickly because internet.
-Journal publishing company representatives: 1-2 people who process articles from your journal as well as several others. Basically convert the document into a prettier PDF and send out for publishing. Also host the website for the journal.
-Associate editors - either help finding reviewers or review papers for free.
Money:
- Research funded by grant
- Institution pays journals for access (if an author publishes in a journal their institution doesn’t have access to, they theoretically couldn’t access their own article without paying. But there are some ways around this).
- Reviews done for free by scientists
- People also can subscribe to the journal for paper versions.
So the money just goes to a publisher like LWW.
EDIT: looked it up. Profit margins of Elsevier are 36% - higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon the same year (2010).
|
technology
|
Yeah, the first comment about internet peer review is just silly and I'm going to assume a /s there.
Not every university is a big name university. Some researchers from smaller universities will do amazing work and will gain recognition for their work being in Nature or Science. Then, they'll be able to move to a big name university.
But yeah, every university name is the same /s. New studies published from Trump University! Steaks are best eaten when burnt to a crisp with ketchup!
|
technology
|
> you do it for ladder climbing
Peer reviews are generally anonymous. Being an editor of a journal might bring some prestige with it, but there's only one of those for hundreds to thousands of (anonymous) peer-reviewers that donate their time during that editor's tenure.
Either way, NONE of this requires a for-profit entity at the helm whose only purpose (today) is to gobble up the copyright and re-sell all of that tax-funded + volunteer work for profit.
|
technology
|
This is how it already works -- you can submit to open access journals or pay for open access in every major journal. Academics who won't pay $3-5k for the option are either (1) cheap, (2) poorly funded, or (3) trying to squeeze more papers than appropriate out of a grant. Every major grant I've worked on already involves publishing costs for several papers.
Paying per paper is actually an excellent model because it will cut down on people trying to publish crap to boost their CV.
|
technology
|
> I was under the impression this is where part of the money went
Yeah, and you also don't want to pay peer-reviewers for exactly the same reasons you don't want to pay professional jurors. It would set up a very perverse system of incentives for all sorts of shenanigans.
> proper peer review is extremely important
Correct... It's basically sort of like seeding in bit torrent... for every paper I publish I also review a few out of civic duty (because as you mention, monetary/publisher issues aside, peer review is the only way we can keep doing good science as a species).
|
technology
|
Don't twist my comments into an extreme position. I was only saying that I would *start* at the peer review and publication layer when trying to figure out how to improve rigor. Assuming an acknowledgment of a replication problem, everything deeper than peer review leads to much more uncomfortable and abstract possibilities. Since scientists seem to take the issue seriously, I'm not going to deny there is an issue just because it makes me a little uncomfortable. I *will* look to possible procedural solutions before assuming it is the fault of the research scientists themselves, and they do not deserve to be on the pedestal I put them on.
You said yourself, most of your peer critique has been reasonable and fair. Would you *really* get all petty to a colleague if you knew it was them that did the review? Would it be so horrible if you *knew* reviewers had a transparent process, able to be evaluated by everyone? Maybe I'm naive, but I refuse to believe people with that many letters after their names can't do fair and objective critique without anonymity. Remember, not all journals *are* anonymous with the review process.
|
technology
|
Honestly I would be ok with paying for articles if I thought I was helping fund further research, or reimbursing costs of the scientists.
I'd also endorse free distribution, if it's truly free, e.g. operated by an ad-free nonprofit organization similar to wikimedia. What I think we want to avoid is a free, albeit ad-funded, or for-profit platform, as that would make the publication highly suspect to bias from the interests of the advertisers.
|
technology
|
Private equity firms own these scientific publishing companies. Companies like Elsevier in 2010 had higher profit margins (36%) than companies like Apple, Google, or Amazon.
Money currently comes from scientists (paying to be published), scientists (paying to access), and libraries (paying for access for their scientists). Generally, the money authors use to pay for publishing comes from grants funded by taxes. Paying for open access is important for the papers to get read and cited by scientists without access.
PubMed, which is funded by the government, could simply host PDFs of articles. Including publication costs, it would be cheaper than what the government pays right now in publishing costs through grants.
|
technology
|
> i'm not into the rat-race of esteem and fame
cool cool cool... but if you are on an academic track you WILL just be passed over for someone who is into that rat-race. So good luck with that.
I was fortunate enough to end up in a field where there is huge industry demand. I could leave all of that academic fuckery behind well over a decade ago and just pack up that big brain to go work for any of the dozens of companies routinely offering to send Brinks trucks full of cash to my house. I publish very few things now, and since I don't give two shits about impact factor, almost nothing in for-profit journals / conferences. Very few people in academia on the publish-or-perish treadmill have the kind of luxury to take that kind of principled stand w.r.t. publishers without seriously risking their careers.
|
technology
|
[Elsevier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier) et al
​
\> Elsevier's high profit margins (37% in 2017)[\[1\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#cite_note-RELX_2017_Report-1)[\[6\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#cite_note-relx-group-results-press-release-2017-6) and its [copyright practices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_policies_of_academic_publishers) have subjected it to criticism by researchers.
​
\> In 2013, the five editorial groups Elsevier, [Springer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Nature), [Wiley-Blackwell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiley-Blackwell), [Taylor & Francis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_%26_Francis) and [SAGE Publications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAGE_Publications) published more than half of all academic papers in the peer-reviewed literature.[\[16\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#cite_note-16)[\[17\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#cite_note-17) At that time, Elsevier accounted for 16% of the world market in science, technology, and medical publishing.
​
\> In 2017, Elsevier accounted for 33% of the revenues of RELX group (₤2.478 billion of ₤7.355 billion). In [operating profits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earnings_before_interest_and_taxes), it represented 40% (₤913 million of ₤2,284 million). Adjusted operating profits (with constant currency) rose by 3% from 2016 to 2017.
|
technology
|
Keep in mind that some of that “other” research is commercial (eg whether a supplement or product works or not so it can be sold). Or the basic science is funded by the NIH, but as soon as there is a potential commercial application, for-profit companies will come in and do research to bring it to market. So much of that research is pretty specific and isn’t really of interest to the broader community.
|
technology
|
It is either a legitimate problem, put forth by legitimate studies, or you are calling it "junk science". It isn't some political hit by pop-media. If you have a comprehensive source that dismisses it as easily as you just did, please share. I would *love* to go back to unreserved trust in published work.
