Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

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Because it is required for promotion, tenure, grant requests, etc.

For example, why can't I (tenured professor) stop submitting journal papers? In Spain we have a research assessment every six years where basically only indexed journal papers count (even in CS where actually journals are quite irrelevant compared to conferences, but that's a different war of mine...). If you have enough indexed journal papers, you get a pay rise. If you don't, you not only don't get the rise, but you have to teach a punishingly high amount of class hours, basically leaving no time for further research. So for any professor that wants to do research, passing this assessment is pretty much needed. And the overwhelming majority of indexed journal papers are in Elsevier and the like, and it's highly likely that it will be the only thematic fit for a given paper.

Similar mechanisms are in place for tenure requirements, recruiting, grant calls, etc. Changing them is difficult. I do try to fight for it as much as I can, but it won't happen in the short or medium term.

Out of curiosity, how does that research assessment treat papers with multiple authors? Does it only give credit to the first author, or does it divide credit by the number of authors?

Depends. But usually being first author counts for more in most fields. However, e.g. in particle physics papers with hundreds of authors are common, alphabetically sorted. Sucks to be Z. Zymmer, nice to be A. Aaronson. People from the field of course know about this. Sometimes they might even act accordingly. But politicians and administrators far too often don't.

And then there is bibliometrics, the art of lying with publication statistics. Everything humans get wrong is even worse there. A. Aaronson is different from Al. Aaronson, right? No paper has more than 3 authors, right? Journals always count for something, conferences don't, right? etc.

Turkish higher education committee ignores multi-author papers completely and only counts single-author or advisor-student papers, in the first appointment of professors; and severely discourages multi-author papers in reassessments.

... which is another silly approach. So a pair of researchers who always work together on projects supposedly never publish :-(

They do anyway, because there is no negative consequences for publishing multi-author papers, just not rewarded at first appointment (this is mainly because they failed to figure out which fields have their authors ordered and which have it unordered).

I'd support dividing by number of authors, but it doesn't. A paper counts the same regardless of number of authors (and regardless or whether you're first author or not), unless it has "an atypically high number of authors for its field" (or something like that), in that case the committee can decide not to count it at all.

In Spain, gift authorship (adding authors that didn't do anything, typically in a mutual arrangement) is not uncommon. Not predominant, but definitely not uncommon.

So it turns out publishers like Elsevier do provide a value of an "indexed journal" status? Why can't the same be done for free?

It can indeed be done for free, and in fact there are some totally free journals that are indexed (actually I am using "indexed" as shorthand for clarity/simplicity, because it's a bit more complex than that: it needs to be indexed on a certain database -proprietary, by the way- and ranked with a high enough impact factor - a crude metric based on citations per paper). The problem is that they are still a minority, and often if you are working on subject X, it turns out that no indexed journal on that subject is free. Or maybe there is one, but your paper gets rejected from it so you then need to resubmit to a non-free one.

And why do publishers like Elsevier hold most of the indexed journals? Pure inertia. We keep sending papers there because we need to for reasons like the ones explained above, then our papers get citations, so those journals keep their impact factor high. And it is extremely difficult for new entrants to break into the rankings, because sending a paper to a new journal that is not indexed yet has a huge opportunity cost (months of work that you aren't going to get recognition out of for tenure, promotion, grants, etc.) so unless they start with really great momentum (support from a powerful scientific society, an open letter by big shots in the field, etc.) they never get the needed papers and citations to climb the rankings. So it's not that publishers do a better job so their journals have higher impact factors, it's that they have a captive market.

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