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Re Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they publish
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2018 15:20:48 -0400
Begin forwarded message:
From: Steve Crocker <steve () stevecrocker com> Date: March 20, 2018 at 2:46:35 PM EDT To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: [IP] Re Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they publish Jean has looked into this area more thoroughly than I have, which is good. But my brief comment was not intended to be casual or snarky. The syndrome I was referring to was the assertion relayed to me by multiple sources that publication in long-standing premier journals plays a strong role in academic advancement decisions because the evaluators tend to give significant weight to the journal in which a paper is published and perhaps less weight to the specific article. Thus, it is claimed, a modest article published in a highly respected journal may carry more weight than a landmark article in a more modest journal. To be fair, I don't have any hard data to back this up, nor do I know whether any studies have been done to test this assertion. But I am pretty sure this is a widely held belief. The effect is that established publications, particularly Elsevier's, benefit from this lock in. However, as Jean points out, the people like her who contribute the intellectual labor that creates the value of a refereed publication get little or no money, while the publisher collects the revenues. With the shift from paper to the Internet, the basic costs of publishing have shifted dramatically, but the cost of publishing refereed articles that count most in the world of academic advancement have remained high and burdensome. I'll acknowledge again that the above is stated without documentation of the actual facts, and thus it is fair and appropriate to examine the hypotheses. SteveOn Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 11:25 AM, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote: Begin forwarded message:From: L Jean Camp <ljeanc () gmail com> Date: March 20, 2018 at 3:28:51 AM EDT To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Cc: ip <ip () listbox com> Subject: Re: [IP] Re Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they publish Reply-To: ljeanc () gmail com Please do not confuse fake journals with real journals based on the business model of the actual journals. It is the reviewing process that is valuable not the publication process. Calling out reliable publishers as fake through a deeply flawed analysis is not helpful to the current state of affairs. This is not a trivial problem. Bad studies do not help. And neither does one-liners attacking academics and the tenure process. You publish this today as the House is calling for grant review by non-technical people for the National Science Foundation. Please do not be part of the anti-science problem. By filtering *after* the reviewing process of course the primary value of publishing is removed. These are only pre-prints because they have been filtered by editing. It was the filtering that identified these are acceptable that is the value added, and that filtering was done before the sampling. It is like filtering college students and finding that those selected in competitive engineering programs already know calculus, so what are we teaching, let's cancel those useless courses!? The paper you pointed to has clear contributions to a political agenda and the surrounding discourse but less clear contributions to the discourse of the value of peer review. It examine papers "which were taken from the arXiv.org preprint repository, and compared with the final versions that appeared," meaning that the editorial process was disappeared. I would also point out that people regularly update preprints to include the changes made in the final version. I would argue this badly designed polemic has received more, not less, attention that it deserves. It is published in a library journal likely for the resulting discourse because we *know* this is an important and difficult problem, not because this is a well-designed study. OMG, it is worse than it appears. They only look at papers with the DOI. You only add the DOI after the editorial process is complete because part of the DOI identified the publisher. OF COURSE THERE WERE NOT CHANGES! "we downloaded PDFs of every pre-print article from arXiv.org with a DOI that could be matched to a full-text published version" means they downloaded identical versions of articles, labeled as identical, and compared these to the same version looking for differences. Mostly these were not the same. Hooray! DOI works!! "So academics are all corrupt fraud whores" does not logically follow. I do not get paid to edit or review. Payment is associated with journal publication only occasionally and then only in the final round, where some journals allow payment for open access. There truly are fake journals with pay to publish, actual predatory journals: https://beallslist.weebly.com/ archived and updated at https://predatoryjournals.com/journals/ Most of these are >>>>>open access<<<<<, which violates the underlying presumption of your snark STEVE and SHARI - I call you out on this. None of them would be credited towards tenure. Any decent paper in them is a professional and personal loss. Then there are legit journals with a range of business models: https://doaj.org/ But 7% of those green-listed journals accepted a request to be an editor from a fake unqualified person. https://www.nature.com/news/predatory-journals-recruit-fake-editor-1.21662 Yes, academic publishing is struggling with how to value authors, reviewers, and editors. It is not "pay to publish". One other thing that computing academics are seriously struggling with in terms of "pay for publish" is academic conferences. These charge ~1,000 per person, in addition to travel and lodging. If you cannot afford to attend, you cannot publish. The travel-to-publish conference model is almost unique to computer science. In other disciplines, ironically, remote participation is enabled by having workshops and conferences being very low value, and only archival journal papers being considered valuable. This particular model of travel to publish also systematically excludes care-givers, (including women with children or first generation graduates who serve as the interpreter between their families and officialdom) in a way those journals against which you and Steve are objecting simply do not. Computer science should be more flexible and inclusive, but in part because of the role of conferences it is less so. Certainly academic publishing is struggling to recreate itself. I wrote about this in an extended riff about the age of code versus the age of print after reading Eisenstein: "Using the historical and sociological analyses of others, which have examined the results of print on perspectives and society, I offer four scenarios for the results of code. The four scenarios focus