Whaaaat. I think my field is a lot more like math. Journals charging authors? That is some crap right there.
Possibly he was talking about medical journals? I'm not sure exactly what field he publishes in, but he does cancer and DNA repair stuff.
I've always had the sense that biology is uniquely cutthroat.
In the journals I publish in, authors are charged only if they want the paper to be open-access, or for having color figures in the printed version of their paper.
Some math journals have page charges but they are sort of voluntary.
Lots of journals in lots of fields.
Here's a list from some life sciences journals.
Oh I've heard cancer research is insanely, brutally cutthroat, like that nobody even works on positive results because all the action is in tearing other people's results down.
Huh. The fact that I didn't know 5 says something about my as-yet nonexistent publication record, I guess.
Anyway, down with journals! Journals suck! I don't know what to make of smart people like Cosma writing about the useful services that journals perform. I must be missing something, but I don't see how I'd be affected if everyone abandoned journals immediately.
Charging authors is more common in medicine, I think because the NIH requires free access to articles from their grabs. Makes it harder to raise money from libraries.
Charging for open-access doesn't seem quite as unreasonable to me.
The other day I got an email from some journal I've never heard of, based in India, asking me to join their editorial board. I checked their website and they've never published a paper in my field, but claim to have about 50 editors in my field, including one of my local colleagues. Not sure what's going on there. Is it just a way for people to pad their CV?
Isn't that just the academic equivalent of a wealthy heiress is in a bind, and will split the inheritance if she can only have your bank account information?
I believe your friend is talking about Journal of Biological Chemistry. You can see their instructions to authors here. $80 per page plus a stringent NBA-style luxury tax above nine pages is pretty steep considering JBC publishes about 500,000,000 articles a year.
Most journals don't charge. Except for color figures. Or to make your article open-access, which from many perspectives is better than charging to read the article.
I don't know about the "reviewers will steal my ideas therefore I will not submit my absolute genius-level ideas, only my brilliant ones" topic. There aren't that many nonobvious ideas out there. I would be more concerned about how grants all require you to send in preliminary data, and your potential competitors would see this preliminary data and think "Hmm, I thought that wouldn't work, but apparently it might. I'll get someone working on that." Which is sort of the same thing.
Ooh, you must get some weird-ass cold-emails, now.
it's a huge service department, and so relative to other departments, math departments are financially secure
And yet English and foreign language departments are always blamed for bleeding the university dry.
I don't know about the "reviewers will steal my ideas therefore I will not submit my absolute genius-level ideas, only my brilliant ones" topic. There aren't that many nonobvious ideas out there.
I dunno. He's an academic in his 60s and describes breakthroughs that he's (perpetually) on the brink of, so maybe it's an old school thing.
It's common in biology for several people to attack a known problem with a newly developed tool.
The culture's around competition, citation, and author lists is a little odd, skews competitive. Maybe a function of the dynamics (necessary to have many competencies to do good work) combined with field size is a contributing factor, or it's just habit at this point.
11. See: http://chronicle.com/article/Predatory-Online-Journals/131047/
17. The paper describing high-Tc superconductors was submitted with the wrong compund name, corrected after review but very shortly before publication.
There are numerous misconduct investigations having to do with reviewer misbehavior (sitting on the paper while duplicating the work), and there have definitely been sanctions. Don't know stats.
Not an academic, but the deal is that open access journals charge for publication, so that they don't have to charge a cover price (and the rest). This model seems to be acceptable to people in the fields affected, so I guess it works.
Some people are trying out this alternative approach.
11
The other day I got an email from some journal I've never heard of, based in India, asking me to join their editorial board. ...
Better than finding out that some Indian journal you have never heard of has reprinted one of your papers under a different name.
whoops, pretend that 18 is English.
/around/s//centered around/
/a function of/s///
I'm about to cost my boss $1800 to publish something. My best work so far. People I don't know personally might actually be interested in reading it.
