Scribd is a step backwards. If they wanted to create value, they could HTMLify PDFs (similar to the Gmail feature or the Google preview page) instead of showing them in a stupid flash window.
You just brought up a great idea. Google can do it, but on a limited basis. A startup that could convert pdfs, word documents, and latex files directly to HTML+CSS, with negligible loss of quality, would be MASSIVE.
Of course, this requires browsers to standardize, and step 0 is for IE6/IE7 to disappear off the face of the earth. And if IE8 can't keep up with the other browsers, then it should go too.
Seriously, what you propose would be super useful.
What's wrong with PDF? It's an open standard and displays beautifully on screen or in print. I can resize it to any size and it still renders perfectly (except for embedded bitmaps of course). I'd much rather read a book in PDF format on my screen then have to hope that a website renders properly at a size that is comfortable for reading.
The main downsides to PDF are that it is not supported in all browsers, especially mobile or embedded ones and even in the browsers where it is supported, it is implemented as a plugin and so is slow to load.
PDFs open in 3sec on this computer. That seems small, but html+css pages open almost instantly.
There are lots of nice things about PDF, but when almost everything else I'm viewing is html+css it's unpleasant.
I don't agree. I can't reformat PDFs. I can't apply my own style sheets. If it's in two columns, I'm just screwed. With a website, I can resize the text, I can edit the style, etc.
Not to mention that it's completely broken in Chrome on linux. The only thing I could do to read it was click on the document and use the down arrow or page down button. I should've googled the name before submitting the scribd link I guess. Next time.
I truly don't understand why academics put up with journals. If I were in the biz, I'd be organizing a torches-and-pitchforks mob to burn them down and replace them with arXiv, personal websites, and peer review panels who link to good papers.
Because that's not how you get funded. Your funding/tenure, etc are related to where you publish, how often you publish, etc. It's a systemic issue, a system designed for a different era which just does not translate to today's science
So in my proposed system "publish" maps exactly to "get linked by this or that prestigious review panel".
Everyone who replied me seems to have missed that. Basically, review panels become journals turned inside out. They don't host the content, but they do certify it.
But is there really a difference then? Hosting the content is a tiny proportion of the work involved in running a journal.
If you're going to go through all the effort required to peer-review and certify work, why wouldn't you also throw up a website and collect the papers you certify?
A larger part is deciding what not to host, given the crazy old-fashioned notion that journals ought also to have dead-tree versions, and therefore each paper costs them quite a lot for a small print run.
Why would actual science come in neat magazine-sized packets? It's obvious they must be normalizing the signal, either by floating the cutoff or just picking until the slots are full and trashing the rest.
A review panel that doesn't have to pay some company to stamp ink onto wood pulp can afford to link as many, or as few good papers as arrive. And, they can afford to do this asynchronously, as soon as they arrive.
That is kind of what the Faculty of 1000 does today. Essentially picks papers regardless of source that they feel is significant. Perhaps in the future that will be the role of Science, Nature, etc with papers getting published all over the place. Of course, the whole peer review process needs an upgrade too, although I don't know if peer review as a concept is going away (nor should it)
The system needs to be redesigned, yet there is very little catalyst for it to be redesigned. People are still more motivated to turn their interests inward, to things like funding, publication lists, tenure, etc. The system is designed to reward those who selfishly work to maintain the status quo. This isn't me passing judgement on these people, just a realization that they are only doing what provides them with the greatest incentives. In a similar situation, I might do the same.
But it is also a realization that this isn't just a shallow local minimum. The lifestyle and security of many researcher are tightly coupled to getting funding out of this system, and thus is tightly coupled to following the rules of the system. Either some external force is going to have to shove this system aside, or the members of the community are going to have to collectively accept the pain of a governing body seeing the writing on the wall and attempting to regain control. With the system as entrenched as this, it would have to be a coup of epic proportions to unseat it. The only other option I can see is this system remaining in perpetuity.
I noted above that being in a similar position, I'd probably work this system the same way most everyone else does. I might provide the usual excuses as well: family, food, survival, lifestyle, etc. I don't know, because normally it takes a person being put under considerable pressure before they decide what is truly valuable to them, and to what degree they are willing to sacrifice one goal for another.
I took a third option while going through my undergraduate years; I decided to not even get involved. I am not saying this as a sanctimonious thumbing-of-my-nose at those who did; these people have my respect for being able to work around the flaws and not be driven mad by them. The allure of being able to work on interesting problems with smart people tempted me toward working to get involved in research, but the glimpses I caught of the politics, mechanisms and incentives chased me away. My significant other at the time was involved in a research effort in computer vision, and the amount of inanity she tolerated, and even in some cases manufactured, killed the desire for me.
Since then, I've been told by a number of people I have the mind and personality for research work. Even if that were true, I know I don't have the personality for all the bullshit that comes with it. My philosophy on this is the same that jwz suggests for people thinking of working at a public company: "sometimes the only way to win is not to play."
All the things you mention are fine for dissemination but publishing in journals in not really about that any more; it's about certification.
Experts in your area---those who can actually understand your paper---mostly won't care whether your paper's been peer-reviewed or is just on the arxiv. You get it published mainly for folks who can't (or don't want to have to) understand it. You put up with all the crap this entails because the latter category usually includes people responsible for hiring you, promoting you or awarding you grants.
