Posts by Bart Janssen
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Stuff’s ”the Crusaders only win because they cheat” opinion column
Poor example because McCaw and the Crusaders do cheat. All elite athletes push the boundaries of the rules, all push umpires and referees to get any advantage they can get. If you support the team, then they are playing to the limit, if you hate their red and black souls with a passion that defies the written word, they are cheats*.
Other than that flaw - there isn't much to comment on because everything in your post was correct. I do admire your blogging and the blogging of some of those you've mentioned - when I've been brave enough to follow the links.
*Did you know that it's perfectly legal to discriminate when employing someone on the grounds of which sports team they support :).
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And a couple more thoughts.
There are real costs to the peer review system. It takes time to organise editors and reviewers and hence money. It takes time to copy edit really well and hence money. Those are real costs. We need to figure out methods to pay such costs, it seems that the British funding agencies are willing to hold money aside for publication, which is given to publishing houses, perhaps that money might be better spent on administrators directly responsible for managing peer review networks.
I've never been paid to review a paper and I don't know anyone who has. So the peer review process really could be free from that perspective.
One argument in favour of retaining existing journals is that they gather information in one place. But they don't. Know scientist I know relies on a single journal. We all use search engines and intelligent agents to find relevant papers. those search engines find web sites and blog posts just as easily.
One argument is the journals set a "standard" that can be trusted. And you wouldn't be able to trust a random web site. I find it really hard not to laugh at such an argument, let me just say all journals have published garbage at some time.
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no idea how to evolve to cope with the needs of todays academics
This has been the topic of many a tea time discussion. The key word above is evolve.
Quite simply the current publishing system evolved over centuries. It's purpose was to disseminate scientific findings, observations, theories and discoveries as rapidly as possible and to as wide an audience as possible.
Yes the general public did indeed read the publications from the royal society in the tea houses.
Now if you ask any 13 year old how do you disseminate knowledge as widely and as rapidly as possible they will all give you the same answer ... use the internet. Blog it, tweet it, post it on your website. None of them will tell you to print hard copies and sell them to libraries!
So what we have is a system that evolved in a different technological environment. It still exists (in most but not all fields) because ... well mostly because of inertia. But there are some reasons why it still exists.
The journal publishers have large databases of peer reviewers and contact lists for editors and experts that can assess new work.
Many research institutes use publications as a method of assessing performance of staff. It's a crap method but lazy administrators and managers like using it because it can be crunched down to a number and converted into some kind of league table comparing staff. Where have we heard that before? And like all such league tables, it's crap because what is good in one field (one great book per career) might be crap in another field. But actually genuinely assessing performance is hard.
So what should science publication evolve into?
Here's one idea the Frontiers Journals.
In other fields eg physics most discoveries are on the internet being discussed and criticized on the web pages for each lab long before there is any "publication". The actual journal paper is more of a summary of all the input gone into a well discussed observation.
I really don't know what the final outcome will be, but my personal bet is that open access is a transition between what we have now and what will exist in the future.
My best guess is that given the power of search engines there is no reason why data needs to be aggregated at all. Each lab could publish their findings on their own website, colleagues/competitors could comment on the page and findings directly. Important discoveries will get more hits and more recognition.
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Hard News: Open or not?, in reply to David Hood,
increasing analysis of impact factors
For those who don't know, impact factors are a way of comparing journals. Theoretically a higher impact factor journal will be read by more scientists and papers within that journal will be cited by more scientists.
Hence administrators like to see staff publish in high impact factor journals, since they are more prestigious.
BUT
It's been shown that the impact factor of the journal is not correlated with how many times a paper will be cited.
For an individual paper it is how many times it is cited that is recognition of how important that piece of science was - except sometimes a paper is cited because it "merely" describes a useful method. You could of course argue that methods are as important to science as anything.
So journal impact factors are a bit of a false ranking system. But still one we use. Worse impact factors vary dramatically between fields. So for plant biology IF of 4-6 is decent but in other fields it would be awful.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to FletcherB,
the car should not stop working if I decline the offer
But the car does not stop working. It just can't go to the new streets.
Really, as Brian says, the iPAD still works it just can't use the new apps.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to David Hood,
Please don’t try to make A0 posters in Photoshop
That was why I learned to use Pagemaker and then InDesign (I say learned in the loosest sense of the word).
And a two hour course sounds good to me.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Brian Fairchild,
”..imagine if the manufacturer of your car disabled it unless you agreed for them to track you with the satnav?”
I think I understand Brian's problem now. And also the problem of the commenter. They both are under the impression that the price they paid for the hardware is the value of the item. Under that assumption it is entirely reasonable to expect updates to be free and for those updates to be free of conditions.
But for an iPAD you are not buying the hardware, no matter what it looks like. You are buying and paying for the design and software.
To flip the analogy it's like buying a satnav and expecting Mazda to supply the car that goes with it for free, with upgrades to the latest model for free.
And I really don't mean that to sound like I'm insulting Brian. It really is a difficult change in perception.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Which is pretty ironic, given what half the difficulty in high energy particle physics is!
Not really given their solution to finding data within an obscuring mess is to smash 500 trillion nuclei
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Russell Brown,
Money goes on marketing rather than actual technical skills.
But that’s what marketing folks are trained to do. It’s hard to blame them. they know how to make a logo, that’s easy. That have no idea how to retain the scientific content in a poster while making it look good, for them that’s hard.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Russell Brown,
Doesn’t that suggest that it’s in the interests of good scientists to communicate effectively?
It's worth noting that what you guys all assume is an easy thing, that is, seeing how a presentation could be made better, just isn't that easy for some people. It really doesn't come naturally to some people who are in other areas very talented.