I see lots of dismissals, but none of them backed up by more than boisterous confidence that either there is no problem, or it is tiny and can obviously be explained away by things the researchers were too dumb to take into account.
|
technology
|
> I will look to possible procedural solutions before assuming it is the fault of the research scientists themselves, and they do not deserve to be on the pedestal I put them on.
They (we) don't deserve any pedestal.
> Maybe I'm naive, but I refuse to believe people with that many letters after their names can't do fair and objective critique without anonymity.
You are naive. I won't ever submit my manuscripts to journals that don't do anonymous reviews, nor will I review for them. Honesty is paramount.
> to believe people with that many letters after their names
If you think letters after a name means that person is any better, more mature, more ethical, or more honest, I have some bad news for you.
|
technology
|
[https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing](https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing)
Just the first thing that came up in a google search. My understanding is that many journals have gone to an either-or model today (i.e. you pay a lot upfront for some level of open-access -or- pay substantially less to nothing for closed-access). But it used to be extremely common to pay on both ends for almost ever single journal in physics. Per page + per figure + per submission AND then also have the resulting published product also be closed-access.
|
technology
|
That argument can be used for the opposite conclusion, though. In the real, non-hypothetical world, there are tons of journals accepting mediocre articles because of the publishing fees. In fact, there's a whole category of shitty journals that pretty much just solicit articles to extract these fees.
The issue of bad articles being published isn't a big deal in the scheme of things - people just don't read them.
Scientists should be paid, just like other content creators. Right now everything is wrong - accessibility to the public is drastically lower compared to other forms of media and the content creators also pay. Academic institutions give these journals incredible amounts of money for access.
It's just a racket. The journals are being run for profit and they can do so because of historical factors, not because we actually have an optimized and rational system
|
technology
|
The problem is not the fee. The fee is often quite reasonable and may well be higher to cover costs. The paywall is the problem because this limits access to the people actually funding the research in the first place, the taxpayers. It creates boundaries for less funded institutes to conduct research and educate students. It is just a parasitical chain in the acquisition of knowledge. Also the fact that there is a copyright on the content of the article, owned by a commercial entity. Scientific journals are a cancer of science.
What should be done is have some renown institutes come together and stop publishing in these for profit journals all together. Take a top-down approach because individual scientist cannot avoid these journals without jeopardising their careers. If MIT, Max Planck, Harvard and the likes stop using them the value of these journals will drop quickly. This can only happen with a large group of institutes because single entities will result in a massive drop in the rankings for the respected institutes.
|
technology
|
Instead of having a big company host this and potentially use some sort of lock in techniques at some point what if we moved to a github style journal. You could have a hierarchy of fields to tag each paper with making it easy to find papers in your area of study. And using some sort of anonymous star system coupled with linking on social media would naturally bring the better papers to the top.
It would be free to view and if you want to publish papers you can pay like a $5/yr fee or something to help cover the costs of a server. If everyone used LaTeX...
(which I know some people are against but I think it’s difficulty is over-exaggerated and if we just learned it in a freshman class everyone would be able to use it.)
Then we could have the rendered pdf for online viewing or download and host the source files along with it. Then using git, in a similar way as github, people could make suggestions for fixes or clarification which would open up a thread where it could be discussed further or open up an issue to talk about a potential fault in logic or whatever. These request would of course notify all the authors of the original paper simplifying communication between them and their peers all while having the discussion up for everyone to view so you don’t have multiple people emailing them about the same thing and more people can join in the forum.
This would also bring in a way to track changes overtime marked with git diff making it easy to see what’s changed since you referenced the work and for those learning, to see the process going behind peer review.
And of course there could be some cool features like following your colleagues to see when they’ve submitted papers, easy citation generators that could be pulled into a .bib file or even a way to mark sets of papers then download .bib with citations for all of them, and since everything would be hosted on this site it would be easy to view references with a click. Plus maybe some system to determine whether a work is trusted or still pending approval (maybe a certain number of high ranking members in the field approve it or something).
|
technology
|
>I think it's pretty self-evident that some very valuable research is not available to the public. Stealth aircraft design. Cryptographic methods. Nuclear submarine optimization. And so on.
Let's take cryptographic research. RSA was invented by some British Mathematicians and supressed by the British government. This was an enormous mistake. When American mathematicians devised the same thing and patented it, RSA became a billion dollar company and allowed for the rise of online banking and shopping. Meanwhile, military communications are still secure. The beauty of cryptography is that even though you may know the method of encryption, without the key you have nothing.
So the British delayed the public benefit of online banking, shopping, etc. They deprived the British taxpayer of the possibility of the corporate tax income of a billion dollar company. And British National Defense gained absolutely nothing that they wouldn't have gotten if the research was public. British funding of said research was therefore worthless. The British taxpayer would have been better off not paying for it in the first place and just waiting for the Americans to publish it.
|
technology
|
Then please clarify. I found your last phrase silly. I was under the impression researchers would be *less* likely to allow emotion or preference in making judgements.
Plenty of people manage to navigate the problems of executing authority, and accepting authority, even within flexible hierarchies.
I have both governmental and private experts evaluating and critiquing my work. While it isn't always perfect, there is no disaster of pettiness in my field. People move back and between from government and private. Nobody has to have anonymity to be able to say "can you do that differently?". We are all grown ups and professionals.
If we can do it, why can't a group who's profession *requires* objectivity?
|
technology
|
>The issue of bad articles being published isn't a big deal in the scheme of things - people just don't read them.
Published work can have far reaching effects and retraction is not always effective when bad research is published and starts having negative impacts on society. People still think vaccines cause autism.
Researchers are compensated for their work. Published work gets researchers positions in universities and research organizations. It allows them to acquire larger grants. Any revenue driven by the distribution of research (even in the current system) is dwarfed by the cost of those systems
|
technology
|
> "you did not do your job correctly. You failed here, here, and here. Your job is not approved. You are required to bring to my subjective approval, regardless of resources or time already invested."
Oh I see. This might be something said about your work, without anonymity? You're right, that is closer to the review process. So, how soon until you get a chance to judge HIS work (or hers) and tell HIM he has failed?
|
technology
|
A lot of these journals are international and so are the papers published in them. A great example is the recent gravitational waves paper from LIGO that won the Nobel for Physics this year. It had hundreds of collaborators form many countries. Which nations publication would it go to if they were nationalized? What if they have competing standards and methods. (Bonus shoutout to LIGO, they published in a lower impact journal than they could have because it had published their smaller papers throughout the years while the higher impact journals denied them)
|
technology
|
>OK, if the peer review process is so great, then why is there a replication crisis?
