How To Publish a Scientific Comment in 123 Easy Steps

Scribd is a step backwards. If they wanted to create value, they could HTMLify PDFs (similar to the Gmail feature or the Google preview page) instead of showing them in a stupid flash window.

1) The screen area I could have been using to read the document has been eroded by: 2 lots of ads, A top nav. bar, and a related document panel.

2) The embedded flash app. appears to consume a lot of cycles.

3) 'Scrollbars within scrollbars' make me unreasonably angry - I want to read a document, not perform keyhole surgery.

I'm not saying any other readers are perfect, but I would say that scribd is not leading the field.

Read http://blog.bradgessler.com/i-dont-get-scribd

In the same way a service that you dial to speak to an operator who dials the number you want would "do the job just fine".

The system needs to be redesigned, yet there is very little catalyst for it to be redesigned. People are still more motivated to turn their interests inward, to things like funding, publication lists, tenure, etc. The system is designed to reward those who selfishly work to maintain the status quo. This isn't me passing judgement on these people, just a realization that they are only doing what provides them with the greatest incentives. In a similar situation, I might do the same.

But it is also a realization that this isn't just a shallow local minimum. The lifestyle and security of many researcher are tightly coupled to getting funding out of this system, and thus is tightly coupled to following the rules of the system. Either some external force is going to have to shove this system aside, or the members of the community are going to have to collectively accept the pain of a governing body seeing the writing on the wall and attempting to regain control. With the system as entrenched as this, it would have to be a coup of epic proportions to unseat it. The only other option I can see is this system remaining in perpetuity.

I noted above that being in a similar position, I'd probably work this system the same way most everyone else does. I might provide the usual excuses as well: family, food, survival, lifestyle, etc. I don't know, because normally it takes a person being put under considerable pressure before they decide what is truly valuable to them, and to what degree they are willing to sacrifice one goal for another.

I took a third option while going through my undergraduate years; I decided to not even get involved. I am not saying this as a sanctimonious thumbing-of-my-nose at those who did; these people have my respect for being able to work around the flaws and not be driven mad by them. The allure of being able to work on interesting problems with smart people tempted me toward working to get involved in research, but the glimpses I caught of the politics, mechanisms and incentives chased me away. My significant other at the time was involved in a research effort in computer vision, and the amount of inanity she tolerated, and even in some cases manufactured, killed the desire for me.

Since then, I've been told by a number of people I have the mind and personality for research work. Even if that were true, I know I don't have the personality for all the bullshit that comes with it. My philosophy on this is the same that jwz suggests for people thinking of working at a public company: "sometimes the only way to win is not to play."

So in my proposed system "publish" maps exactly to "get linked by this or that prestigious review panel".

Everyone who replied me seems to have missed that. Basically, review panels become journals turned inside out. They don't host the content, but they do certify it.

I've just finished my PhD, so I'm an expert in a very small field.

Yes, it is true that I've read a good paper that I do not care whether it is peer-reviewed, on arxiv, or just on a homepage. As long as it is of good quality and there is a way to cite it, I'll probably cite it in one of my own articles.

However, and I'm not saying this out of defense for the current system, you must understand that the system is also in place to filter out some of the complete and total crap some people dare to call research. I've reviewed articles that made my toes curl, because of bad grammer, bad presentation, or just duplicating another article with 10% of the article changed.

Already at the moment there are so many journals and magazines that I have to keep track of that I simply don't have the time to search the web or dig up things on arxiv. I simply have to trust some system to filter out the good articles.

This has the same failings as a system of information distribution where an aristocracy is given the authority to decide what is and is not important and correct. This introduces all sorts of random factors having nothing to do with any sort of objective measurement of the publication.

Those random factors don't even have to be nefarious; an expert in an area may not have sufficient sub-domain knowledge to fully understand the work of another author. The hope is that the publication is clear enough that they can, but every publication has to make a trade-off about how much knowledge they assume the reader has.

Each of these random factors chisel away at the intended meaning of the certification. If enough of these accrete, you end up with something that tells as much about a potential publication as a GPA does about a high school student. But then, people depend on things like that for hiring and promotions as well. It would be a damn shame if this is really sufficiently optimal that everyone stops working for better.

The problem isn't really the technology - the problem is the egos and the assignment of credit. It has been said that it's remarkable what can be accomplished if you don't care who gets the credit, but getting the credit is critical to the continuing employment of academics.

Solve that with technology and you've got a winner.

While this may be true in your field, my impression is that this isn't true in general. Can you offer specific evidence? Here's a page offering a different view: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/jono/item/toc.html

Computer Science

What's particularly galling about computer science publishing, is that our papers are some of the hardest to reproduce. I read too many papers where the idea sounds cool but I have no idea how to reproduce it. What's senseless is, I shouldn't even need to work to reproduce their experiment. We have a perfect, unchanging laboratory (a computer) and the most advanced language for discussing our experiments (programming languages), and we shrink our argument to 15 slices of dead tree.