on the results of "code" on quantitative thought: 1) the divergence of scientific perspective with popular reasoning resulting in reduced innovation; 2) a broad-based popular explosion in innovation expanding the basis of reasoning; 3) cypto-anarchy with those empowered by science corrupted with the power; 4) and a loss of certainty of information with a return to tribalism. The last suggests a new era of ignorance, a moment in modern Dark Ages -- in that an excess of the light of information causes blindness as effectively as its absence. " I think we have opted for 4) and now call it fake news. I released the TrumpRussia network data because I had tenure. No one else on the team had that protection. Global climate change research depends on tenure. Attacking academics and the tenure process as if we were somehow bought and paid for in 2018 is destructive and is aligned with silencing. Is there not enough irrational hate of science and free speech today? Sheesh. Thanks for reading.On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 1:13 AM, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote: Maybe it should say “pay for tenure” Begin forwarded message:From: Steve Crocker <steve () stevecrocker com> Date: March 15, 2018 at 3:59:08 PM EDT To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they publish I looked into this briefly several years ago. The factor that sticks out like a sore thumb is the role these journals play in the tenure process. SteveOn Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 8:37 PM, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote: Begin forwarded message:From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> Date: March 14, 2018 at 4:23:06 PM EDT To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they publish Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com [Note: This item comes from reader Randall Head. DLH] Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they publish from the all-that-glitters-is-not-gold dept By Glyn Moody Mar 13 2018 <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180308/03225939387/research-shows-that-published-versions-papers-costly-academic-titles-add-almost-nothing-to-freely-available-preprints-they-are.shtml> The open access movement believes that academic publications should be freely available to all, not least because most of the research is paid for by the public purse. Open access supporters see the high cost of many academic journals, whose subscriptions often run into thousands of dollars per year, as unsustainable for cash-strapped libraries, and unaffordable for researchers in emerging economies. The high profit margins of leading academic publishers -- typically 30-40% -- seem even more outrageous when you take into account the fact that publishers get almost everything done for free. They don't pay the authors of the papers they publish, and rely on the unpaid efforts of public-spirited academics to carry out crucial editorial functions like choosing and reviewing submissions. Academic publishers justify their high prices and fat profit margins by claiming that they "add value" as papers progress through the publication process. Although many have wondered whether that is really true -- does a bit of sub-editing and design really justify the ever-rising subscription costs? -- hard evidence has been lacking that could be used to challenge the publishers' narrative. A paper from researchers at the University of California and Los Alamos Laboratory is particularly relevant here. It appeared first on arXiv.org in 2016 (pdf), but has only just been "officially" published (paywall). It does something really obvious but also extremely valuable: it takes around 12,000 academic papers as they were originally released in their preprint form, and compares them in detail with the final version that appears in the professional journals, sometimes years later, as the paper's own history demonstrates. The results are unequivocal: We apply five different similarity measures to individual extracted sections from the articles' full text contents and analyze their results. We have shown that, within the boundaries of our corpus, there are no significant differences in aggregate between pre-prints and their corresponding final published versions. In addition, the vast majority of pre-prints (90%-95%) are published by the open access pre-print service first and later by a commercial publisher. That is, for the papers considered, which were taken from the arXiv.org preprint repository, and compared with the final versions that appeared, mostly in journals published by Elsevier, there were rarely any important additions. That applies to titles, abstracts and the main body of the articles. The five metrics applied looked at letter-by-letter changes between the two versions, as well as more subtle semantic differences. All five agreed that the publishers made almost no changes to the initial preprint, which nearly always appeared before the published version, minimizing the possibility that the preprint merely reflected the edited version. The authors of the paper point out a number of ways in which their research could be improved and extended. For example, the reference section of papers before and after editing was not compared, so it is possible that academic publishers add more value in this section; the researchers plan to investigate this aspect. Similarly, since the arXiv.org papers are heavily slanted towards physics, mathematics, statistics, and computer science, further work will look at articles from other fields, such as economics and biology. Such caveats aside, this is an important result that has not received the attention it deserves. It provides hard evidence of something that many have long felt: that academic publishers add almost nothing during the process of disseminating research in their high-profile products. The implications are that libraries should not be paying for expensive subscriptions to academic journals, but simply providing access to the equivalent preprints, which offer almost identical texts free of charge, and that researchers should concentrate on preprints, and forget about journals. Of course, that means that academic institutions must do the same when it comes to evaluating the publications of scholars applying for posts. [snip] Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp-- Prof. L. Jean Camp http://www.ljean.com Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/L_Camp DBLP: http://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/c/Camp:L=_Jean SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=262477 Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wJPGa2IAAAAJ Make a Difference http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/govfel/congfel.aspArchives | Modify Your Subscription | Unsubscribe Now
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- Re Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they publish Dave Farber (Mar 16)
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