Because peer review =/= replication. When you peer review a paper, your job is to make sure that the reported methodology makes sense and the conclusions they give make sense given the result, and that there are no alternative (sensible) explanations that would fit the results, and that the results are actually novel.
Replication is done in replication studies after a paper is published. The reason the replication crisis exists is that there isn't a strong incentive for scientists to do replication studies. After all, you only get a novel result if your replication study refutes the original study. If you confirm the results of the study, then you don't have anything worth publishing.
|
technology
|
If or when I moved laterally in my career. Also having the possibility of them moving back to private work and being hired by me. That was just one example of several different situations where someone in my field could excersize discretion over my work. If you are looking for an exact situational match, sorry... It is an analogy not a perfect comparison. The point was that I have lots of different people, with power, critiquing my work 50-100 times a year.
Sometimes I agree with their criticism, sometimes I don't, rarely do I think it capricious. I have enough faith in my professionalism, and their professionalism, that I still respect and sometimes even like them. They would be *more* likely to get hired by me if they moved to private work because of their experience. Someone who critiques work, especially strictly, is more likely to know the rules, and be conscientious in their own work.
|
technology
|
>This economic model may have made *some* sense when the method of distribution involved printing/binding actual physical copies of that paper and then coordinating shipping them to libraries around the planet (who of course still paid for that subscription).
Honestly hadn't thought of this before. It *does* make a lot of sense when you consider "publishing" in the traditional sense of churning out tens if not hundreds of thousands of copies and ensuring distribution. In the same vein as book sales. So an interesting question is; if we sell e-books at a slightly discounted rate (instead of for literal pennies as all printing / shipping / stocking fees are null) it would drive the demand for real paper books almost completely out. Sure, there will be hipsters like me who prefer a physical book to read, but we will likely have to pay a premium for what will be seen as an outdated technology.
Do you think removing the same barriers of entry to digital scientific publications will kill the desire to be subscribed to actual paper-printed scientific publications? Would it be a bad thing if it did for anyone but printing companies?
|
technology
|
> If or when I moved laterally in my career. Also having the possibility of them moving back to private work and being hired by me.
Right, so it's not like today they reject your work, next week you'll review theirs, and the week after they'll review yours again. Do you see the issue? Even in a make-believe world where everyone was actually acting completely objectively, you can't understand why it would *feel* like the person who just rejected your work was maybe just a liiiittle biased by the fact that last week you wrote "the statistical methods and design in this experiment are completely inappropriate"? And by the way, the person you said that about? She sits on the study section which will decide whether the new grant you've proposed, worth millions of dollars and guaranteeing you gainful employment for the next 5 years, will be funded. Better hope she's a saint, or has some sort of humiliation fetish.
I'm sorry, but if you can't immediately see why small group of people who routinely need to provide objective criticisms of one another's work, in the context of unbalanced power dynamics, need anonymity to remain functional, then ok. I guess we'll just disagree, and I'll be happy you're not a scientist.
|
technology
|
Its the only way to judge, across disciplines, whether the science a given professor is doing is any good. If they’re publishing a lot in a lot of good journals, it is a sign that the scientific community respects and appreciates their work. If not, it may mean they’re putting out crap no one cares about that has little real world value or implication. In theory, anyway.
But that was back when everything was paper-based and these things were literally mailed. Some aspects of this could be maintained (peer review and publishing) without the BS (having a publisher and not paying for reviews)
|
technology
|
Setting aside your last barb, I think perhaps you are too pessimistic about your colleagues.
You will never prevent all acts of pettiness or bias. However, having accepted standards of work, and transparent processes of arbitration on the subjective parts, does not devolve into back biting pettiness the majority of the time.
Maybe that lady does sit on the grant board. Maybe she does capriciously deny you (nobody else cares?). That situation is called "life". All the rest of the world has to deal with it. You seem to be under the impression the scientific fields are the only place with fluid hierarchies. They aren't.
|
technology
|
... or anyone. Like I said, some rando russians are currently pulling this off under the table without any legit source of funding.
Computer resources and bandwidth are so cheap relative to the volume of information we are talking about, that if the copyright issue went away entirely, I (as an individual) could conceivably pay for hosting the few dozen terabytes of PDF's that comprise of all published scientific work in the past century myself. Multiple organizations would undoubtedly step up to host this stuff the same way linux distros work and wikipedia freely hosts content. The point is that no single publisher would have the right to exclusively distribute/paywall this research, so any combination of entities (or maybe even multiple parallel efforts) could provide this information to whoever was looking for it. Hell, google could just directly hotlink these from multiple sources on scholar results.
|
technology
|
> However, in the general case, we fund public research for public benefit and that research is most valuable when it's public. Keeping public research under wraps
Sure, but "available to the public" does not mean "available for free". And not available for free does not mean "under wraps".
For instance, the New York Times is available to the public and is meant to be consumed by the public, but it costs money to read. Would society be better off if the New York Times were forced to publish its work for free? Maybe, but not necessarily.
The relevant question is "Who can't access X due to financial constraints, and how would society benefit if access to X were broader?" And I suspect that nearly all of the people who could provide a benefit to society with access to public research are people who already have access to it or could trivially obtain access.
|
technology
|
Sure... but for people in academic fields it doesn't really *count* for their career unless it's published in an established journal with sufficient impact factor (i.e. some of this is legacy BS, but some of it stems from the fact that everyone knows the peer review and selection criteria are much tougher for more prestigious and established journals). So if your paper is selected for publishing in Nature and your work makes it past the Nature peer review process, then everyone immediately knows that the thing you did was new/interesting/impactful, etc., and that alone is worth far more for your career than uploading a non-reviewed PDF to your website that nobody might ever really read.
|
technology
|
Paying peer reviewers wouldn’t change anything unless the payment was made based on their recommendation to accept/reject. Ultimately, PhDs spend years making close to nothing to build up their expertise. In any other field, asking someone’s professional opinion is compensated (regardless of outcome). If anything, payment would improve review quality - because reviewers are more invested - and other factors in the process (many people refuse to review, or agree but don’t finish it, so they have to find someone else, etc, etc)
|
technology
|
> You seem to be under the impression the scientific fields are the only place with fluid hierarchies.