Not an academic, but the deal is that open access journals charge for publication, so that they don't have to charge a cover price (and the rest). This model seems to be acceptable to people in the fields affected, so I guess it works.
Still a false dichotomy, though. Why does this amount of money flow to these journals? They don't even employ copyeditors. They don't pay us to review the articles. I guess some of the layout isn't computerized. Mostly they provide archiving and web hosting services.
I'm interested in a good answer to 24. AFAICT the journals I use are just giant cash cows for Elsevier and Springer. Reviewers aren't paid, there is no editing, and the journals aren't free. It seems like a big rip-off.
Isn't it a "why do dogs lick their balls" kind of thing?
I'm considering sending an article based on some of my PhD research to PLoS, which charges a bit over a grand, unless you don't have the funds to cover it yourself (and I don't). The upside is they'll only reject if your methodology is terrible. I've had this article rejected three times now as of this morning for complete horseshit reasons, by linguists, who are basically the pettiest, fussiest, and most factional people in academia.
One of the anonymous reviewers was also an anonymous reviewer on last go-round, which I know because s/he just copy-pasted the same comments. This would have been fine, except I'd changed the paper substantially - partly in response to his/her criticisms! So half the critique is pure nonsense now. Trying to gauge just how nasty I should be when I point this out to the editor now...
24. Why don't you write to one of the open access activists who are involved in these journals and ask. My impression is that most of them would be happy to answer questions about their business models asked in good faith.
because dog balls taste like lobster thermidor.
Uhh, I've been told.
15: It's because no one understands that the economics of the university for math and philosophy are pretty close to the same. But Math Is Important, and philosophers take their grant money, haven't you heard?
9 is correct, any research funded by NIH must be open access within 1 year, but if you're publishing to a journal that's not open access, you have to pay to open it up. Most of the top tier journals are not open access (since they're top tier, people will actually pay to read them) so if you want to publish in a good journal people will actually read instead of just stumbling upon when doing a literature search, you need to pay up.
To answer 24, that's really what the top journals are bringing is an audience to read your work that no one would ever care about otherwise. There are still some crappy journals that try to charge but they're not going to last long with that model- more often there are publishers (SAGE or Elsevier, the latter of which has their own problems) who aggregate access and make you or your library pay for crappy ones along with good ones.
I've got four so far this year (last one just came out Tuesday) but either I was just a collaborator so another PI paid, or our department just paid for it since we're not really PI based. One methods paper in press I am sole author, but those are more of a service to the company selling the methods books so they didn't charge me (because I would have told them to suck it.)
the pettiest, fussiest, and most factional people in academia
Quite a distinction!
33:Quite a distinction!
With Chomsky as our fearless leader, it was a remarkably easy one to achieve.
26: I suspect you are right. There's been a little bit of a revolt over this but it hasn't spread to plasma physics. I suspect that's because the funding situation is currently so dire that nobody is willing to risk rocking the boat.
17. The paper describing high-Tc superconductors was submitted with the wrong compund name, corrected after review but very shortly before publication.
I've heard a story that one group did this in the early days of high-Tc and the "wrong" compound they wrote about in the paper proved to be an even better superconductor than the one they had actually worked on. But I can't turn up any Google evidence and I suspect it's apocryphal.
PLoS seems to be one of the good guys. If they need to charge thousands of dollars to authors to cover their expenses and keep free access, it is likely that there are legitimate reasons to charge.
I'd like to put together a bioethics textbook out of open access material, and I keep hoping that PLoS will start covering more bioethics to make that possible.
The qualified uncertainty in 29 stems from the fact that Apo has never actually tasted lobster thermidor.
On top of that, people just freely share their math, and there isn't a fear of poaching, the way there is in other disciplines.
In a discussion about why the Arxiv became such a success among high energy theory types in physics, someone pointed out that around the time it got started it was standard practice in the field to mail copies of a manuscript around to your colleagues for comment before submitting it to a journal.
Apparently the Arxiv was accepted so readily because it was basically an electronic way of doing what people were doing already.
