What are the best open access journals out there? Are there any that have particularly bad reputations to avoid? Thanks.
- Free
- Lots of subject areas (not just computer sci.)
- People may cite your work
- People may offer feedback
You do need to get endorsed first though [4] (as another comment mentions).
However, if you want "proper" peer reviewed & published, you need to start looking around at conferences. They're usually easier to get something through, as they tend to expect much shorter papers.
There are industry led conferences (like RuhrSec [3] for Cyber Security) which might be a good route to start with.
But, really, there's no shortcut for getting into a "proper" journal / conference. You need to research, have funds, time and, sometimes, a bit of fame already.
[1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16832/why-uploa...
[2] https://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#1C
It's true in the biosciences (ask me how i know!). It is not true in, say, theoretical computer science.
On the other hand, in EE, journals are more prestigious in general, partly due to the slower-moving nature of the field. A 9-12 month wait to get your article into a journal is not a huge deal. Further, a journal article typically shows more "complete" work than a conference article would, because it usually takes much more time to fully validate your work (relative to CS, for example).
For instance, if you're presenting a novel low-power circuit, you could get away with a simulation and/or a hastily taped-out version for the conference paper (ISSCC is the top conference for this). But publishing your results in a high impact journal like JSSC will require that you have a fully tested version, etc.
So, why would you want "proper" peer review nowadays? It should be a means to achieve something else. Just for the challenge?
I mean besides arXiv there are many ways you can get your knowledge out there if you want to give people free (or even paid) access to it. This will also create a lot of Feedback if it's the least bit interesting.
If you want your knowledge to generate new products and companies you will also find that Startups nowadays don't wait for peer review before they launch.
So the only practical reason I can see is if you want to get funding. And Then you use the funding to create more papers. To… well… get more funding.
TL;DR: If you think about that you want to have "proper" peer review meaybe you should spend some time thinking about what you actually want to achieve and if there aren't better ways to get there.
Just like flat earth or anti-vaxer theories on YouTube, incorrectly published work could be damaging and dangerous.
Getting peer-reviewed & published legitimizes the research work. It has been verified by a panel of experts.
Good for those start ups. I can't wait to attack all their Deep Learning APIs [1].
There are multiple fields that have routed around peer review; everything that works on preprints and working papers. It takes more than two years to get an Economics paper published. If it took that long for things to get eyeballs progress would be exceedingly slow.
Peer review may have some good points but it certainly isn’t necessary to modern advancements in knowledge and understanding.
Let's say a paper that relies on the preprint take that assumption for granted. And then another paper references that one. And again. And again.
Then the fifth paper gets adopted by a government in some esoteric policy, which causes their economy to implode.
May not be necessary to just publish "stuff", but it is necessary to mitigate against the dangers of invalid assumptions.
——-
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Bayer and Amgen, reported dismal results when they tried to reproduce some cancer papers. Only 25 percent of the papers Bayer examined were reproduced. Amgen was able to replicate only six out of the 53 studies it examined.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/18/5103048...
Plan to replicate 50 high-impact cancer papers shrinks to just 18
An ambitious project that set out nearly 5 years ago to replicate experiments from 50 high-impact cancer biology papers, but gradually shrank that number, now expects to complete just 18 studies.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/plan-replicate-50-hi...
Because I want other people to help catch my mistakes. Why wouldn't you want that?
If you work in the field you know the 10-100 people who provide most expertise and you can build trust relationships with them by delivering interesting thoughts and then get their feedback on These ideas. That's the healthy approach. And if you work hard and the stuff you do is reasonable you will also become known in these circles.
Also technology can help weed out the complete b.s., see HN or Stackoverflow for examples on that.
It’s just set up formally so you don’t need to ask everyone individually and there is (an attempt at) the feedback being blind so that people who are unpopular don’t get penalised.
That's not how I have ever seen peer review done by a reputable conference or journal. Why would they be reviewers if they didn't know the topic?
What do you think the word 'peer' means?
In my field the people I'd ask informally for comment are exactly the same people who would peer review my paper.