Again, comments like these reflect that you have no basic understanding of the context we're discussing. It's not a heirarchy, but you seem hellbent on not understanding that.
> I think perhaps you are too pessimistic about your colleagues.
Then all my colleagues are too pessimistic about themselves, because the anonymous peer review process might as well be sacred to most scientists.
You've said things like "back-biting" and "petty" several times, implying I've suggested something of the sort. You're completely misrepresenting what I've said, and I don't have the patience to argue with someone doing that. I'm sorry you don't understand how science works, but you'll have to find someone with more patience than me to spell it out for you. I highly recommend that if and when you can find such a person, you listen instead of putting words into their mouth. Have a nice day.
|
technology
|
Well, arguably not. The scientists are the ones who put hundreds of hours creating and submitting grants until one is funded, years running the study, and the time it takes to write the paper. The vetting is done by other scientists for free.
The publisher’s role is strictly running the approved paper through a program to put it in the right final layout, then hosting it online with pay walls. They work on several journals at a time and collect the funds.
So if hosting a website is considered the means of production, sure; but again, the profit margins alone suggest that their business model is anything but ordinary
|
technology
|
>For instance, the New York Times is available to the public and is meant to be consumed by the public, but it costs money to read.
It sure does. You know what doesn't cost money to read/listen to/watch? PBS and NPR. Difference is that PBS and NPR receive public money (via the CPB) while the NYT doesn't.
PBS and NPR exist to provide the public an accessible source of news. NYT exists to provide value to shareholders. The fact that there exists a public benefit is a pleasant side effect.
|
technology
|
Don’t assume that’s what it is about. Being a professor is like running a business - you need to get your name out there as a reputable, trustworthy manufacturer who puts out a solid product. That’s why they have to get out the first-author pubs.
There are definitely egos in science. But I also know plenty of people out there who are just passionate about their work and want the world to see it. They’re working away, night and day, to get the results out because they know they’ll have an impact on the world. You can’t reduce an entire profession down to ego.
|
technology
|
> Paying peer reviewers wouldn’t change anything unless the payment was made based on their recommendation to accept/reject.
Not necessarily. Again, these are the same arguments made for/against various levels of jury compensation. Regardless of whether or not anyone is paying for a particular verdict, you never want your "jury of peers" to turn into a "jury of paid professionals roving around looking for more trials to pay their bills"
So right now, if you accept a review, it's purely out of civic responsibility to the scientific community, individual availability, and because you + the editor (or whoever recommended you) believes that you credibly do have the expertise to provide informed input on that particular topic/paper. So even as a poor grad student, I often passed on review requests for papers that were a little too outside of my specific area of expertise. Or I accepted papers that were obviously plagiarized and then recommended rejection outright after 3 minutes of "work". Regardless of outcome, both of those extremes are entirely predicated on the premise that there was no money changing hands between myself and publisher for services rendered (i.e. if reviewing one more paper meant my girlfriend and I could have steak tonight instead of mac&cheese I might just "review" that paper on a topic I wasn't really qualified to review. I might also be compelled to write up corrections + detailed moderate comments on the obviously plagiarized POS paper because the publisher paid me and now expected an hours worth of work out of me instead of immediately bashing that "do not recommend for publication" button, etc. etc.)
Money ALWAYS sets up perverse incentives.
|
technology
|
I’d also argue that if the costs don’t come from one place, they come from another, and they still end up being covered by tax payers.
Example: every grant has “indirects” - basically a percentage of the grant that goes to the host institution for overhead. Indirects are often about 50%, so a grant with 100k of science ends up being 150. But that’s another story.
So if authors don’t pay through the grant, the institution will take up the slack. That money will likely come from indirects.
So again - it comes back to the taxpayer each time.
|
technology
|
I don't think it follows that receiving public funding is incompatible with charging an audience. For instance, public universities receive public funds, but they also charge tuition to their students.
Furthermore, while you don't pay money to listen to NPR programs on your local radio station, your local public radio station *has to pay NPR* for the right to broadcast NPR programs. Likewise, if you want to access NPR content, under some circumstances you will be charged or outright denied.
NPR relies on that licensing revenue. If NPR programs were forced to be in the public domain, then NPR as we know it would cease to exist.
Same is true of PBS. Taxpayers funded the creation of Sesame Street, but try to sell Big Bird merchandise and you will likely be sued.
In fact, as broadcast dies off many people find that they can only access PBS via cable or internet. How is paying for a Verizon subscription for access to Sesame Street any different from paying for a journal subscription for access to research?
|
technology
|
Well, not really; they are basically fulfilling a contract to the government to do work. You wouldn’t call up a construction worker to complain about bridges, right?
And they explain how the money is spent right upfront in the grant application. Those grant applications are rigorously scrutinized, right down to the budget. If the budget seems at all fishy, it won’t get funded.
Many scientists are really stretching the dollars - employing “20 hour per week” graduate assistants who are in the lab 50-80 hours a week, buying supplies themselves, building equipment when they can. Unpaid internships, the whole thing.
|
technology
|
Also research already costs a shit ton of money. Spending tax money on a public journal means taking money from research. There is also no reason for a public journal to be committed to quality science since they get paid either way. But the number of subscriptions a commercial journal gets is primarily based on how good they are.
If this was a simple, obvious fix it would have been done by now. Most professors and postdocs I know, while cognizant that it the are some problems with the system are still supportive of it overall.
|
technology
|
'Where's all this money going?'
Second commenter from parent poses this question. Hmm, good question! After miles of scrolling and reading through reams of back and forth: I am certainly aware of where it ISN'T going:
* Reviewers? Not usually or a pittance.
* Editors? Not really, a pittance.
* Presentation, hosting, formatting and delivery? Pennies.
* The process as a whole? Hmmm, Pennies to the dollar.
More scrolling and reading when FINALLY!
'The people who make out are the venture capitalist who regularly buy and sell these publishing companies.'
Now we're on to something!
|
technology
|
And that local public radio station receives money from the local taxpayer, the State taxpayer, the Federal government (CPB), and donations.
As for public Universities charging tuition to students, yeah we've got a big student loan problem in the US that doesn't exist in Europe. Maybe not your strongest counterpoint.
