The Meddling Middlemen of Academia
bastian.rieck.me
bastian.rieck.me
The annual subscription cost for this journal is $3,250.
I am bewildered that we continue to tolerate this state of affairs.
Feel free to reach out with any questions you might have!
That said -- and keep in mind that this might be different in different academic disciplines -- I'm not sure that this would be appealing work for a graphic designer. There just isn't room for creativity of any sort. Mathematics papers have an extremely homogeneous look and feel, and everyone in the discipline is perfectly okay with that.
Maybe textbook companies would be a better bet -- although with its $200+ textbooks that industry has its own set of problems. That said, if I were writing a student-oriented book (as opposed to a research paper), I would welcome the chance to work with someone with creative ideas for the visual presentation.
Good luck!
Sure it was not his 8 year old child?
Journals employ language editors to smooth out papers written by non-native speakers with a poor command of the language. If you want to edit for language you have to comprehend somewhat the content. People who know mathematics and are willing to put up with poor language skills are rare.
Is that because writing usually pays terribly?
[edit] in this particular case the person had likely gotten by pattern-matching 1, a slash, and a 3, as one-third, and simply never cared why one might write 3/1 to mean 3, for example. Why do that, after all? I see a one, I see a slash, and I see a 3. One-third. It’s worked every single time before so why would your thing be a special case?
For example, I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone mentioned "taking the 30 seconds to read something"; the discussion went on a tangent where someone called themselves a slow reader because it took them a whole minute, and then others chimed in that it was taking them longer still. So, I timed myself and it took me 14 seconds to read it.
What that made abundantly clear to me was that my own experience in the world - seeing _words_ as first class entities everywhere, immediately tagged and understood as whole components, instantly, without ever "reading" them... is not everyone else's experience. Some adults who nominally believe themselves to be literate must actually have to sit there and spend some effort to recognize each letter and sound out a word, the way my children did when they were ~4 (and some children get even younger). What is the world like for these people? I can often speed-read a paragraph and come away with an understanding within seconds, skimming over it for key words and familiar grammatical constructs; my assumption is that most people posting here can do the same. Maybe that's not the case?
There's also a lot of talk on the Internet in the last year or two about inner monologue, with the growing realization that it is likely that a large part of the population simply does not experience the ability to talk to themselves within their own head. This makes me wonder if they can read silently without having to mouth the words; perhaps this is the tip of the iceberg for a differentiation in intelligence that hasn't really been extensively studied yet (unsurprisingly, since psychometrics are not in vogue right now).
Not that I don't agree with your overall message but petty one-upsmanship at things one should never strive to one-up someone else on is kind of a staple of Reddit and that's probably what you were reading.
Interesting. Would you really qualify that as being like "quieter volume", or was it more like it was harder to "recognize" words out of the dialogue?
> Obviously not the case in deaf-mutes who never learned to speak of course.
I wonder what reading is actually like for these folks, since letters symbolize sounds; they _must_ recognize word-at-a-time with no sub-vocalizing, right? I hope we get lucky and a random person with experience in the field stops by ;)
You could argue that of any number system, but if you can count to ten and understand "more left of decimal point = bigger, more right = smaller" then most comparisons in numerals are easy. 0.25 vs 0.33, 1/4 vs 1/3. We are, I believe, the only animals able to comprehend either, especially in conjunction with units of measurement.
Side note, but one of my favourite gotchas is in optimisation - say for a race car, where we want to minimise time (for a constant distance), rather than maximise speed. Strictly speaking, they're equivalent, but people doing the latter almost always end up focusing on top speed, and overlooking the time lost going slowly.
You might guess from the above that I’m pretty firmly in the camp that thinks “k-12 math just isn’t mathy enough and that’s why it’s bad” is dangerously wrong. You’d be right about that.
In ACM / CS, the publishing pipeline is now fully based in LaTeX, so authors effectively do their own typesetting for their own articles. There is now a standardized template for submissions, so the version of the draft you send to peer review is typeset in the same way it will be published in the final version. In my experience, almost always the version that gets published is identical to the final "camera ready" version I submit after peer review.
Finally, peer reviewing is indeed not paid, but the way my fields treat peer review is that you are supposed to review proportionally to however much reviewing you obligate on others by the papers you / your students / your lab submit to peer review. If your paper goes out to three reviewers, you sign up for three reviews. Then for the reviewer coordinator / meta-reviewer burden, if your group/lab is submitting 6-8 papers a year, then you have an obligation to be on the editorial board / program committee, which comes with the reviewer coordinator burden of what a decent sized group/lab obligates on others. Of course, some people are still free riders, and many people submit publications who are not qualified to peer review, but it does change how you think about the "peer reviewing is free labor" issue.
My bad experiences stem mostly from established publishers such as Springer or Oxford University Press, who are often very important for certain application areas, such as as bioinformatics. The point about equations is very much true, though: _despite_ the fact of existing LaTeX templates, they take your paper and typeset it once again---often with detrimental results :-/
Concerning the peer reviewing: I fully agree! I myself am seeing reviewing as an honour and a duty to support my field. I am objecting to the reviewers/editors doing all this work and the publisher charging ludicrous prices to access a paper. Wiley still charges 42 USD for a PDF download and online only access of a paper I wrote 6 years ago! This is absolutely bonkers and not useful for people in countries/universities that are less well-off...
That's the problem really: ACM viewing a digital library, journals, and conference proceedings as a cash cow to be milked for many unrelated purposes.
ACM seems to have little interest in real open access as long as they are hooked on milking that cow.
What's also terrible/embarrassing is that the ACM digital library doesn't even have an API, and its ToS forbid programmatic access.