I've just finished my PhD, so I'm an expert in a very small field.
Yes, it is true that I've read a good paper that I do not care whether it is peer-reviewed, on arxiv, or just on a homepage. As long as it is of good quality and there is a way to cite it, I'll probably cite it in one of my own articles.
However, and I'm not saying this out of defense for the current system, you must understand that the system is also in place to filter out some of the complete and total crap some people dare to call research. I've reviewed articles that made my toes curl, because of bad grammer, bad presentation, or just duplicating another article with 10% of the article changed.
Already at the moment there are so many journals and magazines that I have to keep track of that I simply don't have the time to search the web or dig up things on arxiv.
I simply have to trust some system to filter out the good articles.
This has the same failings as a system of information distribution where an aristocracy is given the authority to decide what is and is not important and correct. This introduces all sorts of random factors having nothing to do with any sort of objective measurement of the publication.
Those random factors don't even have to be nefarious; an expert in an area may not have sufficient sub-domain knowledge to fully understand the work of another author. The hope is that the publication is clear enough that they can, but every publication has to make a trade-off about how much knowledge they assume the reader has.
Each of these random factors chisel away at the intended meaning of the certification. If enough of these accrete, you end up with something that tells as much about a potential publication as a GPA does about a high school student. But then, people depend on things like that for hiring and promotions as well. It would be a damn shame if this is really sufficiently optimal that everyone stops working for better.
The problem is that your articles get measured by the "quality" of the journals that they appear in.
The problem is that the whole system is fundamentelly broken and it is going to take a complete mindshift of everyone involved to change that.
The OpenAccess movement is something that may have a chance now that funders are also seeing the positive effects of it. But this is going to take years to change.
Depressingly close to my experience, and one of the reasons I left academia, despite significant offers to stay.
I long for the day when collaborative media allow multiple authors to converge on an agreed paper. Those that disagree can converge on an alternative paper, and readers can see for themselves the data, reasoning and conclusions.
The problem isn't really the technology - the problem is the egos and the assignment of credit. It has been said that it's remarkable what can be accomplished if you don't care who gets the credit, but getting the credit is critical to the continuing employment of academics.
Solve that with technology and you've got a winner.
> - the problem is the egos and the assignment of credit.
Yep. I'm not in academia, my prior education level precludes me but I dated a lady who was and over the years I have come to simply loathe the infighting and politics that academia has become mired in.
I really wonder how many good or maybe even great scientists leave academia because they're sick and tired of the whole spiel to find a job in some company somewhere.
Don't disagree on that point at all. I don't think the credit system is going away. Academics need some incentives to do what they do. If not money, it has to be credit, or some other system. It's frustrating, and one reason I went straight to industry as well.
I'm studying for a PhD at Cambridge, UK, and I'm seriously interested in fixing this. Well, maybe fixing the whole thing is too big, but I'd like to try :-)
Anyone know of anything worth getting involved with? Anyone want to work on an alternative to journals?
One thing you really should at least do is retain the copyright of your own paper. Journals will allow you to retain copyright and almost all rights of your paper if you just ask for it.
While this may be true in your field, my impression is that this isn't true in general. Can you offer specific evidence? Here's a page offering a different view: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/jono/item/toc.html
Elsevier sends you a draconian form by default. If you tell them that you're a PhD student and want to retain copyright and later publish your article in your thesis, then they will send you a new form.
That form lets you keep the copyright, keep the right to publish this on your homepage, keep the right to publish this later on paper, et cetera. It takes some courage, some pushing and patience, but you will get it.
This is one of my papers, note that it explicitly says on the webpage that I have the copyright: http://bit.ly/PBKqx
What's particularly galling about computer science publishing, is that our papers are some of the hardest to reproduce. I read too many papers where the idea sounds cool but I have no idea how to reproduce it. What's senseless is, I shouldn't even need to work to reproduce their experiment. We have a perfect, unchanging laboratory (a computer) and the most advanced language for discussing our experiments (programming languages), and we shrink our argument to 15 slices of dead tree.
Computer Science is one of the places where dead tree publication is going the way of the dodo pretty soon I think.
Results can come very fast, and one of the top journals can take 18+ months to review and publish an article.
Computer Science is one of the places where dead tree publication is going the way of the dodo pretty soon I think.
The flag day for this, as alluded to in another thread, will be when fund-raising and faculty appointments stop being closely tied with dead tree publications. There's been ample time for that transition to happen, but not all the interested parties seem so motivated to change things.
I did not exactly mean it like that. You see more and more magazines and journals offering their accepted publications online first.
It will not be long before that will become the main mode of how people learn about these articles.
I heard a presentation by the Public Library Of Science (http://www.plos.org/), who apparently are attempting to correct some of the problems of journals. For example, all their articles are publicly available on the web and they allow comments to be posted on the web. They claimed to considered to have some of highest "impact" journals in their fields.
Of course, some of the problems cited by the author of this piece could have to do with disagreements among experts. He may think his comment and his point is compelling but other experts may simply not think what he's saying is relevant and not be interested in giving him a forum. A more transparent process might only change things to the point where the folks on top would be forced to be more upfront about saying who is right - even wikipedia has transparency of debate and right-to-reply issues.
http://www.physics.gatech.edu/frog/How%20to%20Publish%20a%20...