If you're going to be private, by all means, be private. Charge money, make a profit, do what you must. But the moment that public money gets involved, every restriction to access becomes suspect. We pay for a public service. I'm not opposed to showering money on public services, but they better be public and serve the public interest. I'm unconvinced that charging for access to publically funded research serves the public interest.
Note that it's not good enough to say that restricting access doesn't hurt that much. If you're going to take public money, I must be convinced that restricting access is in the public benefit and superior to no restrictions.
The EU S-Plan (when it rolls out in 2020ish), will settle this. I'm content to wait until 2025 to see how this plays out.
====================
I think I've said all I want to say. You may have the last word if you like.
|
technology
|
Some universities already pay for open access publications. Fees are paid for individual publications. They are not paid for publications in packages of journals like in the current subscription process. These packages bundle popular journal with unpopular ones, forcing the libraries to pay outrageous subscription fees for journals nobody cars about. Your example does not apply.
Costs incurred for publication and hosting are neglegible, that's why publisher's margins are so high. In this day and age, access to publicly funded knowledge should be free.
|
technology
|
You are discounting p-hacking, HARKing and publication bias. p-values mean nothing if scientists perform dozens of experiments until they happen to find an effect, then publish only these positive results. This undermines the whole basis of your confidence intervals. Which undermines the whole point of scientific publications in the first place. If scientists are fishing for these coincidences, the science stops reflecting the truth.
That's why peer-review is not enough to guarantee solid science. It needs pre-registration and replication. Please inform yourself about the replication crisis instead of discarding it willy nilly.
|
technology
|
The reason the replication crisis exists is because scientists have published science that cannot be replicated by others, either because they did not document their experiments well enough or because their findings are not true. If the studies to be replicated were valid, similar results should be able to be obtained by other scientists. In many replication studies, original authors help developing the experimental setups because they want their studies to replicate. Still, many of these studies fail.
|
technology
|
Open access publications in reputable journal costs money, no matter how good your study is. There is no point in disagreeing with facts.
http://www.pnas.org/page/subscriptions/open-access
> Corresponding authors from institutions with current-year site licenses will receive a discounted open access fee of $1,100, compared to our regular fee of $1,450, to make their articles immediately free online.
https://www.nature.com/openresearch/publishing-with-npg/nature-journals/
> Nature Communications $5200
> Scientific Data $1675
> Scientific Reports $1760
You also can't really disagree that open access becomes expectation, because funding agencies already start to require it:
https://www.openaire.eu/h2020openaccess/
|
technology
|
How do they address the overall lack of quality inherent in journals that don't charge their readers money so can't afford to hire competent editorial staff?
Does part of the research grant cover cost in publishing? That would be a terrible idea that would only serve to invite a landslide of utter shite research to 'fund' what will amount to a tabloid journal.
/Angrily deletes the next 50 spam emails from journals begging me for a submission while I'm not even a fucking researcher.
|
technology
|
I think that's a recurring theme throughout the transition into an all-digital economy- All of the old fees and processing charges are still there even though the cost to the business that originally warranted their use is gone. This just becomes a higher potential profit for the businesses, who probably already allocated it to something else (rejustifying the cost).
They won't budge on that until either a major competitor eliminates the fees/charges and forces the rest of them to follow suit, or a government entity forces the practice through regulation.
|
technology
|
That’s an interesting take! I can see your point there. On the whole, though, I think the benefits would outweigh the costs. It might get the best scientists to start reviewing papers that they wouldn’t otherwise because they’re so busy, for example. There are a lot of pros.
I know someone who messes with his buddy by sending him reviews to do all the time. His buddy ended up getting an award for reviewing so many papers :)
|
technology
|
The author offers papers for free to publish while putting any editing responsibilities on that author. They get all the review furnished for free from reviewers. And then charge and arm and leg to publish when they have essentially nothing invested in the content.
Early in history peer review was something that happened organically after publication. It's also understandable that serious readers want some kind of filter before they invest too much time in what my be a crackpot, or generally self serving mush. But publishers have coopted it as if their creation handed to them on a silver platter.
|
technology
|
You really seem to be trying very hard to twist and contort everything that's said in this thread in such a way that it puts scientists in the worst possible light. It's almost like rhetorical origami.
The odds of facing any sort of retribution for an open review are exceedingly low, but people tend to be irrationally afraid of it. Low odds, high danger events scare people. That's why people can be so afraid of airplane crashes and yet not bat an eye about speeding in a car. Furthermore, even if reviewers aren't concerned about any sort of retribution, people just tend to be more blunt and honest in general when they know that they are under the cover of anonymity. That is why reviews are anonymous. It's not because science is an evil field full of bullying and cronyism.
|
technology
|
Of course, I understand that. But why are we cycling public money meant for the common good through private enterprise? If fees are what keep poor quality publications from staying bloated, that can be done regardless of whether the publisher is private or public. I don't see the point of introducing private middle-men to shuffle around and skim off government research money when most of the work is volunteer-based by academic editors and reviewers that have a lot of public funding in the first place. The value-add is in the reviewers, who aren't really paid for most journals, rather than in the mechanical publishing process.
I think my fundamental point is that most of what separates journal ranking is based on the prestige and rigor of the peer review process, not anything that is related to the economics of publishing. It's fundamentally not a profit-maximizing market (and shouldn't be), which is why I'd advocate to keep it government-run (or government funded in some form of public-private partnership) and free to access for the public.
|
technology
|
I don’t quite understand what you think I’m calling junk science. I was not trying to say there is no such thing as a replication crisis, just offering up one source of error that leads to difficulty in replicating the results of others. You also should never have unreserved trust in published work, as has been mentioned elsewhere there are plenty of bad journals out there where the peer review process is much less rigorous or nonexistent.
It also has nothing to do with scientists being too dumb... like I said instruments are not created equal. Even the most careful, rigorous scientist can’t help that their thermocouple reads 500 degree Celsius while their colleagues reads 525 when measuring the same environment. There is always error in manufacturing, calibration, etc.
All I meant to say is that articles are written about a replication crisis, and the general public reads it and thinks scientists must be bullshitting their work. Then you talk to an active researcher and the problem is acknowledged but it doesn’t prevent them from progressing in their work. It can be a legitimate problem that is still somewhat overblown.
|
technology
|
If you ignore things like blatant plagiarism and bad English, at bare minimum when I review a paper I make sure that the premise makes sense from first principle (e.g. some jabroni isn't trying to just sneak a perpetual motion machine past us), that the experiment/data collection was set up correctly (e.g. was a control group/measurement warranted but not performed, etc. was the science scientific kinda stuff), and that the conclusions are actually supported by that data presented in the paper. Then I decide whether those results are important/original enough to meet the criteria for that particular journal.
