from Hacker News

Scientific publishing has been gamed to advance scientists’ careers

by DanielleMolloy on 9/29/24, 2:00 PM with 15 comments

• by DanielleMolloy on 9/29/24, 4:08 PM

  Here is the link to the full text:

  https://iai.tv/articles/science-publishing-is-a-multimillion...

  @dang: Could you edit this, please?

• by westurner on 9/29/24, 2:14 PM

  Grants, Impact Factor, can't publish or apply for a grant because I don't have university affiliation, Exclusivity agreement, you can only upload the preprint to ArXiV because you paid a journal an application fee and they're going to take all of the returns from distributing your work with threaded comments.

  What other industry must pay an application fee to give an exclusive to a government-granted Open Access research study?

  You should tell them that they must pay you.

  (And that they must host [linked] data, and reproducible containers, and code.)

• by orev on 9/29/24, 3:59 PM

  Science works on long (often generational) timelines. Eventually the charlatans are weeded out, even if it’s after they’re dead. It’s a messy process but you have to dig through dirt to find the gems.

• by jfengel on 9/29/24, 2:51 PM

  I can't find the actual text either, but boy, "squatters of the broken records of ideological mantras" rubs me the wrong way.

  I hear it all the time, from cranks who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. They first spew gibberish, then vitriol that people won't devote time to translating the gibberish. And they certainly won't listen, with the insuperable defense that any explanation from the scientific orthodoxy means you're part of the cabal.

  Yeah, there is a hell of a lot wrong with publishing. But it's not a "Ponzi scheme" because ultimately progress does get made. There is an underlying value that a Ponzi scheme lacks by definition.

  And we can't fix the real problems without a serious statement of the problem. Science is fundamentally hard. There are a lot of people doing a lot of work and nobody has time for more than a miniscule fraction. Keeping up is impossible, even when everyone is working in good faith, which not everyone is.

  Don't trivialize the problem by saying "the real solution is to listen to me and ignore everyone else".

• by stavros on 9/29/24, 2:38 PM

  Is the article somewhere? I just see a summary.

• by GeekyBear on 9/29/24, 3:14 PM

  Publish or perish is the root cause behind the flood of fraudulent studies seen in recent years.

• by jmclnx on 9/29/24, 2:36 PM

  Sadly, these days, seems every business eventually evolves into a ponzi scheme.

  It is like the theory about evolution to Crab like creatures over the eons, but for businesses :)

• by octopod12 on 9/29/24, 3:21 PM

  the title can be restated as "outcomes are produced by incentives" and applies to anything including: college admissions, climbing the corporate ladder etc. any system is gamed by its participants, and so, the system design is critical to ensure whatever the system wants to sustain.

  the design of disincentives (or punishments) is harder - coz you cannot jail a scientist for poor me-too publications, or papers that self-claim "an innovative approach to this or that"

  Just as in corporate orgs, or societies, the culture that is fostered plays a critical role. Once rot takes over, it is hard to eradicate.

• by drewcoo on 9/29/24, 10:19 PM

  Science is captured by money? Blame the scientists.

  Never ever blame the monied interests. That would be anti-capitalist.

• by daft_pink on 9/29/24, 2:47 PM

  I only see the summary but I am not sure the word ponzi is appropriate.