27: The reviewer should have told the editor they'd seen the paper before. I've done so in that position; they still asked for my comments from the previous go-round, which I provided only because the paper hadn't been changed at all from when I saw it last. I think a slightly sharp tone is warranted--ultimately it's on the editor for letting this through.
I'm betting linguists would get blown away in the bitchy and factional category by comp lit, art, or philosophy. But everyone thinks their family is the worst.
It seems like a big rip-off capitalist corporation.
That's better.
On top of that, people just freely share their math, and there isn't a fear of poaching, the way there is in other disciplines.
I dunno about that -- I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk, whose friend in Omsk has friend in Tomsk with friend in Akmolinsk...
When I search pubmed, I can't just get the full text of articles for free. I suppose that not all of the research is funded by the NIH, but how do I get the list of all the new open access, NIH-funded articles?
"pubmed" seems like it should be a "Cheers" knock-off about a bar next to a big medical school.
"How much does the round come to?"
"Oh, it's on the House."
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Sitting around, waiting for Hawaiian Punch's demerol to kick in so that she can have a bunch of cavities filled. They require two parents to be here! One to comfort the kid while the other drives home. Almost like after Fresh Prince's parents came off of their vacation to get him.
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On the mobile site at least, right after doing a search there's a link to filter by free full text only.
41: Anthropology ("The academic study of accusing each other of racism") is definitely the most factional, but I don't really think of them as "fussy."
They require two parents to be here!
So, single parents have to find another dentist?
49: Interesting! Is M/tch an anthropoligist?
No, they just have to borrow a parent.
50 was me, asker of random stupid questions.
I'm told on good authority that a high quality math journal costs $50/page. Not copy-editing would drop that cost non-trivially. Still that's way more than the $7/paper that it costs to run the arxiv. I don't totally understand where the rest of the cost is coming from.
PLoS One is definitely one of the good guys. Still, I think they should be able to get their fees lower than that.
Wishing pleasant druggy dreams and no pain for HP!
Annoyingly, I have no official academic affiliation this summer, and so all closed-access papers are suddenly off-limits to me. It's infuriating.
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Hawaii is still pretty hyper, 45 minutes after dosing. Only 15 more minutes for her to abruptly fall asleep.
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Somebody on one of my linguistics mailing lists sent an email to the list this morning with the subject "unsubscribe" and the body "sorry all, I don't see any other way to unsubscribe". (The actual way to unsubscribe involves logging in to the host site or something, I don't know).
Anyway someone else just replied to the message with instructions about how to unsubscribe from a support group list for Overeaters Anonymous. Wrong list! I feel so bad for her! What a shitty way to accidentally overshare with all of your colleagues and students. Ugh.
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|| Hee hee. Guy from Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Something (OASAS) just told us about icing in a training. He failed to use the term "bro."
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Increasingly hyper, actually. We're past when it was supposed to have taken full effect.
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Annoyingly, I have no official academic affiliation this summer, and so all closed-access papers are suddenly off-limits to me. It's infuriating.
Shoot me an email with the citation if you need something in particular. (That's a generally open invitation)
The definition of Anthropology in 49 made me laugh.
36. Are you always this careful? Chu's 1987 PRL has a revised MS received date on the title page.
63: I'm sure your version of the story is true. I'm not sure the other version / other story I heard in which the other compound was a better superconductor is true.
44. PubMed Central, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/
64. Sorry to snipe, my mistake. Yes, the other compound was Yb rather than Y, I don't know anything about it. Chu apparently didn't credit the grad students in Alabama who did the key work properly.
No, I wasn't clear. And yeah, the story I heard involved yttrium and ytterbium, so it must be the same one. But I think the claim that the ytterbium compound was a better superconductor was an embellishment added to make it a better cautionary moral tale, or something.
