Connectionists: Approaches to Publication

[Rothganger, Fredrick]

There are some other approaches to publication we could consider.

1) Something like Wikipedia, but which allows original research like Scholarpedia, where people collaboratively build up a knowledge structure about a topic. In this case, credit assignment can come for the revision log and the significance of the edits you make.
2) Something like arXiv, where you make article available without peer-review. In this case, the strength of an article is determined by how many people link to it. Articles can be made visible to search engines rather than a specific editor or group of peer reviewers. Perhaps criticism could be handled via a talk-back section, which would be equivalent to a rebuttal section in some journals.
3) Personal/lab research blogs. This would be a good place to post software and data, and to talk about negative results.

All these are enabled by fairly recent (last few decades) technology. Our culture is only slowly catching up. Part of the problem is that we are in constant competition for funding, so credit assignment is a big deal.

I dream of a world where competition for basic survival is no longer an issue, where people practice science, or art, or serve in other professions, merely because they love to. That world is technologically possible, but I don't see it happening in my lifetime, due to cultural issues.



[http://scholarpedia.org/w/images/thumb/d/d5/SET_book_cover.jpg/90px-SET_book_cover.jpg1zB]<http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page>
Scholarpedia<http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page>
Experimental determination of the CKM matrix. Sébastien Descotes-Genon et al. (2022), Scholarpedia, 17(1):54385. In the development of particle physics describing matter at the smallest distances, it has proved possible not only to understand the structure of the proton and the neutron in nuclei as made of two types...
www.scholarpedia.org







________________________________
From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> on behalf of Tsvi Achler <achler at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2022 2:14 AM
To: Fellous, Jean-Marc - (fellous) <fellous at arizona.edu>
Cc: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu <connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Connectionists: [EXT] If you believe in your work ...


I think the recent trend (starting 70s& 80s) of having articles accepted for publications based on peer review is a problem because it adds more politics to every small decision.
Academic governance, which started in the middle ages, is not democratic and is actually rather dysfunctional: think tenure type politics.  The less of it the better.

It may be better to go back to just having a single editor decide if an article is worthy.  That way at least more novel ideas can be presented.

Of course the other problem is paid journals which have low costs (in these days of the internet) and free labor and skim lots of money for unclear reasons.  Also realize most innovative researchers are on a shoestring budget because of politics.  It is an awful combination: journals love the peer review system because it lets them act like they are bringing value by adding more politics and obfuscating the skimming.

-Tsvi


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/connectionists/attachments/20220720/654d9b64/attachment.html>