tags: #research #scholarly-publishing
Dear reader, I have been blogging for a long time. More often than not, I am writing for myself, mostly my future self, but I am aware that just over 140 folk have subscribed to get updates for my blog, and I am grateful for your attention. I tend to decide to send email alerts for posts that are most specifically related to scholarly publishing, and in particular about events of interest, trends around technology and scholarly publishing, and over the last year, things that might point to how AI may be changing what we are doing.
I really believe we are at the start of a great and interesting journey, that how science is done will evolve, and that everyone can play a role in thinking about these changes, sharing what we are seeing, and even imagining great futures.
As we crack open the door to a new year, I wanted to share some whimsical thoughts about what might be true (or not) about what we do when we do research, or when we engage in the social systems of research. This is not too serious, but it is interesting to me that there are many quite contradictory positions that could be true in different contexts at the same time, so here is my list of things that might be true:
- If you are an honest scientist, you can get sufficient feedback from your close network, and you don’t need peer review, or maybe even journals!
- Closed networks can be highly exclusionary, and peer review by strangers helps to break out of those silos.
- It is easier to get funding for ideas that are accepted by your community of peers.
- Ideas that get embedded in communities can lead to stagnation of a field.
- Top scientific disciplines are probably well understood, but there is a need to anoint new research.
- Much low-impact research is time-wasting and performative.
- The act of learning how to write papers and be in a community requires participants to write.
- The data is probably more valuable than the paper.
- No one gets credit for the data.
- It’s an oddity that we don’t check identities in any verifiable way in scholarly publishing.
- At scale, market forces are the only non-centralised, non-coordinated mechanism we know how to operate that works across geographies and legal systems, which can support the diversity of approach that science needs.
- Most research funding comes from centralised, coordinated local post of money.
- Publisher profit margins at the top end are extractive of funds flowing into science.
- The amounts extracted remain a tiny fraction of the funding flowing into science overall.
- The profit motive drives more efficiency into the system than if it didn’t exist.
- People are using AI right now to read, write, conduct research, analyse data, and to do peer review.
- AI will write papers that are better than papers that are being written by humans today.
- No one will care that AI will write papers that are better than papers that are being written today because the AI won’t try to self-promote its own work.
- A high-quality human review is invaluable.
- There are not enough reviewers for the volume of content published.
- Some publishing models have thrived by focusing on speed and removing the pain of review; researchers have reacted enthusiastically.
- The public does not understand what peer review is.
- There is no one single thing as peer review.
- The “peer review” label is used to grift, scheme, and politicise.
- Academics demand high-value signifiers such as the CNS brand.
- Chasing after this label distorts the act of doing science.
- These brands can be used to capture market share.
- No one knows what the right pricing model is, but every pricing model has some folk who are absolutely certain that it is the wrong one.
- Editors from these journals can provide great service to their authors and communities.
- History is the only true arbiter of quality and impact.
- No one working today can wait for "History”; so, we make do with proxies.
- All the proxies are broken; some may be more broken than others.
- Real-world impact does happen; the world does get better.
- We all have filters; journal names are a great filter, even if you don’t like them.
- The technology of publishing is stuck in the 1990s.
- There is more technology innovation now than ever before.
- Not very much of this innovation is financially sustainable.
- It’s cheaper to innovate now than it has ever been.
- It is no easier now to shift entire embedded systems than it has ever been.
- Governments have been the biggest driver of standards.
- Governments don’t want to distort the market.
- Grant givers are the only entities that can compel behaviour change in researchers.
- Researchers are the only groups that set the agenda for funders.
- No one knows what institutions do, but whatever it is that they do, they have been doing very well for over a thousand years.
Tags from OpenAI:
scholarly publishing, research, technology trends, artificial intelligence, peer review, research funding, data science, market forces, publication models, academic branding, technological innovation, government regulation, grant funding, institutional roles