Dysfunctional as law reviews are, I almost wonder why other disciplines don't do a saner version of the same thing. Set up a journal in a prestigious department, slap the school's name on it to give it standing, have whatever appropriate academics in the school as editors, do the peer review with unpaid volunteers like the pay journals do now, give the grunt work to grad students as a TA/RA kind of thing -- it seems as if it should be awfully cheap and easy to do, and cuts out the for-profit middleman.
Law reviews are nuts because there aren't grownups acting as editors and reviewers, but if you change that, it looks like a workable model.
What would be the downside of just having a bunch of electronic journals that published everything that was minimally coherent, followed the basic layout (e.g. intro, methods, results, discussion, conclusion), and was not spam? Could you just "let the market decide" what was good or not in the short term, with various citation metrics?
69: I think you can and that's roughly how things work in a completely arxiv-dominated field like mine. But our putting papers on the web for free while being generally unwilling to shrink our papers down to four barely-comprehensible pages to publish in PRL seems to be interpreted as yet another manifestation of our stereotypical arrogance by everyone else.
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Aaaand back home again. The whole "parents are not allowed back in the dentist's room" totally backfired, and Hawaii was really not okay being back there by herself, and by the time they relented and called me back, she'd melted down to the point where it wasn't worth doing the procedure.
So we're out $200, and had an extremely hungry and tired three year old who is now finally getting some breakfast.
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we're out $200
Because they failed to manage the work they were supposed to do? That seems unreasonable to me.
71: The drugs will kick in any minute now.
No, for the cost of the sedative.
71,72: Also, this figure probably doesn't take into account the productivity lost from insisting two grown adults take off work and come in?
But it sounds like the sedative didn't work. I don't know, in reality I hate arguing over things like this and I would just pay it, but I feel like someone with more of a spine than me shouldn't.
Yeah, it definitely didn't sedate her. I think it's just really, really hard to do dental work on three year olds.
68: That sounds like the exact model of the one academic journal (in the humanities) in which I have been published.
It took absurd amounts of anesthetic to knock out Noah for his MRI a few years back. He'd look like he'd finally conked out, then would sit up and announce that there were birds flying around the room and laugh, and they'd push another dose through the IV. Wash, rinse, repeat. And repeat. And repeat. I felt an odd sense of pride about it: "My little man sneers at your pediatric dosing guidelines!"
Then he started to wake up during the procedure and had to have yet more pumped in.
The fundamental problem is that it makes no sense to pay market determined journal prices for academic work published in journals. The universities and governments (through some combination of private and state-sponsored charity) should just pay for the publication costs and open access, just as they support professors' salaries. Actually it sounds like in a somewhat convoluted way this is how it's starting to work (ie, the government pays for your grant, which in turn pays the journal for publication costs, which in turn requires some form of open access). That's a way better model than the weird mixture of private for-profit publishers and nonprofit culture of academia (which, theoretically, the government and nonprofits support in order to encourage the diffusion of knowledge) you guys complain about all the time.
I'm holding out for getting rid of journals altogether. Online archives for all! Or if people insist on peer review, online archives for some, independently curated selections from the archives for others. Or something like that.
How old is HP? Does she have strange teeth to have a lot of cavities already? Did the dentist not put sealant on her teeth? I'm sure that this is really nosy, but I've never heard of demerol for dental work, so the whole thing seemed strange to me.
There's a lot of internal budgeting issues that go into this. The library budget is not a part of a departments budget. There's a big difference between money coming from the government vs coming from universities. Furthermore, there's lots of people at lower-tier schools who publish very rarely whose schools don't get grant money, and someone has to pay for their articles. So although you're clearly right in the outline, there's going to be a lot of fighting to work out the details. And there's a lot of publisher lobbying and bribery money going into screwing it all up.
Totally off-topic, we should have a NYC meet up before I leave. How about some time next week?
79: I met somebody with PTSD, because he woke up during an operation and was in pain, but the anesthesisologist had left as soon as the procedure started.
but the anesthesisologist had left as soon as the procedure started.
Jesus Christ, remind me never to have surgery in America! The anaesthetist should be present throughout the procedure to control how deep you're under and ensure that you come round OK. What a bunch of amateurs.
