[GOAL] Re: [Open-access] Re: Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke

Wed Nov 7 17:52:39 GMT 2012

Marcin said:
The statement that "scholars publish for prestige" is an euphemism for
"scholars are careerists who care more about tenure than quality and
meaningfulness of their research". I don't believe this.

I most definitely do not believe that myself for a minute. I don't do
euphemisms. The young and untenured need to publish in prestigious journals
for career survival. I don't see why that needs to be turned into the
negative "careerism". If you want to be a researcher, you need a compelling
cv. Publications are a big part of that.

Changing the system should primarily be a responsibility of senior faculty
and university administrators. Unfortunately, they are beneficiaries of the
current system, give it more value than it deserves, and are probably too
cautious in their attempts to change it.
--Eric.

http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com

Google Voice: (626) 898-5415
Telephone:      (626) 376-5415
Skype: efvandevelde -- Twitter: @evdvelde
E-mail: eric.f.vandevelde at gmail.com

On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Marcin Wojnarski <
marcin.wojnarski at tunedit.org> wrote:

>  Eric's distinction between publishing for communication or for prestige
> is quite thought-provoking, if not provocative. Does anyone have an idea
> how many authors fall to each group? What's more important for majority of
> academics: communication or prestige? ...
>
> I think there's a misconception regarding prestige and its real
> significance. This issue has been raised many times recently in discussions
> about OA: the frequently repeated claim, expressed also by Eric in his blog
> post, is that *scholars publish for prestige* (and for: high metrics,
> tenure, "exposition", benefits, rewards, incentives, ...) - that's why
> adoption of OA is slow and costs of traditional journals are high. Do you
> think this claim is true?
>
> I don't.
>
> The statement that "scholars publish for prestige" is an euphemism for
> "scholars are careerists who care more about tenure than quality and
> meaningfulness of their research". I don't believe this. I don't believe
> that majority of academics are careerists who don't care if their papers
> are read by anybody. Suggesting that entire academic communication is
> nothing else but a PR bubble (prestige! prestige!) driven by primitive
> rules of social darwinism - is not just totally wrong, but also offending
> to academia. Maybe 5% of academics are careerists, the other 95% are
> extremely interested in whether their papers have *real* impact or not
> ("real" in contrast to "measured by IF"). I mean: they have a deep *hope*that their research will ultimately have an impact. I'm convinced that this
> hope accounts for at least 90% of motivation of those people for becoming a
> scientist and doing laborious research job that's compensated with a half
> or 1/3 of what's paid for similar skills outside academia.
>
> The key problem is that prestige of the journal and size+quality of
> potential audience for the paper - are correlated. Every author who
> respects his own work seeks as large and reputable audience as possible -
> not for prestige (!) but for the ability to communicate own discoveries to
> people who are able to understand, appreciate and make use of them. That's
> why authors must rely on prestiguous journals even if prestige itself has
> no value for them! (BTW, looking at the society as a whole, I think
> scientists are the people with *least* respect for prestige, compared to
> any other community).
>
> The way to change the situation is by decoupling communication potential
> of journals from their perceived prestige; and by enhancing visibility of
> small, niche, low-prestige journals. The focus must be on communication,
> community and readers; not on prestige.
>
> -Marcin
>
> --
> Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIThttp://tunedit.orghttp://www.facebook.com/TunedIThttp://twitter.com/wojnarskihttp://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski
>
> TunedIT - Online Laboratory for Intelligent Algorithms
>
>
>
> On 11/06/2012 09:58 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>
> Copied only to the OKFN open-access list.
>
> It may be useful to consider the question: "what can we do to change the
> situation?" - the OKF has a strong tradition of building things to change
> the world. The distinction between publishing for communication and
> publishing for reputation is valuable. Maybe by changing and improving the
> former (which I think OKFN is well placed to do) we can separate them.
>
> On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Leslie Carr <lac at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Publishers are capitalists - I don't think they'd argue the point.
>>
>>
> This is a generalization. Many learned societies and scientific unions are
> not capitalists.
>
> --
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
>
>
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