If you want to fork over 5k, I would recommend PLOS ONE as a major, well recognized open access journal that takes the "publish anything with scientific merit" approach.
If you do not want to pay, Arxiv is your best bet. However, I will say that, while good papers end up on arxiv, so do lots and lots of bad ones (that's the point) and there's no concept of "peer review" there.
Are there any others?
If you already know somebody in the academic community, it would probably be better to try them first. But if not, it appears that ArXiv etiquette allows cold-emailing people... they just ask you not to blast requests out to mass numbers of people simultaneously.
Different fields do things entirely differently, and short of publishing in Nature journals are very specific to their fields.
I'm not really sure what field I'm targeting, so I was hoping people would note their favorite open access journals and I could investigate (and I also thought a more generic list would be generally interesting to all the HN folk).
An academic paper is a kind of conversation between experts. You need to describe the problem you're exploring, state what others have done in the area, and finally explain how you are contributing to the problem and show that your contribution is novel.
What you're writing about reads like a combination of philosophy and machine learning. The philosophy probably makes it unsuitable for a machine learning publication. I can't really speak for the academic philosophy side because I don't know the publication conventions there.
If you want to take this further, your first steps should be to identify the conversation you want to be a part of, and get to know the current landscape of that conversation (I'm mixing metaphors, but you know what I mean).
The conversation is probably mostly a part of the field of Positive Psychology and Meaning in Work literature, a summary of which I cite (Martela and Steger); however, when researching the field (I probably read about 50 academic articles), I didn't see any discussion about value theory (in the realm of philosophy). I have a connection to one of the researchers and maybe I can reach out to start the conversation.
0) Golden rules:
- Readability & formatting matters.
- Know your audience.
- Context matters.
- Brevity is best.
- Be clear & concise.
- Abstract, General Intro, Aims, Background/Previous work, Method, Results, Conclusions, Future work => In that order.
- Most important: Nothing goes into the main body unless it makes a tangible, useful & clear contribution.
Some of the best papers are the shortest ones: I can read, understand and explain it to someone else in 1 hour. Among the worst are the 25 pagers that take me 2 days to realise that they aren't useful to me.
1) Footnotes
You aren't commenting code. If it doesn't go in the main text, why is it even there? It is distracting away from the important part - the main body of text.
It either lives in the main text body, a reference or the appendix. If it doesn't live there, then maybe footnote (e.g. a url to some very specific data you trained against).
Get very delete happy with them. For example:
- viii & xiii @ on page 3, xvi @ page 4 should either be in main body (if important, they don't look it), or deleted.
- Things like python commands should just get dumped in the appendix. No footnote / reference. A blanket "you can see all the commands used along with descriptions in the appendix". I'm going to look at what is in the appendix anyway. Because I'm a pedantic academic.
2) Formatting:
- Think about using a template like [1].
- Reduce your font size to 10pt please.
- If you are going to be very maths heavy, think about moving to a single column style. I, personally, find it makes it easier to read eqns and to follow their logic. Currently I have to jump from around the page and keep getting lost.
- For sections 5 & 6: Stop putting something in bold every paragraph. Bold is only to highlight when it's really important. The name of something is not really important. Prefer italics over bold, but even use that sparingly. How difficult was it to focus on reading this paragraph when the words keep changing shape?
3) Graphs & Tables
Graphs & Tables exist at the top of a page. That's the only place they live if they live in the main body. They don't have to be on the same page as where you refer to them, and you can group them together. Otherwise, appendix that stuff.
Else you'll to end up with blank space (like end of page 4 & 5) and formatting headaches later on.
You haven't done your results discussion part yet... When you do, make sure you don't talk about every single table/graph. Only talk about the results that are important. Otherwise it's guff that will bore your audience.
4) Structure:
You have so many sections that I need a table of contents to work out where I am. For a 10-15 pager, that's silly. Learn to love subsections. Especially those early parts.
5) Intro & Background work:
I have no idea what previous work this relates to. Is there previous work in the field? If so, talk about it. Talk about how you're improving it. Talk about what the context of this paper is.
Don't know what the context is? Then you better find out... People will ask!
