Academic Substack: Open, Free, and Subject to Review
jfmcdonald.substack.com
jfmcdonald.substack.com
I've noticed a significant increase in submissions here from Substack recently; it seems to be supplanting Medium as a preferred platform for independent long form articles.
Medium started off with seeming decent quality and goodwill but a lot of that has been jettisoned with walling off content and barrel-scraping in "expert" contributions.
I hope Substack will avoid some of those mistakes; it will need to if the sub-platform described in the article here (or others like it) is to succeed.
I don't think anyone at Medium thought their service was better for their users by putting up paywalls, requiring accounts, and broadening their SEO by soliciting contributions. But they need to grow either in users or in profits, and there's only a certain number of ways you can squeeze money from internet readers.
Do you use newsletters for subscription? Is it paid? Free? How is better than an academic blog?
If you want hard evidence you'll have to wait for a real claim.
The choices we make, especially about those with whom we enrich via our business and custom and, increasingly, even attention, matter more than most people realize when it comes to shaping the future of our world. It’s one of the few actually-powerful options still retained by most of the general public, increasingly rare in our modern western world.
It’s quite important that we know who we’re dealing with and to whom we pay money. A good example of the result of ignoring this is the fact that the now-largest hosting provider in the world are also the CIA’s sysadmins.
Doing business blindly with vendors is to pass the steering wheel to someone else, and abdicates a critical individual responsibility.
If you find it irrelevant, you’re free to ignore it, but many people (in my estimation) do not, and I believe we all benefit from having better information about markets, whether it results in endorsement or avoidance. Informed decisions are good decisions.
I'm thankful Substack allows a place for Greenwald and Matt Taibbi and others like them.
I believe homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species, however, so I'm probably alt-right in your estimation.
Comments like yours prove exactly the value of having something like substack for journalists like Greenwald.
I did not intend to be vague, nor to smear anyone, I’m just trying to stay on-topic and not derail this comment thread into where it appears your reply has gone.
I encourage you to reach your own conclusions based on the facts; I am not interested in pushing any particular political alignment. The ongoing (and supremely noisy) American culture war is extremely disinteresting to me, I just want people to have the information to make their own decisions and reach their own conclusions.
Perhaps you like the alt-right and learning that information would make you more eager to use Substack, perhaps not. Either way, it’s better that people have more information than less.
Oh, how? Do they have some special kind of agreement with Google?
For very large email senders it, yes, may include knowing whose phone number to call.
I've only used arXiv via their search but the NEP service[3] within RePEc offers curated mailing lists of recent economics working papers by specialty area.
> NEP is an announcement service which filters information on new additions to RePEc into edited reports. The goal is to provide subscribers with up-to-date information about the research literature. Our success in achieving this goal has been substantial. Today, there are 80541 subscriptions from 34926 unique addresses distributed throughout the world. The reports are generated by subject-specific editors. They are available by email and RSS feeds.
What these platforms don’t offer is built-in peer review. Quality control can be an issue.
However to me the real problem is that he completely ignores the existence of preprint servers. This started with the arXiv in the 1990s for physics, math and computer science, but finally the model has begun to catch up with other fields. In biology the bioRxiv is well established and I'd say more than half of the papers I see do have a preprint deposited there. For medicine, which has a notoriously protective culture, the medRxiv was launched last year and got a gigantic boost due to the pandemic.
Other fields also have their own preferred preprint repositories. To me preprints solve the gatekeeping and cost barriers very well. I only wish they were a little more tied to comments from the readers (in depth comments of the kind you get during peer review, not the knee jerk ones we're used to seeing on the internet).
I say this because there is almost and "adversarial" relationship between the readers, who just want the bottom line in two sentences, and the authors would like their work to be perceived as a big important and novel contribution. Because of this often papers are written with more flourish language than actually necessary to make a point, and so it is really a hard to parse articles and tell good from bad. Often the "summaries" that peer reviewers wrote before making the comments are better than the official abstract of an article, but readers don't get to see and benefit from them. Each person that reads an article has to redo all that work of judging it for themselves, and with the deluge of articles we have it is simply impossible to keep up.
Initiatives such as openreviews.net are already a big step in the right direction. I think in the next 10-20 years this is where the bulk of scientific publishing is headed. A mix of preprint server coupled with curated community reviews that makes papers much easier to gauge and also incentivizes authors to write better and not bullshit, or risk getting wrecked publicly with the public reviews.
This is true for now, but many startups end up charging for stuff that was free in the beginning. I'd feel better on Posthaven, which promises not to pull the rug out and is financially sustainable.
> Access to journals is prohibitively expensive and therefore practically unavailable to independent researchers ...
and
> Apart from the financial walls that academic publishers encourage, there are frequently de facto barriers to participation as a contributor, ...
the Cornell Arxiv approach to free publishing is already spreading into other fields like Bio Arxiv. The substack culture isn't actually free.
> Finally, the review process itself may be subject to intellectual protectionism and even unintentional gatekeeping that prevents research from reaching a broader audience that can help the ideas grow ...
Without review process the volume of papers that get produced and published freely online will be so much that people will feel the pain. This is already happening in ML community because everyone dumps a slightly different but not so diff paper on Arxiv.
I wish someone would make a technological solution to this. One way is an aggregator of scores which weights exponentially big for known subject experts. This is basically review but all experts are allowed to weigh in, not just the chosen reviewers which are either random or sometimes even biased.
Another far fetched dream solution would be to come up algorithm to review the paper, or at least find if its similar to some other paper. The way papers are currently written it would have to be some sort of natural language processing AI, something like GPT-3 maybe.
Of course what I describe is basically youtube for science and there can be a problem because of that. These days creators cater their videos to the algorithm rather than the audience. Since there isn't really a way that the algorithm can capture actual audience demand nuances, videos are being made predominantly for lowest common denominator of a genre. This can manifest very poorly in this papers system and then it would matter so much more.
> If Academic Substack were used across scientific disciplines, the potential for innovative collaboration and robust review would strengthen academic publication in ways difficult to imagine under the present regime.
Does Substack have peer review built in somehow? Would the peer review be in the comments?
Either way, there’s currently a spam comment on this article - can the author moderate comments or is that stuck there until Substack remove it?