86: true. That's malpractice right there. The gasman stays in the theatre throughout.
86: It's totally unacceptable here. He didn't do anything at the time, but he told another doctor and they went after the anesthesiologist in a big way.
That's a rare occurrence.
84: God knows I need a drink. Pick a day.
Bave? Smearcase? Teraz? Blandings? Jackm? Who am I forgetting who's local?
How old is HP? Does she have strange teeth to have a lot of cavities already? Did the dentist not put sealant on her teeth? I'm sure that this is really nosy, but I've never heard of demerol for dental work, so the whole thing seemed strange to me.
The enamel on her back four molars didn't form for some reason, (hypoplasticity). So she has a bunch of cavities. The sedative was recommended just to hopefully put her to sleep, so that it wouldn't be a traumatic experience.
But not as weird as my comment and its formatting.
69/70:
How would you sort the gold from the dross in that model? In other words, how would you know what to read in the first place? If it's just citation, doesn't that just reinforce the circle-jerk/reference system of the major departments? In the absence of Journal editors do you have something like music reviewers who wade through everything and try and lift up the scrappy newcomers? And for someone coming from outside your field, even, say, from a related but not-entirely overlapping field, how are they going to know what's worth reading and who to trust?
94 -- I have absolutely no idea whatsoever (in re how one knows what to read in the first place), but maybe it's fun to guess.
My guess: it's almost entirely done by institutional affiliation or reputation of the author. If something's coming from the University of Wyoming it doesn't get read unless everyone knows that Professor X at the University of Wyoming is a former grad student of famous professor Y at Harvard.
94: 81 goes there--suffieciently dedicated individual curators are indistinguishable from editors.
But for the curators to work, someone needs to pay them. I guess good curating could become a respected academic specialty that would get you a professorship, but is that how it works now?
Anyhow, I obviously have no actual knowledge of this field, but figuring out how Arxiv actually works and why it works seems important.
97.1: spoken like the filthy copyright apologist you are. Some people labor for love. Or just do the work when they're supposed to be doing something for someone else who is paying them.
Well, but that's not really a sustainable model, or, alternately, you'll get crappy curating. Or so I'd think. Obviously if it's a respected professional job paid for by universities to be the guy who culls through the mass of academic articles to select the gems (in roughly the same way that, if I understand things right, serving as a journal editor is seen as prestigious academic work that is an appropriate thing for universities to pay professors to do), then great.
I don't know, Halford, I think that the rise of the academic blogger militates against that view. Maybe not for long, considering the direction of so much of academia (i.e., poorhouse, adjunct-peril, etc).
90: Wednesday is my only sure bet for next week.
Just this morning I saw the evidence that time-since-publication is sufficient to explain the citation rates of cited papers (the one place left for the quality of the paper to matter was in the chance of getting its first citation). First and worst will do your h-number more good. Hence mad scooping, I suppose.
A couple of journals are thinking of switching to an arXiv-plus-bubbling-up model in which arXiv does the hosting and dating, and the reviewers and editors do about what they do now, only presumably less scooping. The hope is that brilliant papers from U Podunkus, Lvov, will eventually get their due when someone points out that they were available when the later Berkharvford work was apparently in process.
Also, *despite* the Price model, good papers make good fodder, and perhaps they'll get hoisted by people who want the results checked so they can be used.
Too bad so many fields can't use the law review model for knowing which articles to read: none of them.
103: I'm told that Brandeis's article on the right to privacy wasn't terrible.
some law review articles pop up near the top of certain law related google searches. they are usually pretty good. I wouldn't intentionally try to find a law review article though.
Also, *despite* the Price model, good papers make good fodder, and perhaps they'll get hoisted by people who want the results checked so they can be used.
One thing about the alternative model is I bet it would produce even direr popularizations!
Because any weird junk could be the same place as the greats? True.