6) Quotations
This seems like a technical paper, not an English lit assignment. If you directly quote anything, let alone a whole paragraph, it better blow my mind. I am afraid page 3, column 2 does not. Remove it. Just reference anything like that. If people want/need to know, they will read it too.
I tried to let the figures and tables float but I disliked the strange spacing that resulted. I also tried putting them at the top and it was very hard to follow.
Thanks again for your very thoughtful feedback!
> Most important: Nothing goes into the main body unless it makes a tangible, useful & clear contribution. > Some of the best papers are the shortest ones: I can read, understand and explain it to someone else in 1 hour. Among the worst are the 25 pagers that take me 2 days to realise that they aren't useful to me.
This is an interesting point because I see both sides of it. Brevity can lead to opacity in some cases; however, I agree brevity's a good ideal (in whatever sense brevity is reasonable).
> - viii & xiii @ on page 3, xvi @ page 4 should either be in main body (if important, they don't look it), or deleted.
Agreed, I'll move those to the main body.
> Things like python commands should just get dumped in the appendix. No footnote / reference. A blanket "you can see all the commands used along with descriptions in the appendix". I'm going to look at what is in the appendix anyway. Because I'm a pedantic academic.
Agreed, I'll move the commands to the appendix.
> - Think about using a template like [1]. > - Reduce your font size to 10pt please.
Thanks, I do like the compactness. Draft: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/freeradical13/ValueBasedPr...
> - If you are going to be very maths heavy, think about moving to a single column style. I, personally, find it makes it easier to read eqns and to follow their logic. Currently I have to jump from around the page and keep getting lost.
I do like the double columns but I'll think about this.
> - For sections 5 & 6: Stop putting something in bold every paragraph. Bold is only to highlight when it's really important. The name of something is not really important. Prefer italics over bold, but even use that sparingly. How difficult was it to focus on reading this paragraph when the words keep changing shape?
I didn't think about that. I'm not sure why I decided to do that, but I agree and I'll remove those.
> Graphs & Tables exist at the top of a page. That's the only place they live if they live in the main body. They don't have to be on the same page as where you refer to them, and you can group them together. Otherwise, appendix that stuff. > Else you'll to end up with blank space (like end of page 4 & 5) and formatting headaches later on.
Yeah, I had to use `\raggedbottom` for a nice flow. I'll try the more classic way.
> You haven't done your results discussion part yet... When you do, make sure you don't talk about every single table/graph. Only talk about the results that are important. Otherwise it's guff that will bore your audience.
Makes sense.
> You have so many sections that I need a table of contents to work out where I am. For a 10-15 pager, that's silly. Learn to love subsections. Especially those early parts.
I hadn't considered sub-sections. I'll try those out.
> I have no idea what previous work this relates to. Is there previous work in the field? If so, talk about it. Talk about how you're improving it. Talk about what the context of this paper is. > Don't know what the context is? Then you better find out... People will ask!
As far as I could tell, not much, or very orthogonal, but I've seen this feedback multiple times, so I'll do my best.
> This seems like a technical paper, not an English lit assignment. If you directly quote anything, let alone a whole paragraph, it better blow my mind. I am afraid page 3, column 2 does not. Remove it. Just reference anything like that. If people want/need to know, they will read it too.
That makes sense and I'll remove that huge paragraph. I think it's worthy of highlighting, but best for the appendix. I do wish academic writers would more often quote what they found most relevant from critical papers instead of just using obscure citations.
I'll be away for a few days, but I'll integrate this feedback soon. Thank you very much, again. I'll post an updated draft here when finished, or feel free to email me (see my bio) if you'd rather get a push then pull (and I totally understand if I never hear from you again). If you ever need help with anything, please let me know.
Cheers!
https://waltcrawford.name/goaj3.pdf
More writing here:
https://waltcrawford.name/goaj.html
I'm not sure that's exactly helpful for what you're asking about, but it's a good read for anyone interested in this area.
Be aware that they are slightly different than other publications and have some special requirements (for example, I believe that your paper should have some interactive diagrams if possible).