Comment by mixedmath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixedmath | Hacker News Reader

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There are a couple of journals in math that ask for the paper to be submitted using their particular latex template, and a typical latex template is incompatible with what I consider "standard" latex, i.e. either the `amsart` document class or `article` document class with certain AMS packages included.

Sometimes it's small, like whether or not `\author{my name}` needs to be included in the preamble or in the main body. These are short but annoying. Sometimes it's very annoying. I'm glad that I've never tried to publish in a two-column journal (which might exist in math? I don't know) which would require more substantial superficial edits.

I always assumed that this was a deliberate source of friction, slightly raising the bar of entry so as to discourage a certain sort of submission. I don't say I agree with this, but that's what I thought.

This sounds like the sort of problem that latex would be great at solving: changing the look of an article just by using different document classes. And sometimes it is great --- but some templates are terrible, terrible, terrible. (And sometimes these terrible templates are for great journals! I see little to no correlation there).

I am a mathematician, and I always ignore requests to submit papers using a certain LaTeX template, or using any other journal-specific formatting. Judging by the papers I get to review, so do most other mathematicians.

Once (for a Springer journal) I got called out by their editorial staff, and told I had to follow their dumb rules. So I did. But I would never do this preemptively.

Publishers charge thousands of dollars for a subscription to a single journal. If they want their papers formatted in a certain way, then they can employ staff to do that work themselves. If any for-profit journal tries to insist that authors do lots of reformatting work before even submitting, I will never submit to or review for them again.

On one project I had someone trying to slow us down (we were making them look bad) with rules lawyering about our API docs. In the end I ended up prettying up our integration tests quite a bit, and using jcite to combine snippets of the integration tests with our inline documentation.

I couldn't quite get it to the company standard, but I got it down to under an hour worth of work for our tech writer per release.

In the end it was a week's work for me and it improved our integration tests. Not the constant draw on resources and sanity that I think someone was after.

> I always assumed that this was a deliberate source of friction, slightly raising the bar of entry so as to discourage a certain sort of submission.

There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s intentional gatekeeping. There’s a reason why many papers are being “published” on Arxiv and foregoing all this boxticking.

The whole publishing process is fundamentally broken. Aaron Swartz (RIP) had the right idea all along. Get rid of the middlemen sucking up millions of dollars by paywalling government funded research.

It’s been proven time and time again that a shocking number of studies can’t be reproduced and that the traditional peer review process just isn’t working. It’s a good old boys’ club putting a stamp of approval on their friends’ work and keeping the outsiders away.

When it comes to Math though, I do have some sympathies. There are so many cranks that think they solved Collatz or a millennium problem and don’t even know what they don’t know. It must be exhausting to sift through all that noise in a volunteer, unpaid position. These shibboleths might be a necessary evil.

> It’s a good old boys’ club putting a stamp of approval on their friends’ work and keeping the outsiders away.

> Math though, I do have some sympathies. There are so many cranks

Lots of other fields have their cranks, quacks, fringe theorists, and whackjobs. Why give math special treatment?

I think it’s an asymmetric problem across areas of study. Including within math — there aren’t many amateurs who are going to try their hand at algebraic geometry, but number theory tends to be like catnip, because many wicked problems are very simple to state.

Math is not so different from computer science in that it seems relatively approachable to a layperson. But there are relatively few mathematicians out there. That same level of spam is being filtered by much fewer people.

To me, it’s akin to why the Linux kernel devs operate the way they do. No GitHub issue page, no Slack, no Discord, banning topposting and web email providers. It’s all based on old school mailing lists, because there’s orders of magnitude more amateurs than kernel devs and they don’t have time for handholding the unwashed masses.

Anyway, I think there’s some middle ground to be found between this extremely burdensome process to submit a paper for publishing, and making it as easy to publish as making a forum post…

For what it's worth, as a curious computer science university student in 2013 I sent Linus Torvalds an email from my personal GMail account. He answered both my original question and a supplementary question, even though they were (in hindsight) quite stupid. Even the great and very busy Mr Torvalds has at least some time for handholding unwashed amateurs.

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