On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 11:38 AM Randy Bush <randy@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> This could be made to matter to tenure and promotion committees
if you mean academic, like ha ha.
The traditional academic lit model is dying. There is actually scope to replace it but we can merely be part of a wider movement.
Governments throughout the world are tired of paying billions of dollars for public research that can only be accessed by paying ridiculous amounts to publishers of academic journals that pay for precisely none of the material they publish. The editors, the authors, everyone gives their services for free. Not surprisingly, governments are starting to prohibit publication of research paid for with public funds in journals that are not open access. They control the grants, they can easily trample over what the publishers imagine to be their rights.
But there is a much deeper problem in that the model of publishing that has arisen was never designed to support grant giving or tenure track promotion. That is an emergent property of a process it is ill suited for. The current model encourages a whole series of detrimental behaviors such as data hoarding and minimum publishable units. Much of what appears in the academic lit is rubbish because it is what is publishable rather than what is useful. The easiest way to a tenured chair is to concentrate on timid projects that are more or less guaranteed to provide publishable results. Risk taking is discouraged, failure is punished.