It really is amazing how useless law review articles are for the practicing lawyer. Which might be OK, if law was a coherent academic discipline pushing the boundaries of knowledge in ways unrelated to legal practice. But, whoops, failing there too. Which might be OK if law schools were heavily focused on teaching people to be practicing lawyers. But, uh oh. I know and like a lot of law professors and it's a pretty sweet gig but it's hard to believe it should be a model for doing anything.
Is that a primarily American thing? I always got the impression that the UK law reviews tended to be a lot closer to the profession.
Legal history articles in law reviews are kind of like legal history articles in history journals. And similarly unlikely to help practicing lawyers.
94
How would you sort the gold from the dross in that model? In other words, how would you know what to read in the first place? ...
How do you decide now? Most published papers are dross. I don't think the filtering jounals do is worth the trouble.
Applied math seems to be fairly cutthroat, with lots of people working on similar things and competing for recognition/citations.
And for someone coming from outside your field, even, say, from a related but not-entirely overlapping field, how are they going to know what's worth reading and who to trust?
Shearer has it right, I think -- if you think that going by whether and/or where something is published now is a good guide to whether it's worth reading, you're fooling yourself. To the extent that this would be a problem without journals, it's already a problem.
I dunno, in math the top 10 journals really do put out very good papers, and the next 20 really are better than the rest. I don't see any function in sorting for quality for papers below those two tiers.
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Man, I really want to buy myself a Victorinox Huntsman with wood handles. Utterly unnecessary, but I can't stand the thought of not owning one.
Cultriditas radix malorum est
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Is that a primarily American thing? I always got the impression that the UK law reviews tended to be a lot closer to the profession.
It might well be. My only exposure to legal academia outside of the US was this place, which seemed to be at once (1) very theoretical and (2) very focused on active engagement with current developments (see, for example, this). If anyone's read some decent sociology on this, I'd be interested in hearing it, but my sense of things is that it has to with the greater dominance of legal doctrine (especially in the areas of European and international law) by academics and bureaucrats/expert officials rather than by generalist judges. This is at least as much a matter of institutional setup as it is of legal ideology.
115
I dunno, in math the top 10 journals really do put out very good papers, and the next 20 really are better than the rest. ...
I never paid much attention to journal reputation (of which I wasn't particularly aware). When browsing I looked for papers in my field and then sorted further by title, abstract and author. Once you find an interesting paper you can then check out the references, papers citing it and other papers by the same author. Mathematics is pretty specialized and it isn't too hard to figure who the stars are in any particular subfield you happen to be interested in.
Perhaps mathematics papers are a bit easier to evaluate (in terms of quality) than papers in some other fields where various forms of bias and experimental error are more of a concern. But referees don't have some magic crystal ball that will tell them if for example a striking experimental result is correct and important or incorrect and worthless.
117 -- law professors* in Germany have had a very different, and much more important, role in developing legal doctrine in Germany for at least 450 years.
*Basically, with a few exceptions like Blackstone, the Anglo-American law professor is about 120 years old whereas the civil law has been developed in universities since the middle ages, and the law professors have been especially important in Germany.
I still don't understand who does the gatekeeper/sorter of sand from gold function on Arxiv.
Basically, with a few exceptions like Blackstone, the Anglo-American law professor is about 120 years old
Now I understand the argument for mandatory retirement.
In history, a common, but not 100% reliable, method to judge what to read is to look at the book reviews. People read journal articles too, sometimes.
119.3: Nobody does it. (There are journals that put all of their papers on arxiv, but that's not the main way papers end up there.)
119.3: The arxiv has some automated filters to reject obvious crackpots. There are a few administrators in each field who control those things, I think. Sometimes they remove papers by hand or reclassify them into a different category. But it's really only the completely crazy stuff that gets filtered.
For our non-U.S. friends, there are professionally run journals for lawyers, but they're very practitioner oriented and not academic. I think that sometimes you'll see a professor publish something in one of those but it would be almost like a service rather than an accomplishment.
I knew they sometimes removed crackpot papers, but it's funny that they're sufficiently predictable that some can be automatically screened out.