Beyond that I most often only accept reviews for papers on topics in which I'm already an expert. So like anything else in life, if you spend enough time on a particular subject you start to develop rules of thumb and various intuitions on how things work in that domain, what is or isn't possible, methods for quickly cross checking things, etc... so those are very specific and hard to describe but as a simpler example, I was judging a science fair the other year where a kid did some calculations on this sliding rail setup and told me that he had a 30 Tesla magnet at the end. I didn't have to check his calculations or replicate his experiment to know he is wrong because I already know that the superconducting magnet in an MRI is only in the 1.5-3 Tesla range. As another example in this [paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.08572) the authors were reporting evidence of superconductivity at a temperature far higher than anything observed before. Someone reading that paper then noticed that the noise in two separate plots appear to be correlated when there was no reason for this to be the case, which obviously calls into question the entire result, etc.
Sadly there is almost never enough time/money to actually replicate experiments unless they truly are groundbreaking. So even a a lot of peer-reviewed, published science is still just bad.
|
technology
|
I think my comments have been fairly calm and reasonable about the issue. I haven't been banging on the research community. In fact, I've been pretty clear I'd like the peer review and publication system looked at before we assume some fundamental issue with the fields. If peer review is too lax on descriptions of methodology or process, it is reasonable to expect researchers might not be as descriptive or specific. That would be a completely innocent explanation for replication issues.
I know you are just tossing out an example, but I really don't like the connotations. Accurate measuring equipment should be expected. A noticeable variance on thermocouple readings shows a lack of attention to detail and rigor.
Coincidentally, I did some "layman science" dealing with air temperature measurement last summer. Even I knew that for my results to be relevant, measurements had to be as accurate as reasonably possible. I had over 150 temperature measurements over 90 days. I used high end thermocouples, and checked calibration daily. I even designed a hand held styrofoam air tunnel to enclose the thermocouple to shade it from the sun, or any other IR sources to make sure I was *only* measuring air temperature. Now this was just research to satisfy my own curiosity (work related). If I were doing that data collection as a professional scientist, I would have spent far more effort making sure my measurements were solid.
|
technology
|
I believe free access, especially for publicly funded research, is 100% the right thing to do, but lets be factual: there are people on the payroll. Its not a zero-cost endeavor. We have not identified an alternative funding system and believe me, our institutions are not going to pick up the tab. My Uni already tries to push every expense on to research budgets. "Oh you want paperclips? Look at you Mister-sitting-on-$50k-of-research-funds..." They'll be perfectly happy to not have to pay journals and pass the problem on to the researchers.
|
technology
|
I don’t want to insinuate that you are being unreasonable at all. I’m only trying to bring the perspective of someone who is active in the lab.
Back to your air temperature measurement: the focus of your study was temperature, whereas for someone working in synthesis for example, temperature accuracy is not as critical as temperature precision. So as long as you can count on it reading the same way on Tuesday as it did on Monday and stay that way over a long period of time, then you don’t really care if it’s absolute temperature reading is 20 degrees off. Research operations with huge budgets can of course have the best instruments for everything but that’s not how academic labs are so you have to save your money for the instruments that matter most and go cheaper on things that aren’t make or break it for the science.
|
technology
|
Yeah. But they require insane publishing fees for open access which puts a burden on authors. Some funding agencies do not cover those fees, despite asking for open access.
I may be wrong but I published with IEEE transactions on nanotechnology recently and open access was like 1200 or 1500 Canadian dollars. It came out of our research money. That money could go to actual research.
Someone needs to keep these fees in check.
|
technology
|
This is a wonderful perspective and I'm very glad that I read your comment this morning. I'm a young scientist and it's always astounded me that my mentors would review all these papers and submit one only every two years or so (I went to a small liberal arts college where publishing wasn't their primary responsibility). I just published my first paper and it cost ~$3,000! I was blown away by how expensive the whole process was (especially given that we had no institutional help ☹️) and wondered who was the ultimate benefactor of all this money.
I read a really great book as an undergraduate in a philosophy class called "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets" by Michael Sandel. It's all about how the introduction of market forces into an area of life previously untouched by capitalism degrades the intrinsic value of whatever you're doing. Examples include the naming of sports stadiums after corporate donors, paying people to stand in line for "Shakespeare in Central Park" tickets, political lobbying, and selling organs. Highly recommended if you have a free weekend or two!
|
technology
|
Yeah I have, ya dick. Each journal has a extensive style guide that has to be followed before it will be accepted including formatting, this is done by the writers. Images are sized to fit the columns with required standards, sections, references and title page are also already done all by the writers. The flow of the paper is looked at by all the authors and anyone else who volunteers to critique it before submission.
What is the publisher doing other than making the text 2/3 columns and inserting images where the text says images need to be. Where does all this extensive work come in for the publisher?
|
technology
|
They seem to think that their lofty publication will elevate your reputation and further your career as a research scientist. Open the door to new opportunities and give you the way to the future.
This is what virtue signaling has devolved into. Now that reputation is so critical in the field, the ones who do absolutely nothing substantial to improve the quality of work itself are profiting off of selling one scientist's reputation to another. It's become a commodity that is available on the open market for whoever want to seize the opportunity to trade it.
|
technology
|
So just mandate that all public grants be used only for open access journals with <5% profit margin (instead of the current 40% profit meta). Since noone is allowed to publish in extrotionate journals, they will die and the price of science doesn't rise.
The issue is two-fold, firstly, morally taxpayers should have free access to the research they funded. If that makes it more expensive, so be it, if the public don't get to access what they are paying for, why the hell should they pay in the first place? Secondly, since the journals outsource most of the real work of what they do to free labour, their service isn't worth their price, but since scientists have yet to unionize against them they remain in a position of power.
It's like rents in my home country, I wouldn't even be able to afford university (despite the government literally paying me to go) unless the renters' union kept rents from inflating. The prices in publishing are set by what the scientists can possibly afford, and not by the cost of performing the service+reasonable margin because competition on the market of scientific journals is mucked up.
|
technology
|
> morally taxpayers should have free access to the research they funded.
Taxpayers spend millions on defense research. Morally, should they have free access to it?
