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164 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 17 Jan \ on: The strain on scientific publishing science
I pretty much agree with all these suggestions except #5. I don't trust AI to offer proper summaries, and I don't think the writing is wasteful at all. Oftentimes, as I try to explain my ideas in writing, I realize holes in my ideas that I didn't notice before.
The thing is, we have the tools necessary already for productive scientific collaboration, like github. Moving to a more open source model would be super fruitful, I think. Competition should be between projects, and hypotheses, not between people and labs.
The reason I don't see it happening (in my field at least) is that it is asking the people at the top to give up a lot of power, as well as exposing themselves to a lot of risk. When their work moves to a more open source model, they won't be able to manage their reputations or the narratives about their work as easily. Why subject yourself to that risk when you are already at the top of your profession?
Why subject yourself to that risk when you are already at the top of your profession?
Yes, case in point, I got to know about this paper through a fellow academic who left academia a few years back. He could not reach the top. He hence has a clearer view of what is wrong and how it disadvantaged him in securing a permanent position in academia. Yet, he's likely a better scientist, both in coding and physics, than many people that I know at the top.
We're trying to move to a more open-source approach in the lab I am in now. The problem that I see in our case is that academics are notoriously messy and lack proper documentation of code. Also, time. Why would one bother doing this extra work when so much is already asked outside of actual research?
The whole system needs to change. There are fundamental flaws that make it extremely hard to change things, even incrementally.
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Some funding agencies, especially in Europe, are pushing people to move away from the opaque and closed-source editing houses.
I am applying for a job there, and I can really feel how in Korea, my number of publications matters most, while in Europe, they try to assess many other metrics.
Of course, I'm not naive to think that my papers with Springer journals won't carry a higher weight than the ones in other open-source journals in the final grading. But at least, there is a clear intent from the EU to change things, for the better.
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