That's a valid, but still weird take to me. Academic publishing takes a very long time. Every paper I was involved in took many months from submission to eventual publishing (completely ignoring the time it takes to prepare a submission).
Ioannidis published something extremely controversial (if not even flawed) and one of the main authors he attacked responded with a lengthy explanation so that this manuscript would not remain unchallenged. I found that aspect way more important than the venue of response. Would you prefer to leave Ioannidis' work unchallenged for potentially months instead?
Academic publishing is a conversation between academics. No one paper is truly authoritative and only with time will the highly cited well regarded contributions make themselves known within the academic community (and eventually outside of it too). The time horizon between publication and "impact" for most academic work is usually (or should be) in the range of 10-20years. In the rush for funding and "impact" university PR machines (and scientists too) are forced to make flashy statements about the latest new sensational, tenuous at best implications of their findings. Boring, rigorous, incremental work has no place in a media driven funding cycle. This is a real problem and one we need to think about how to resolve.
Having said that, scientists are not perfect either. As an author, problems of honesty and reproducibility in science trouble me greatly. That's why on our recent papers (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/qjump/pubs/2015-n... and http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/musketeer/pubs/20...) my coauthors and I have gone out of our way to make the original unprocessed data sets and detailed experimental descriptions easily available. If you take a look inside of our papers, you'll find that all of the substantial figures in the papers are clickable giving direct access to original datasets on our websites. Although not perfect, this is a start down the road of more easily testable and reproducible work. To our great surprise, only a few weeks after publication we've already got requests from people trying to reproduce the results in different environments. This suggests to me that this kind of approach both can work, and really should become the minimum standard in academic publishing.
Having a paper published can take a very very long time, a year is quite short and 6 months is basically the minimum wait. My last paper has taken 2 years to be accepted from the first time I submitted it, despite it being largely the same as the initial submission, accepted as part of my thesis over a year ago, and having several citations. It is very frustrating, and it also means that easier (and less original) work is easier to publish.
The time argument is the thing that really turned me off. In my one published paper we wrote the draft a full two and a half years before it saw the light of day. One referee didn't like it, so it went through a review process, then got bumped down to a lower journal (PRL to PR-A for the physics folks) started the acceptance process again...
Even in CS where things are mostly conference oriented, you're still probably looking at close to a year between finishing the research and seeing it published.
While I have a lot of critics for Academia in particular regarding code publication or reproducibility or the chase for the next conference paper, this is completely uncalled for.
Their real world constraint is publish or perish, and they do have a timeline: the next conference. And their requirements does not include usability and maintenance.
Also writing a good paper is a long endeavor, often frustrating, sometimes with politics involved.
In my experience a significant fraction of the time it takes to publish a paper is spent waiting for the journal. During that time you can do other useful research. The long delay between submitting, getting through the reviewers and the actual publication is one of the reasons why for example in CS a lot of the interesting stuff happens in conference publications with fast turnarounds and the journal versions of the same paper appear a year or two later.
You neglect the costs of submission, revision, resubmisssion etc. which are borne by the authors. Even if we assume that all involved are pure of heart and no one is deliberately delaying publication of their rivals’ work submission to publication in economics is on the order of two years. This is insane so the actual intellectual conversation has moved to working papers with final publication being in a journal being as much for archival and career progression metrics as anything else. I believe the situation in much of computer science is similar, with conference papers serving as the workaround for the fact that pre publication peer review is unbearably slow, not working papers.
Peer review happens anyway, but faster, and in public, without the insanity of revise and resubmit.
Journals are not where the action is in Economics or Computer Science. It works for them. Why not for everybody?
>instead, your motivation is to push through as many papers as possible.
I think this is an assumption that doesn't have to hold true in practice. Maybe it's biased by the 'publish or perish' paradigm that's pervaded academia, but there's no reason to replicate the same problem elsewhere.
Alongside the other major problems with publish-or-perish mentioned in other responses, most people's ability to fulfill their job requirements is not decided by a program committee of 30 colleagues from other workplaces looking-over the reviews given by 3-5 anonymous colleagues, but actually written by their grad-students, based on a bare-minimal reading of your actual work.
A software engineer can commit his code when it compiles and/or when the unit-tests pass. An academic might spend months writing and revising a paper, only to be successively told, "Too many examples", "not enough examples", "there's a bug in your proof", "I can't understand this so it must be brilliant", and finally "too long, didn't read". The paper is then not published, and at minimum the academic must revise the paper and resubmit, taking several more months.
After maybe 6 months, the academic might have succeeded in getting one publication out of one project, and he has to be running multiple papers' worth of projects concurrently throughout the whole year to make sure he produces enough papers each year.
I on the contrary find it perfectly reasonable. Academic publishing has its own share of bullshit and I can well understand someone, specially a retired person, wanting to give up on that kind of prestige in order to save time and energy for actual science. For example, as far as I know, Grigori Perelman has not published the work that won him an offer of the Fields Medal in any journal.
As a former academic I find this kind of behavior antithetical to the principle's of science. The scientific publishing industry is archaic and a burden on the progress of science. These journals are gatekeepers for both consumers and producers of public research. I've worked on some research projects that took nearly 2 years to get published after the all of the data collection and analysis had been already completed. The peer-review process can always be over-ridden by the editors and it is the editors who get to choose who reviews the research. So instead of having all of science practitioners to bear on work, it's a select group that an editor deems worthy. Despite all of our technology, the politics of control remain the same.
Perhaps this problem is worse among biomedical journals? I've routinely had publications in ACS journals that go from submission to acceptance within two months, usually closer to one---I hear the same from colleagues.
(I also post the PDFs and links to code on my website, as well.)
> What’s the role of an academic journal in 2020?
Partly peer review, partly signaling game, and partly exposition/advertisement/reach of papers. Those are, of course, all intimately linked in scientific fields.
> I’d love to see more blogging from hard science academics
I think a lot of them have taken the Twitter route! There are a few who also have their own somewhat-updated blogs (myself included).
> I’m wondering if there’s a reason why that’s challenging or if it’s just academic culture.
The problem is kind of general, though: (a) writing good, useful blog posts takes a long time, especially when attempting to distill the topic even further for a general audience, and (b) writing (good) papers really does take a long time. (Of course, there are many, many poorly-written papers, but, unless the results are truly incredible, almost nobody spends time deciphering them.)
For example, I think I'm a fairly fast/decent academic writer, yet on a given paper, I spend roughly half of the time doing research and the other half of the time finding the right presentation/abstraction to present, along with writing and editing a given exposition to make it clear and legible. Any given paper will take me =20 total hours in structuring, writing, and editing (not including research hours). Reviews can take =40.
The problem with academic papers and stamina is that most of them are bullshit produced only to further the author's career and not to produce new knowledge or inform anyone at all.
Publish or perish has side effects, consequences, and pitfalls.
Sorting out which papers are bullshit, lean on scant evidence, were funded by organizations who want an outcome, or exist solely to meet a requirement for the author to advance towards a PhD is time consuming and almost never worth the effort.
That is ultimately why we pay people (civil servants, etc) to figure this shit out on our behalf when implementing regulations.
Conferences and journals are merely marketing venues, and there is no reason to slow down the field by clinging on to flawed review process. If you adopt this attitude you will only find co-authors and students abandon you for fear of getting scooped.
Ioannidis published something extremely controversial (if not even flawed) and one of the main authors he attacked responded with a lengthy explanation so that this manuscript would not remain unchallenged. I found that aspect way more important than the venue of response. Would you prefer to leave Ioannidis' work unchallenged for potentially months instead?
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