Post-mandate, I've been submitting to closed access journals and getting OA on the side for free due to the mandate. Pre-mandate, I only submitted to paid OA journals, and paid ~ $3k each time for it.
The article claims the solution is "every government grant should stipulate that the research it supports can’t be published in a for-profit journal. That’s it! If the public paid for it, it shouldn’t be paywalled." That's an equivocation fallacy. Whether a for-profit journal publishes the work at some point is orthogonal to whether it is available un-paywalled, which it now must be.
You say that publishers replaced subscription fees with APC charges, but I haven't seen this happening when I've submitted papers recently. Journals need new submissions or they lose mindshare. Authors are price-sensitive and will shop around. Starting a new journal isn't that hard (it can been done as a side project) so high margins will likely be undercut. I have no idea why the author chose to pay a $12k APC; they probably didn't need to. Finally, closed-access journals will have residual subscription income from their closed-access archives for many decades; if the author wants to kill that income stream off, their proposed solution will not do it. So while I agree with the article's condemnation of the publishers, who are certainly no friends of science, I think it's wildly off-base on pretty much every other point.
Author-pays APCs are even potentially a good thing as long as they aren't much higher than the cost of publication. Universal APCs would provide some pressure against publishing many low-value papers that aren't really worth the time it takes to read them. The paper spam is kind of getting out of control.
The article's discussion of how the open access mandate works is wrong. Federally funded research, when published (even in a closed-access journal) must be deposited in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ or a similar repository.
Edit: OA advocates have won pretty much everything we wanted, there's not much left to be outraged over.
Evaluating a function using a densely spaced grid and plotting it does work. This is brute-force search. You will see the global minima immediately in the way you describe, provided your grid is dense enough to capture all local variation.
It's just that when the function is implemented on the computer, evaluating so many points takes a long time, and using a more sophisticated optimization algorithm that exploits information like the gradient is almost always faster. In physical reality all the points already exist, so if they can be observed cheaply the brute force approach works well.
Edit: Your question was good. Asking superficially-naive questions like that is often a fruitful starting point for coming up with new tricks to solve seemingly-intractable problems.
> Discussions with different stakeholders suggest that many currently perceive systematic fraudulent science as something that occurs only in the periphery of the “real” scientific enterprise, that is, outside OECD countries. Accumulating evidence shows that systematic production of low quality and fraudulent science can occur anywhere.
From supplement (section about the output of the "ARDA" paper mill):
> We obtained 20,638 documents and were able to impute country of authorship for 13,288 documents (64.4%). Of these documents, more than half were solely from India (26.4%), Iraq (19.3%), or Indonesia (12.2%).
The identity and reputation of the authors, and the publication venue, is (for now) still a strong signal when evaluating the credibility of an article.
The article is spot-on though in that there is a real risk of paper mills infecting formerly reliable journals, and this is not helped by the publishers' commercialism. For example, it used to be easy to ignore Hindawi journals (they are characteristically low quality); then Wiley started publishing them under its own brand. The good is now mixed with the bad under the same label. Practicing scientists can fall back on whether they know the authors personally but that doesn't really help non-practicing professionals or the general public.
True, but the RF coils do get turned on & off. Heating of non-magnetic metal from the radio waves used for scanning is another concern, not just magnetic force.
Even extremely privacy-conscious authors could submit their paper to the service at the same time they publish their preprint v1, then if the service's feedback is useful, publish preprint v2 and submit v2 as the version of record.
Industry research is generally R&D (applied science, engineering research), not basic research (basic science). Not to disparage either; both are needed, but they are quite different and a person may be suited to one but not the other. It can be hard for someone looking for work to determine where an organization's focus is, as an outsider.
Multiple comparisons and sequential hypothesis testing / early stopping aren't the same problem. There might be a way to wrangle an F test into a sequential hypothesis testing approach, but it's not obvious (to me anyway) how one would do so. In multiple comparisons each additional comparison introduces a new group with independent data; in sequential hypothesis testing each successive test adds a small amount of additional data to each group so all results are conditional. Could you elaborate or provide a link?
The intent of the Bayh-Dole Act was to deal with a perceived problem of government-owned patents being investor-unfriendly. At the time the government would only grant non-exclusive licenses, and investors generally want exclusivity. That may have been the actual problem, moreso than who owned the patent. On the other hand, giving the actual inventors an incentive to commercialize their work should increase their productivity and the chance that the inventions actually get used.
Once something has a predictable ROI (can be productized and sold), profit seekers will find a way. The role of publicly funded research is to get ideas that are not immediately profitable to the stage that investors can take over. Publicly funded research also supports investor-funded R&D by educating their future work force.
The provided examples do not clearly support the idea that industry can compensate for a decrease in government-funded basic research. Bell Labs was the product of government action (antitrust enforcement), not a voluntary creation. The others are R&D (product development) organizations, not research organizations. Of those listed, Xerox PARC is the most significant, but from the profit-seeking perspective it's more of a cautionary tale since it primarily benefited Xerox's competitors. And Hinton seems to have received government support; his backpropagation paper at least credits ONR. As I understand it, the overall deep learning story is that basic research, including government-funded research, laid theoretical groundwork that capital investment was later able to scale commercially once video games drove development of the necessary hardware.