Also OT, but I am going to be back in Narnia for the whole of w/c 25 June if anyone is around for a quick chota peg.
I knew they sometimes removed crackpot papers, but it's funny that they're sufficiently predictable that some can be automatically screened out.
One of the sections of the Arxiv that I browse regularly is Quantitative Biology. For a long time it was the case that, every year without fail, someone will post a paper in which they failed to understand information theory, mis-applied it, and concluded that they'd discovered the secret of life the universe and everything.
I haven't seen one of those recently, so maybe the filters are getting better.
125
I knew they sometimes removed crackpot papers, but it's funny that they're sufficiently predictable that some can be automatically screened out.
One thing that it is easy to do automatically is flag certain authors like Danut Marcu who I alluded to in 21.
Well, the current system requires anyone who wasn't grandfathered in to obtain an endorsement before posting anything on the arxiv. They basically filter out people without university affiliations, who can post only if they're vouched for as non-crackpots.
Another nice thing they started doing is flagging papers that have substantial text overlap with other papers on the arxiv, which has been interesting to see. Every so often this catches some plagiarism, but mostly it catches people who keep posting minor variations on the same paper over and over.
Apparently they started playing with an algorithm to detect plagiarism by looking for strings of several identical consecutive words, but realized they need to require more than 8 because of the common practice of starting the last paragraph of one's introduction with "The structure of this paper is as follows."
11
The other day I got an email from some journal I've never heard of, based in India, asking me to join their editorial board. I checked their website and they've never published a paper in my field, but claim to have about 50 editors in my field, including one of my local colleagues. Not sure what's going on there. Is it just a way for people to pad their CV?
It is also a way for the journal to try and inflate its reputation. The academic standards of some Indian Journals appear to leave a lot to be desired. See here for example:
SIAM also contacted Clyde Martin, who is listed as the journal Editor-in-Chief on the the International Journal of Statistics and Systems web page (local copy). Martin responded, saying that he himself was unable to contact the journal publishers. He provided SIAM with a copy of an email dated 27 April 2007 from M. Sreenivas to him, submitting an abstract to the journal, but the abstract and title were different from the one under consideration, and Martin had no further information on how the paper was published. On 14 September 2009 he also informed us that he had submitted his resignation as editor but received no response.
See here for more about the low end of the academic journal spectrum.
130: wouldn't specifically ignoring that phrase have been easier?
Probably that's what they do. Or some more sophisticated algorithm. I think what I heard -- second- or third-hand -- was that when they first started thinking about plagiarism detection they made a plot of number of text overlaps versus number of consecutive words tested, and found it falls off a cliff after 8, and were puzzled, and that turned out to be the reason.
127: Will you check in with Alameida? Unless of course you are Alameida, under a new pseud.
134: I'm not alameida - yes, I will, was wondering if anyone else is around.
I miss al, but being migraine-free is obviously more important than unfogged.
Please say hi for me if you do see her.
I can read out selected comments in a soothing voice.
What's the best way to contact her now that she's off unfogged?
I don't want to get too annoying for people who use it regularly, but as I say Arxiv is interesting. By "filtering" I didn't mean who serves as a gatekeeper to the site as a whole, but "how do you decide what to read." Do you really read everything that comes in that relates to your subfield? Or screen by prior knowledge/institutional affiliation of the author? Or not really read anything until it comes up as useful in a search for what you do and/or gets a lot of buzz?
I didn't mean who serves as a gatekeeper to the site as a whole, but "how do you decide what to read."
At least in my sub-field(s) there are not a huge number of papers coming out per day, maybe 5-15. Only a few of those are likely to be relevant enough to what I do to be worth reading beyond the title. So I've basically decided what papers I'll be keeping for a closer look by the time of finished my first cup of morning coffee.
I follow 4 subject headers on the Arxiv (math has 32 subjects). That probably misses a few papers I'd be interested in (there's two other subjects that I might be interested in), but since many papers are cross-listed in two it catches almost everything. That gives me around 20 abstracts in my RSS each day. Of those just reading titles gets it down to at most 5 that are actually of interest to me. From there it's easy to sort out what I actually want to skim.
