On Mon, Oct 01, 2018 at 11:48:43AM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > 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. I feel like this is veering off-topic for this list. -Ben
