Academic publishing as ruinous competition: Is there a way out?
33bits.org
33bits.org
In terms of generating metrics better than journal publications and citations, there's projects like this:
(no connection, I just heard of them in this context). These kind of metrics would have addressed the OP's "blogger" problem.
Another strand, which at least my small scientific field is pursuing, is to facilitate citations of datasets, or dataset+software combinations (think of it as making a directory structure citeable). This (in theory - it's a recent development) rewards people who take their time to clean up and give open access to their datasets, instead of doing the minimum to extract a couple of papers out of it and move on.
I find much easier to learn from RFCs, git-hosted documentation projects, and wikis. (Going from more professional/less open to less professional/more open - not that these are necessarily exclusive, but it seems costly to have a system that satisfies both.)
For documentation, I really love sphinx[1] and rst[2]. I know some people love markdown and it's good for light manuals/READMEs but IMO not adequate for full documentation.
[1] http://sphinx-doc.org/ [2] http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html
I don't know why you bring up documentation, the current tools used to write academic papers seem fine.
As the OP states, the problem is the incentive system, not the particular set of tools and practices.
(However, I don't think his suggestions are fundamental enough to change things, and I am skeptical about his claimed expertise on the stock market and copyright.)
What does the current publishing model do for us that a blog wouldn't? What does academia-speak accomplish? From the few CS papers I've read, generally speaking the harder the paper is to understand, the less profound the insights contained. What does the formalism get us, besides formalism itself?
The problem with a blog is that there is no way to screen for quality or obvious mistakes. Of course the current method of doing this might be imperfect, or even completely broken depending on the field, but the solution isn't to just tell academics to start blogs and call it a day. It's a more complex problem than that.
I don't see where all the ceremony creates enough value to pay for itself.
Another problem is recruiting enough people to actually review all the research produced. HN has a handful of links per day. There are tens of thousands of researchers around the world doing work. Peer reviewers aren't generally compensated monetarily, but they have a strong moral incentive to help out and review articles, especially if they themselves have published in the journal in question.
Again, I don't want to come across as defending the entire system. There are certainly things to be improved. All I'm saying is that I don't think the answer is to just tell everyone to start a blog. It's an appealing idea from a populist, egalitarian, and perhaps "hacker" perspective (just get the information out there!), but the current system provides a bit more than a simple communications medium.
By contrast, for the sorts of projects I listed, there is more structure on the background for understanding a particular document, and even without explicit structure, hyperlinks make the entire mass of content easier to navigate and teach yourself with, instead of having to spend minutes digging out a reference. This is from personal experience of reading both academic papers and working with those sorts of projects, though granted I have more in the latter.
Good tools lower the cost of creating good documentation, meaning that more positive incentives can have higher priority. If current tools are "fine" then the OP would have used them to publish a paper instead of writing a series of blog posts.
The academic peer review process basically curates the literature by filtering out the majority of submitted papers, which often are low quality, cover something already done, etc. So, it's somewhat a different beast. More importantly, though,
> Academic papers are definitely not good learning materials, unless one is already familiar with the subject area.
That's right, because a lot of the cutting-edge research is really hard stuff that takes years of study to really understand. The point isn't to educate, it's to advance the knowledge of a small group (other researchers) that specilizes in a narrow area. Hopefully, those people (or their students) will eventually distill that knowledge into something usable by others (e.g. software). The point _can't_ be to educate (in general), because the stuff is just too hard. That's just the way research is. (If it's good research.)
I don't think the OP's experiences are typical: He needed to publish blogs because his work had immediate impact. That is rare overall in academia, including in CS. Most of the good work that is done will _eventually_ end up in a product, but it will take time.
But it's worth noting that the OP _also_ publishes papers. Really don't think there is a tool problem there, though there is always room for improvement.
I don't know why you keep talking about the academic peer review process. The things I mentioned have their own peer review processes too and it's for the same purpose as you said.
> The point isn't to educate, it's to advance the knowledge of a small group (other researchers) that specilizes in a narrow area.
This is a poor excuse, and from experience, quite insincere. Nearly everyone links to academic papers in non-academic settings as "references" to communicate with a wider audience, and nearly no-one re-writes an academic paper afterwards for it to be more understandable.
> the stuff is just too hard
Nothing is "too hard". I can understand RFCs perfectly fine, even an RFC that I have completely no background in. I cannot say the same thing for academic papers.
> Most of the good work that is done will _eventually_ end up in a product, but it will take time.
This is also just wrong.
You seem to be blindly asserting that academic papers somehow magically get turned into documentation that is more easily understood by a wider audience. This requires either academics to re-write their own papers (this nearly never happens), or for someone non-academic (like me) to come along, understand the paper, then re-write it. My entire topic in this thread has been that the latter is grossly ineffective, and that other avenues are much more effective, but unfortunately not used in the academic world.
Survey papers would seem to fill that role. They are a useful step for information moving from being on the research frontier to being in a textbook.
> Nothing is "too hard".
Well, lots of things are too hard for me. I don't read papers in quantum physics, biochemistry, or pretty much any specialized field of science. And I don't even try to read papers outside of my subfield. Because I don't have the years of expertise necessary to understand them. That's just the way the world works. Things are hard.
> You seem to be blindly asserting that academic papers somehow magically get turned into documentation
No, I didn't say that they get turned into documentation. Go look at what I said.
Otoh, with scientific experiments, it is critical to ensure validity and correctness so that further research may be built on a solid footing. Unlike code, it is not easy to "fork" and verify someone's work. So some form of peer review and verification are crucial.
It's not just about openness (scientists have arXiv, PLOS, etc) or about formats/systems (LaTeX is as good as anything else). It's fundamentally about the need to ensure correctness, to establish a foundation for future work.
OP was not talking about correctness and I am not talking about correctness, but the economics of collaboration and publication in academia.
I want this service to have an API so you can easily push content to other platforms like Tumblr, facebook, or your own personal website, housing all your content on my site.
I would use this. I believe in paying people for their hard work and I want the money to go directly into their pockets. No overhead.
I think this exposes the bigger problem of metrics in general. It's hard to determine how much impact research has, particularly in the short term. I'd be interested to see what the outcome of the REF is, but I remain sceptical and apathetic towards it, as does everyone else I've spoken to.
[1] : http://www.ref.ac.uk/
[2] : I get the impression it does anyway - I'm not involved in it this round.
It's simply a matter of choosing where to invest your scarce time. A paper from prestigious authors/affiliation presumably has a better chance of being worth your time. So such papers get more attention and hence more citations, even if they might not have been the most novel or the most comprehensive. The same also applies to papers in high impact factor journals where citations have some kind of a positive feedback loop.
There might be other models that work (other people mention Medley). The attention span for an HN clone is too short though.