Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Incomplete, inaccurate and misleading, in reply to Kim_Wright,
Does it matter if he is Foreman or Forman?
Well, if it's Foreman, then he could be the son of Bill and Diane Foreman, the ice-cream Queen, a name with a quite unfortunate connection back to the National Party.
ETA: What I mean is, they do have a son called Joshua. But I don't know if they're same person - he'd be only about 23 and might have nothing to do with it. Or maybe he is inspired by Slater. I can see that happening to a rich teenage boy.
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Hard News: Incomplete, inaccurate and misleading, in reply to truthgiver,
I suspect this time in three year’s time, Andrew Little will be the recipient of the same fickle treatment.
That will depend entirely on how successful he is between now and then. At this point, I wouldn't want to pick it. But I can pick this: I personally like what he says a LOT more than anything Cunliffe or Shearer ever said.
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Speaker: Market failure in the research world, in reply to James Green,
But how often are these people publishing with PhD students or earlier career researchers and feel like they can’t risk it?
Yes, they've already risked 10 years of their lives by that point. But I've often thought that they don't see it that way at all, and that it seemed like the path of least resistance to many a brilliant but somewhat undirected mind, which could go a long way to explaining the strangely selective risk aversion.
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Speaker: Market failure in the research world, in reply to Mark C. Wilson,
More interesting reading
There goes my afternoon! Thanks btw, for the reading and for the thread.
I and almost all my colleagues have rather large egos in some sense, or we wouldn’t be doing research at all.
I'll trust you on whether that is actually so, but have to ask, do you think it's a good thing that it is so? That cuts out a lot of people who might be valuable but just don't happen to be ego driven.
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Hard News: Incomplete, inaccurate and misleading, in reply to Kim_Wright,
How did he suddenly come across this ‘sensible new breath of fresh air from the left’
It could be that that is actually his opinion (hard to fathom though it may seem to any who actually are left wing). But Slater touted the guy for a while didn't he?
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Speaker: Market failure in the research world, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Sadly that isn’t true. My employer, a CRI, has very specific policies about staff web sites.
Right, as I expected. So,
We very very very rarely get told we can’t publish.
quite specifically excluded the most obvious and easy form of publishing implicitly. In the context of the discussion that makes sense. I'm sorry about that, it's a mindset I have not yet accumulated. But I do suggest that the mindset itself is the lion's share of the problem, and that no solutions will occur within the context that automatically leaves out the obvious. So long as researchers themselves personally value these exclusive journals so highly, this can not change. This can only get worse.
So to me the question is: Why do you value them so highly? Are they really providing you with value? I don't just mean the value of being published in them, but the actual reading of them. Is their ability to pick out the good research from the bad really worth so much? Or is it quite literally their exclusivity that generates their value, almost in its entirety? That you can't even get the research any other way?
It's bizarre to think of this kind of human pyramid existing. No wonder people don't want to get into research. It's not just the money, it's the very idea that the quality of one's work and ideas counts for so little compared to one's access to the information channels, and all the kudos grafting involved.
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Speaker: Market failure in the research world, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It’s quite another for me to make that decision for an early career scientist who is on the paper as well and the technician and my collaborators.
I'd expect you to sell it to them first, rather than just make the decision.
Also cheap is a relative term, generally it costs around $3000 for us to publish in an open access journal!
Sure, but we're talking about professional people here.
Also, that's not the only alternative. You could publish directly onto the internet at no more cost than the effort of setting up the site. Not that I'm saying this is the ideal path, but it is at least a possible path.
It shouldn’t affect our careers where we publish (only what we publish) but it does because the bean counters only know what the numbers (like impact factor) tell them.
I get that, and it sucks. You gotta eat. But I can't see any direction this is going to go other than intensifying, if the intellectual workers themselves, the actual producers of the only good in this picture, can't take the risk to free themselves from what are mostly self-imposed constraints. There is zero motivation for the journal establishment to reform itself from within. Quite the opposite, they have strong motivation to continue intensifying this.
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Hard News: Incomplete, inaccurate and misleading, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
/What on earth possesses Key
Good question.Could be below the earth, just sayin'.
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Speaker: Market failure in the research world, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But we don’t control our research finances at all.
No but you can publish quite cheaply. However, I take your point that the research itself is not cheap, and you can't just publish without permission if you don't own the research.
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Hard News: Incomplete, inaccurate and misleading, in reply to Russell Brown,
Have we reached #peakcray? Who knows?
Nah, we've only just reached the point of finding the cake saying "Eat Me". There's long chapters ahead before we get to the Queen of Hearts.
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