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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

The level of academic unhappiness with publishing and its surrounds is actually surprising to me.

First, I never hear the counterargument.. that current publishing is OK. Does it exist, or is everyone unhappy while nothing changes?

Second, I'm surprised at how much of a single institution academia seems to be. "Publish or Perish," for example, has to be supported by tenure committees, grant makers and such. Are they all the same?

Michael Stonebraker^ suggests that tenure committees accept a limited number of papers on a resume. This is to encourage lower volume, higher quality publication. What stops some tenure committees from implementing such changes.

I just don't understand what's locking everything into place.

^https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA&t=853s

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Well, this trend is more or less everywhere but it's not uniform, some countries have much more extreme "publish or perish" cultures than others.

For example, in Spain practically everything related to the academic career (promotions, salary decisions, tenure, etc.) is measured by pure bean counting. Actual quality doesn't matter at all, it's all about having X papers in Y journal quartile during Z period. Evaluations are conducted by scientists but they might as well be clerks, because there is usually a grading scale on everything saying "each paper in this quartile gives X points" so the weight of the actual opinions of the evaluators is zero or close to zero (even if they read one of those papers and it's total bullshit, the regulations still say that they have to give it X points). As a result, the kind of subtle fraud described in the post is widespread, with most people gaming metrics and trying to publish in the crappiest possible journals that happen to have a high impact factor.

In contrast, for example in France things seem to be more relaxed. I don't know the exact details as I'm not from there, but I have many colleagues from there and I do know that they can actually spend years thinking about very difficult problems, and then publishing a really good paper (even if it's in a journal or conference without such good metrics) and their career seems to be more or less fine. As a result, research coming from France in my field tends to generally be really high quality (IMHO) even though in Spain those people's CVs would be considered bad due to not optimizing metrics.

The US seems to be somewhere in between, China looks similar to Spain, Northern European countries seem to be somewhere between the US and France in the spectrum, and so on.

It’s not the papers per se that get you tenure — it’s the grants you bring in, and you can only get those by going through funding agencies, who are the ones that care about your publications. The grant process is like this: you write a proposal that says “I want to do this. Here’s how it will work. I’ve published these papers to support my idea. Now give me $x million dollars”. That pitch only works if there is a significant publication record to back it up.

That’s why there’s a monoculture — everyone is going through the same agencies: nsf, darpa, and a handful of other government/institutional funding sources. If you are bringing in 10s of millions of dollars worth of funding into the university with only a handful of papers, you’re going to still have a lot of support for your tenure. The flip side is that you can publish all day every day, but if you’re not bringing in grants you’re not getting tenure.

> If you are bringing in 10s of millions of dollars

What's even more fun is what happens when you do bring in those funds. It doesn't go directly to your research and you will have restrictions on how you can spend the money. Some organisations take between 0% and 70% of off the top. Then, they require you to spend your money on specific areas. We wanted disk space for storing some data. They wanted to charge us >$1/GB + cost of backups to store this data and we couldn't just go to AWS or any generic cloud vendor.

Ding-ding-ding! This is indeed the root cause of much of the pressure that drives academic researchers to publish All Of The Things. Funding agencies care very, very, very much that you have a published track record of having done something similar to whatever it is that you are proposing to do, and regularly will reject otherwise solid applications due to the PI not having sufficient relevant publications. Not saying it’s right or wrong (that’s too big of a question for an Internet comment) but it’s one of the main motivating forces behind anything that a researcher does.

The fundamental problem is that there isn't enough money in the system and there aren't enough professorships for the legions of PhD students that exist. We either need to cap the number of PhD students much more aggressively or we need to spool up many more institutes and increase funding dramatically. If you set the bar for tenure at people who are publishing in Nature or Science or prestigious journal X then people will just come up with ways to game that too.

The other thing that goes unsaid is that huge swaths of researchers in the US are immigrants on visas. If they cannot find that next postdoc they will be kicked out of the country. This creates a massive incentive to do whatever you need to do to get your next opportunity.

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