I would pull the plug on ACM if I could.
This is actually a bad thing, and a sign of standards slipping. Even if one uses a LaTeX template there are all kinds of quality-typesetting nuances that many authors are not aware of: where non-breaking spaces are necessary, proper hyphenation of foreign-language names, en dashes instead of hyphens in ranges, etc. I have seen so many publications in maths and sciences where the author was expected to provide camera-ready copy and the final result was sloppy.
I agree that learned societies can do a great job of publishing journals and Festschriften, and it is the norm in my own field where our learned societies never handed over their journals to a for-profit publisher. But I am happy that in my own field one's submissions still get hands-on work by trained copyeditors and typesetters so that the final result is perfect regardless of the author's own typesetting competence.
They're charging huge tolls for their work as peer-review gatekeepers, and for the career benefits - and potential improved access to funding for departments and universities - that can result from having work published in a prestigious journal.
Essentially it's like a more complicated form of buying likes (i.e. prestige and marketable crediblity) on social media, for an older and much richer market - with a monopolistic twist.
Opening access to content and paying editors more won't necessarily help. This market won't go away until the tacit benefits become equivalent. This means breaking their ability to operate together as a cartel.
Besides - in reality they only the highest profile journals provide any benefits at all. Most journals are low-profile throw-aways with limited influence and prestige. But the publishers have contrived a situation where universities have to buy an all-or-nothing access package.
If citation prestige is opened up, the cartel will collapse almost overnight.
> Besides - in reality they only the highest profile journals provide any benefits at all.
In my discipline (mathematics) there is a large middle tier of "respectable" journals, that regularly publish good work, including work by well known people. A typical tenure dossier at a middling research department might list say, 15 papers, most of which were in this middle tier, and a couple of which were published somewhere really good.
I agree that the system is a cartel and would love to see it collapse. In my opinion, whatever replaced it would need to duplicate the signaling mechanism to succeed.
Advancing my field is my life's mission, and disseminating my research is too important to outsource.
Believe it or not, Twitter has been crucial to the process. It's not great for nuanced discussion, but it's AMAZING for advertising the existence of technical information. For example:
https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1138963271594020864
If science gets attention according to its level of twitter amplification, then scientific publishing is going to start looking a lot like journalism. That's already happening. Ask journalists how their search for truth is going.
My personal experience (twelve years of traditional publishing followed by five years of DIY publishing) is that I spend substantially less of my time on publishing/dissemination, have higher impact, and produce higher quality work. You should give it a try!
This is so completely true, and is something everyone should be fighting for. As for the U.S., it doesn't look like our FASTR bill has gone much anywhere at all.
It should be available immediately, of course, particularly since the official "publication date" can be delayed many months after the article is actually available. But taxpayers do get what they paid for in a somewhat reasonable time frame. The part where academic institutions provide publishers with content for free, then buy the same content back, is the insane part.
https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16009/nsf16009.jsp#q1 https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm#753
Open access and not stuck in the dark ages with dissemination.
As far as I can tell though, functionally this is breaking down. People can find preprints and archived papers, and do, if they're searching by topic.
So journals at this point are providing a peer review portal, and formatting. I happen to think the formatting does provide value. My sense is that at a good journal, there's a kind of stochastic improvement in errors and formatting, so that the numbers of errors go down on average, and the formatting improved, on average, over iterations back and forth with the copyeditor.
As for peer review, I'm not so sure anymore. My sense is that it does provide some kind of stamp of approval from experts in the area, so if you don't know much about an area, it provides some sense that at least some small group of people in the area believe it meets some kind of basic standards. But that says very little, and the amount of noise in the review process is large.
I think the core of the academic communication system is slowly being hollowed out, and being replaced by blogs, things like twitter and mastodon, and archives. At this point the peer review journal process provides some value, but it's being propped up by tradition. Already, with COVID, we're increasingly seeing the focus on preprints. Journalists and others are careful to note something hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, but everyone knows it matters little because they can turn to experts to find out what they think of it.
If there aren't formal attempts to create an alternative, I think we'll just be left with people posting and passing around preprints and discussing them on twitter, mastodon, blogs, and message groups. If people want the nice formatting, and some stamp of approval, I think something else will have to be worked out. But the journals are starting to feel like they're getting in the way, in general, and represents some kind of power or status structure more than quality control system.
Paying reviewers I think creates bad incentives as the author of the post points out. So do author-pays systems. What is maybe missing from the piece is some recognition that in the past, reviewers reviewed and editors edited in part as part of their job. That is, you were paid as a faculty member at a university, and that was what people understood you did. Pre-internet, this was all valuable service. Now that universities and others are more focused on faculty bringing in profits rather than paying for their services -- and questions are being raised about the value of journals in general -- we are seeing these questions about what reviewers get paid.
I think in the future there will be value in article hosting and searching, and providing website frameworks for discussion and peer review, but I'm not sure they will look like journals per se. You'll see things like arxiv.org, but with commentary, rating, discussion, and approval infrastructure over them. That's what large libraries and research centers will be donating money to or paying for. I think journals per se will eventually start to seem kind of stodgy and old fashioned.
It isn't, it was a mistake trying to bring it everywhere. Peer review is a way for your jealous colleagues to stop your novel, disruptive, or counter-intuitive research from being published; and while it may serve some purpose in some limited fields, for most fields it does little else but suppress good science.
If your peers understood where your field was going, they'd be doing the research, not reviewing it.
Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't have journals with editors, but peer review is not necessary to good science, and in most fields it is a parasite.
Also, open access journals will eventually dominate, but I think the idea is hurt by all the scam open access journals that plague our inboxes.