Scientists usually present their latest findings at scientific conferences. Should taxpayers get free admission?
Scientists often summarize their work in university courses and seminars. Must they also be free to attend?
Scientists aren't the only people who receive grants. Doctors and artists also receive them. If a doctor gets a grant, say for serving in a rural clinic, must her care be free? Does the artist need to give away her art?
|
technology
|
I think in part we have different opinions on the purpose of research grants. A popular view is that the government supports research because it wants to contribute to human knowledge for its own sake. But I don't think that's true.
The NIH supports medical research as a means to a practical end: improving health. Likewise, DoD research is not funded for its own sake, but as a means to the end of improving national defense. In that context, scientific publication is not supported for its own sake, but as a means to accelerate progress towards these goals. Thus, the only moral obligation is that research funds are spent as effectively as possible to improve our health, defense, agriculture, etc.
With those ends in mind, would the benefits of sharing defense research with the public outweigh the risks? In most cases I doubt it, even in peacetime. I'm sure we can think of anecdotes where it would have helped (RSA), but I think a general policy of open access would be net detrimental to security.
What about medical research, agricultural research, etc? Perhaps it would be beneficial, but I think the benefits would be quite minimal. I think the people who are capable of improving health already have access to the literature they need. Ultimately this proposal is not really motivated by improving health, but by satisfying the curiosity of non-experts. And even if this would lead to an improvement in health, the gains would very likely be outweighed by those foregone due to the additional burden on research budgets. If so, it is inappropriate.
Perhaps the only exception is space exploration, especially manned spaceflight. The goal here really is to stimulate the public imagination and scientific curiosity, so perhaps this field really is obligated to make its work as accessible as possible.
|
technology
|
>jury of paid professionals
Actually, they are picked for jury duty and perform at random and are reviewed for personal conflict. Also, I agree that no one needs to get paid for it. Work must be dictated similarly. It must be considered as part of their duty within their fields.
>So even as a poor grad student, I often passed on review requests for papers that were a little too outside of my specific area of expertise.
If the writer is lazy and cannot communicate effectively then reject it; They need to have good communication skills. And the "Jury pool" would consist of a "Reviewer pool" with pre-selected areas of expertise that the submitter would attribute to their paper for the review process. This should not be difficult accept making people who are use to the old ways change the way they work, but that can be changed through time. Those new need to be a part of it. Those within the field for 10 years need to sign up for "reviewer duty" and those within their field over 10 years are voluntary or required if they are to peer review papers from the previous two circumstances.
The details of how many need to approve can have waited values. It can depend upon the reviewer's time in field, the number of previous reviews, the correlation of agreement with other colleagues. Heck, the selection process could be carried out through an AI program with an agreed set of rules without bias and with transparency.
I think this would only be possible by establishing a new department, Department of Scientific Reviews; DSR maybe? It would need to be required through legislation and have a public website for all reviewed, pending reviews AND rejected journals all available for public consumption. It would also establish registration field experts for the the "review pool". The creation of DSR would also outlaw profit for tax-funded research. If a company receives money to research a cure for cancer, they have to share it then. This would prevent duplicate trials and waste of resources. The positives go on and on.
&#x200B;
|
technology
|
Once you know that you really truly desperately want to read a particular article, and just can't get it any other way, then sure. The challenge is getting to that point, and ultimately the "email the author" approach isn't sustainable as a model for academia in general.
You figure the average student diving into a new topic starts with a few dozen articles based on a keyword search, or citations from the source their advisor gave them, and then expands that to what might be a list of hundreds of relevant papers... most of which won't be terribly helpful or pertinent.
Is it worth the students time to try and find the author's current email address, and then compose an email to them asking for a specific paper, and then wait for a response, if there is only a 5% chance that the paper is really "on topic?" Is it worth the authors time to field requests for papers from these individuals if the recipient might not even use the paper? Of course not. It would be a massive waste for both parties. So this "email the author" (or find the authors personal website) thing isn't really a sustainable and useful model for academic publishing.
There absolutely is a place for some kind of archive of published papers. The biggest challenge is figuring out how to curate such an archive and ensure that the papers in it aren't all crap.
--------------
As for the $20 per article costs you see on the major websites when you try and pull an article mentioned somewhere online: I imagine that very few people ever pay those fees for one-off access to articles from the major publishers. Rather those fees are a way of "demonstrate the value" of the unlimited access subscriptions services they sell to libraries and other institutions.
A good comparison would be music streaming services like Apple Music. 45 million songs for $10/mo, so that's $120 a year. In theory that is great, at only 0.0003 cents per song, but of course the vast majority of the back catalog is virtually never listed to. At best the average individual will probably listen to a couple hundred songs in a year all by the biggest artists. Even if songs were priced at 10cents (which is really high relative to subscription "cost"), I would likely do better to purchase them individually.
So in order for a subscription service like Apple Music to be viable (and not be undercut by iTunes) the price for individual songs has to be at bat-shit crazy high >$1 levels.
|
technology
|
> This is why people should continue to buy physical media.
Do you think you're buying that blue ray?
See, that blue ray disk comes with encryption built in. If you get a new disk, you might have to get an update for your player to play that new disk. But therein lies the danger. What updates giveth, updates could also taketh away.
I've not seen an example of that happening yet, but don't believe for a moment it couldn't.
|
technology
|
I can't tell what your point is. Are you arguing for or against physical media for movies?
Even if movie quality is improving over time, the improved versions are sold at retail price even if you have an older version. I don't see any online service serving you a 4K movie at no additional price if you've previously bought a 1080p version. Even if they did, I don't see a big market for such "small step" quality remakes.
|
technology
|
But you can channel and attenuate its progression. You can prevent the new hot thing from burning the house down when there’s still people inside. Thats stewardship and its vital to sustained prosperity for a nation.
People think that supporting coal and natural gas production is anathema to progress, but its not. We just have massive amounts of it that we can still sell — but not if we destroyed those markets prematurely in favor of what’s obviously the future.
There is no good reason to disenfranchise a large section of the working population as sacrafice to the new god. Give these people an opportunity to transition out of these fields instead of cutting them off at the knees and decimating local economies, or worse, like the Obama Administrations policies which served to punish those communities and treat them like villains standing in the way of progress.