Not all math papers are on the arxiv, but in my fields most are. It wouldn't add more than a couple minutes if they all were. We're talking about 15 minutes of easy work that I do while reading blogs. Really not a problem.
Now in medicine and biology there are way more papers so it might be harder.
The main function journals serve is in hiring and promotions, not in helping people read. They're way too slow to help for the latter anyway.
In History, I find journals serve two useful purposes. First, they really do serve a useful gatekeeper status in terms of filtering the best work. A paper published in AHR or Past & Present (or in my sub-field, the Journal of African History) is just plain likelier to be worth reading. The combination of open submission and blind review is not a perfect system, but does bring the process closer to equality. Second, while editors are not always sane and reasonable people, they often are and can work with people, particularly younger scholars like me, to get their materials in publishable form (Dunning-Kruger meaning that its often hard for us to know if our work is any good or not).
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It's because no one understands that the economics of the university for math and philosophy are pretty close to the same. But Math Is Important, and philosophers take their grant money, haven't you heard?
Math is useful and philosophy is useless.
144 is almost tautologically true, because whatever parts of philosophy have turned out to be workable get renamed (e.g. mathematics, psychology, political science, biology). At any given point in time, the questions that philosophy is still allowed to ask are the ones that are so hard that we haven't figured out a way to begin to answer them yet.
I myself have the answer to every epistemological question there is. I'm just not telling.
As in the famous toast: "Here's to pure mathematics, and may it never be the slightest use to anybody!"
Robert Harris makes great play in "Enigma" of GH Hardy's similar sentiments in "A Mathematician's Apology":
"There is one comforting conclusion which is easy for a real
mathematician. Real mathematics has no effects on war. No one
has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems very unlikely that anyone will do so for many years".
This was written in 1940.
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144 is almost tautologically true, because whatever parts of philosophy have turned out to be workable get renamed (e.g. mathematics, psychology, political science, biology). ...
You could claim the same of astrology or alchemy.
I feel confident 145 is eliding some subtleties, but in trying to figure out how to describe the particulars of what I'm confident about I ran across this article, which kinda cracks me for some reason (name of professor/last paragraph?).
In History, I find journals serve two useful purposes.
That's funny, I thought history was a field where only books count.
whatever parts of philosophy have turned out to be workable get renamed
Benquo, what are you doing to drive them away?
At any given point in time, the questions that philosophy is still allowed to ask are the ones that are so hard that we haven't figured out a way to begin to answer them yet.
I usually find that working on questions I have no idea how to begin to answer is not a very productive process.
James, did you really go into mathematics because it seemed useful? Of all the words I could use to describe the math classes I've taken, that one would be... probably nowhere on the list.
He's an applied mathematician. By definition, his answer to that question is "yes".
no one understands that the economics of the university for math and philosophy are pretty close to the same
"...all the mathematicians need is pencils, paper and wastepaper baskets. And all the philosophers need is pencils and paper".
84, 90, 101: I'm local (and soon to be getting more so), when's the meet up or did I miss it?
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James, did you really go into mathematics because it seemed useful? ...
I went into mathematics because I liked it, I was good at it and it had reasonable career options. One thing I liked about it was the low BS factor.
... Of all the words I could use to describe the math classes I've taken, that one would be... probably nowhere on the list.
You don't find the mathematics you have learned useful for doing physics?
I have certainly found that some of the mathematics classes I have taken taught techniques which have proved useful in attacking the type of problems I am interested in.
I solved a very minor open problem on Sunday! My colleague gave it to me to work on, in the context of "This is a good introduction problem for this area. My advisor gave it to me to cut my teeth on, when I started working with him." It turns out that the conjecture is false, and I've got a whole lot of counterexamples.
Yeah, it was super fun! I've been very absorbed in this problem for the past two weeks.