The median sample size of the studies subjected to replication was n = 5 specimens (https://osf.io/atkd7). Probably because only protocols with an estimated cost less than BRL 5,000 (around USD 1,300 at the time) per replication were included. So it's not surprising that only ~ 60% of the original biomechemical assays' point estimates were in the replicates' 95% prediction interval. The mouse maze anxiety test (~ 10%) seems to be dragging down the average. n = 5 just doesn't give reliable estimates, especially in rodent psychology.
I can confirm that some (30%?) mechanical and biomedical engineers follow the described problem "solving" strategy exactly. It's not just software engineers.
Prioritize work by ROI and alignment with the institution's mission, communicate the prioritization to relevant decision-makers in your management chain, and actually follow through on it unless coerced otherwise.
Edit: There's no guarantee this will work out positively—nothing is guaranteed—but it's worth considering if the alternative is giving up / changing careers.
> Well, obviously the part-time thing will bring a reduction in my institutional teaching and admin duties. I have to say there is uncertainty about how much relief will arise in practice
As someone who has tried something similar, institutional bureaucracy expands to fill all available time. People engaging in bureaucratic empire-building will still happily consume your personal unpaid time. And splitting attention between multiple lines of work creates some legitimate additional overhead, which doesn't help.
I'm not sure what the winning strategy is. I think it is necessary to either get out entirely or play the bureaucrats' "system-game" to some degree, but not on their terms and not fairly. When the bureaucracy demands useless work, maximize their costs and minimize yours. Many academics constitutively cannot make themselves do a lazy, poor job, but is a useful skill to deploy defensively so that you can fulfill your education and research responsibilities. Often you'll find that the bureaucracy only cares about the superficial appearance of compliance; the actual actions performed are irrelevant to them. Shift responsibility to some other part of the bureaucracy and use LLMs to generate boilerplate. If the bureaucracy never attempts to punish you in any way, that may indicate you're being more compliant than necessary. This approach is safest if your retirement plan is fully funded and you don't truly need to keep the job. It is also helpful if at some part of what you do is visibly important to someone who does have power; this helps deflect consequences when you accidentally step a over a line. Everything depends on context and execution though; I hope the part-time approach works out for you.
Securing the funding often means writing a research plan that is interesting and convincing enough to be selected for funding in a competitive review process (80–97% rejection rate). The plan usually represents a substantial intellectual contribution that serves as the foundation for derived papers. As long as the people who join the project later don't freeze the planner out of the paper writing process, they'll usually meet all authorship criteria.
The upvote and downvote buttons are a couple millimeters apart on mobile and there's no feedback (that I've noticed, anyway) regarding which one you've pressed. There's probably a lot of accidental voting.
> Or, better yet, the gay satanic-panic currently gripping half the country, and the insane culture war being waged around it. You can't actually believe that all those people who have strong opinions about it have been somehow personally wronged by homosexuals.
Or the satanic panic over Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. One of the cops ("school resource officers") in the middle school I went to still believed in that nonsense and it was the early 2000s by that point.
This is really cool and has a lot of potential. Academic papers are dense and heavily cross-referenced, so experimenting with new display formats that do more to help the reader could make researchers a lot more productive. For example, citation tooltips are a big time saver compared to cross-referencing the bibliography. However, it's also beneficial for every paper to look the same because this makes skimming easier. To get both innovation and consistency is to develop tools, like Arxiv Vanity, that automatically transform the source document. This example makes me hopeful that we'll someday have similar tools for the commercial publishers' papers.
As for immediate tweaks, I tentatively suggest making the text 100% black (like the original PDF) instead of rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8). The higher contrast will help those of us with less-than-great eyes.
The article claims the solution is "every government grant should stipulate that the research it supports can’t be published in a for-profit journal. That’s it! If the public paid for it, it shouldn’t be paywalled." That's an equivocation fallacy. Whether a for-profit journal publishes the work at some point is orthogonal to whether it is available un-paywalled, which it now must be.
You say that publishers replaced subscription fees with APC charges, but I haven't seen this happening when I've submitted papers recently. Journals need new submissions or they lose mindshare. Authors are price-sensitive and will shop around. Starting a new journal isn't that hard (it can been done as a side project) so high margins will likely be undercut. I have no idea why the author chose to pay a $12k APC; they probably didn't need to. Finally, closed-access journals will have residual subscription income from their closed-access archives for many decades; if the author wants to kill that income stream off, their proposed solution will not do it. So while I agree with the article's condemnation of the publishers, who are certainly no friends of science, I think it's wildly off-base on pretty much every other point.
Author-pays APCs are even potentially a good thing as long as they aren't much higher than the cost of publication. Universal APCs would provide some pressure against publishing many low-value papers that aren't really worth the time it takes to read them. The paper spam is kind of getting out of control.