Stewardship. There is a reason that “the writing is on the wall”. Its to give you an opportunity to change direction before you smash into it head first.
|
technology
|
Trump isn't stopping progress here, he's merely forcing it to be American. Even though I don't like Trump for other reasons, this specific policy is good because one of the biggest criticisms of solar power on the far right is that it's (supposedly) Chinese. Specifically this was the claim lodged against Obama and Harry Ried during the Bundy Ranch standoff, who (supposedly) wanted to build a Chinese solar farm on his land (note: this wasn't ever true).
|
technology
|
You seem to think that it can only be one way, your way, and that's it. The OP didn't say coal was clean. They said there are lots of things that are damaging but you, and others like you, point to one thing, coal, and ignore all else.
Think of the waste and by-products that goes into what ever you use to read and comment on Reddit. There's toxic shit at every stage from manufacturing the components to delivery. There's your use, then there is disposal--even electronic recycling is damaging but it doens't happen in *your* back yard, does it? You don't see it and don't think about it, therefor you don't care about it. If you knew, would you give up your electronics? Or your shrimp (just look into the ecological damage of shrimp farming). Hell, look into the damage of solar panel manufacturing and recycling!
The point is, coal pollution is bad, but it is sypotomatic of a cause--which is inattention to managing waste--waste of all kinds.
You want to solve world problems? *Stop being distracted by symptoms*.
|
technology
|
the first words in their comment was "Burning coal is not killing us." That is simply not true. Even without considering implications of climate change, literally thousands of americans die each year from causes related to air pollution from fossil fuel use, of which coal is a meaningful contributor. [example source](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-to-shift-away-from-coal-air-pollution-that-kills-thousands-every-year/)
I never said that coal was the only wrong in the world. That was purely their whataboutism... i literally gave zero comment on anything other than the impact of coal.
|
technology
|
> but those have been used so much that it just flatlines it
yes, that is the point.
> The point being though is that the word wasn't in wide at all use until it recently and I've already stated it's standard use.
If it was in standard use, it wouldn't be flatlined by other words. "Compact disc", "Fortran" and "Brady Bunch" are used more frequently than "whataboutism"... and it is effectively tied with "cabbage patch kid".
>Just know calling something 'whataboutism' isn't an argument
Comment: Coal is killing people.
Response: No coal is not killing people. Plastics are what is killing people.
that is a classic whataboutism. whether or not plastics are killing people is irrelevant to whether or not coal is killing people.
|
technology
|
>If it was in standard use, it wouldn't be flatlined by other words. "Compact disc", "Fortran" and "Brady Bunch" are used more frequently than "whataboutism"... and it is effectively tied with "cabbage patch kid".
My claim was that it was a recent buzzword, not that it was a popular word. The fact that by itself it completely flatlines until 2016 and John Oliver is the top related search I'm pretty confident in my initial assumption
|
technology
|
More stuff produced domestically is good for economy. But higher prices on stuff generally is bad for people & the economy. net-net, tariffs are bad for the economy (like most forms of taxation, bad except for providing funds for other programs)
Tariffs don't help the economy, which is why western economies have been working to reduce barriers to trade since the end of WW2... and until recently, the right were overwhelming advocates of free trade.
|
technology
|
“Solar is Chinese, oil is American” is exactly the kind of moronic bullshit I’d expect from the far-right.
Solar is (a) the sun and (b) technology to collect that energy. Neither one belongs to any country on Earth. The only reason that one country might be associated with it is by *choosing to prioritize it*.
Want to make solar “American,” rather than binding America’s energy economy to a finite supply of dirty gunk from dead dinosaurs? Here’s the recipe:
1) Research it. Invest enormously in both the basic science and the engineering technology of solar power collection, storage, and distribution.
2) Invest heavily in building a market for manufacturing all of the components. Sell them widely both here and abroad.
3) Adapt government to support it. Regulate it so that parts from different companies work together. Develop industry standards bodies to share and license patent rights - so that valuable research is financially rewarded **and** the industry has access to the full spectrum of innovation. Create government subsidies to fund development. Remove archaic legal obstacles and pass new ones to expedite the safe deployment of solar technology throughout the country.
4) Build the shit out of it. Push industry and consumers to replace gas with electric, and to supply electric power via solar. Push electric cars and trucks and trains. Push charging stations. Push neighborhood solar collection and the injection of collected solar energy input into the grid.
That’s how you make solar “American,” if you can’t break this idiotic habit of looking at the world through a lens of nationalism. For more pragmatically-minded people, this is just ordinary technological progress. Exciting and important and impactful, yes - but one of many such emerging trends in the big picture of the technology of the world. (And everybody else is ahead of us.)
And ffs, stop voting for politicians who think 1950 was some kind of golden age and want to take America back there.
|
technology
|
Not if other countries have a comparative advantage in producing target good. Demanding that we produce solar panels or whatever at a loss vs importing them is a net negative for our economy. We’ve got opportunity costs to consider. Trade isn’t a zero sum game you play once. Also taxes don’t fund government programs. The perennial plumage ruffling over the debt ceiling should be evidence enough.
I don’t know anything about the solar industry but it seems to me that the primary thing the US contributes to the industry is research and design while the manufacturing is outsourced. Willing to be corrected by someone in the know.
|
technology
|
But in the short term, tariffs on product that aren't available here suppress supply. Prices go up; availability goes down. Solar becomes less appealing, more cost-effective, and more difficult to deploy today. The friction delays some projects and promotes keeping existing infrastructure.
This isn't an merely incidental disadvantage: it's the objective. Look at how much time the administration has spent plugging oil and "clean coal" since he thinks they're popular with his base.
There are many other paths to the ostensible purpose of tariffs. For instance: Expand funding for university science projects in solar technology. Offer funding and tax credits for startups in the solar industry. Pass regulations that reduce barriers to entry for states that want to start rolling out an electric infrastructure.
Apparently those aren't options because Obama backed Solyndra, and Fox News manufactured a scandal out of it, and because Elon Musk said some mean things about Trump, and because ridiculing "environmentalism" is a reliable source of amusement and political capital in conservative circles.
This is why we can't have nice things.
|
technology
|
The only thing that Apple contributes to the mobile phone industry is "research and design." All of the manufacturing is done overseas.
Apple is one of the most profitable companies in America, and the first company in the world to pass the $1 trillion capitalization mark.
If you think that the story of Apple is a tragedy for America simply because China has a comparative advantage in *manufacturing* all of Apple's products, then I suggest you broaden your understanding of international trade.
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.