Category Archives: Opinion

Open access update

There is a lot of new material out there, and some older stuff I hadn’t yet seen. These may be useful.

Krakow trip

Last week I was in Krakow, Poland for COMSOC 2012. The meeting itself was intense (perhaps too many talks) and useful – I need time to digest it. The day before I walked around the central city as a tourist. My expectations were initially low, then built up by a little reading of Wikipedia. I found the Wawel Cathedral to be a good introduction to Polish history, which seems to have been rather difficult, full of invasion and struggles for nationhood. The Schindler factory museum of wartime Krakow was overwhelming, and emotionally draining, but very worthwhile. I didn’t manage to go / couldn’t face going to Auschwitz / Oswiecim, one of the main tourist attractions nearby. However I now have a better appreciation for the day to day brutality of Nazi occupation and more sympathy for the concept of Israel.

Krakow seems to have a large tourist infrastructure and overall it seemed to be doing well economically. English is widely spoken, which was just as well because my efforts to learn Polish were fairly ineffective. It is much harder than I had guessed. I recommend a visit to the city if you are intending tourism in Central/Eastern Europe.

Plagiarism: more, or just easier to detect?

In the last year I have seen a flood of stories on plagiarism, and academic misconduct more generally. In the world of journalism, there have been some high-profile cases: Johann Hari, Jonah Lehrer and Fareed Zakaria. In politics, several German politicians have recently been affected, including the Defence Minister.

In Zakaria’s case, it seemes at least plausible that the offence was committed by an assistant, and he signed his name to something without reading carefully. As pointed out by Richard Bradley,

people who seem like they’re doing much more than most of us could do in the same amount of time…probably aren’t really doing it.

There have been a few other recent cases of very “productive” and rather famous academics getting into trouble by overextending themselves, for example  Marc Hauser.  There has even been a case at my own university. Some of these cases involve plagiarism, and others falsifying data. The common thread is an attempt to cut corners and have the rewards without the hard work. Retraction Watch is often a good source of information on such cases.

In the academic sphere there have been some amazing developments in cheating lately: Hyung-In Moon’s attempt at influencing the peer review process is the latest one I know. It seems that the rewards for cheating are overpowering the penalties for being caught. Perhaps we need to work harder on ostracism, and explain to these people that it’s OK not to appear to be superhuman, or in fact better than you really are.

Division of labour in prepublication peer review

It seems to me to be a good idea to separate out the traditional refereeing (pre-publication review) functions. In mathematics at least, a paper should be “true, new and interesting”. It is often easier to check the first rather than the second, especially for less experienced researchers.  It makes sense for more experienced researchers to be asked for a quick opinion on how interesting and new a paper is, while more junior ones check correctness. This has some other advantages: if it becomes widespread, authors will have an incentive to write in a way that is understandable to new PhDs or even PhD students, which will probably improve exposition quality overall. It would reduce the load on senior researchers (I received an email yesterday from a colleague who said he had just received his 40th refereeing request for the year!) Doing a good job as a junior researcher could lead to a good CV item, so there would be an incentive to participate. Some sort of rating of reviewers will probably need to be undertaken: just as with papers that pass “peer review”, postpublication feedback from the whole community will be involved.

Full unemployment

A post at our departmental blog has reminded me that for many years I have been surprised at how unrealistic politicians’ claims of achieving full employment are. Technology and the market economy are driving in the other direction. For thousands of years people have been trying to work less. And in reality many jobs are of low quality and rather unattractive. Developed countries would have trouble even harvesting their own produce without cheap immigrant labour, for example. As less developed countries develop, the pool of cheap labour is reduced. Eventually we may have many tasks to do, but no one willing to do them. This may require an increase in the price of labour of fruit pickers and janitors, more use of automation, or clever redesign to eliminate the job altogether.

The creative destruction that means that many unskilled workers (e.g. in retail) lose jobs, while many other roles are created (e.g. in software development) may not reduce the number of jobs overall, but it certainly makes it tough for the unskilled. One problem is income, which in developed countries is less of a problem because of social transfers through the tax system. A bigger problem may be that idle hands do the devil’s work. If I didn’t have to work in order to maintain my current income level, I would probably do much the same as I do now, because a research career is a rewarding one (I might teach less and not do so much administration, and spend more time trying to help young children learn). I have an infinite number of things to learn about, and that is fun. However if one is unskilled and poorly educated, the sheer amount of free time might be hard to fill. I wonder how much of poor outcomes in terms of crime, health, etc of the underclass in developed countries stems from this basic deficiency of not knowing how to handle free time.

RIP Paul Callaghan

Dead of cancer at 64. I never met Paul Callaghan, New Zealand’s greatest public intellectual and by all accounts a thoroughly good human being. His vision for this country struck a chord with me. A basic obituary is in the NZ Herald.  Let’s hope that his work is not wasted. Productivity growth through better use of the mathematical and physical sciences is what we need.

Beyond the boycott

The boycott against Elsevier has been interesting so far. I have had some discussions with colleagues, most of whom have not signed. I am still struggling to detect any principled reason: worry about destroying the “brand” of the journal (from members of an editorial board of an Elsevier journal) is the only one I can sympathize with, although the fact (opinion, at least) that Elsevier has subtracted value from these brands after buying them from other publishers should be noted. Very few people have stated their reasons for not signing – Ariel Procaccia is a welcome exception. I suspect many researchers don’t give the issue more than a passing thought, others are too timid, and others like a free ride. Perhaps a few really think the current system is good, but in that case I would have to question their fitness for research work. The main feedback I have had informally is that it is all too hard, since they own the “best” journals in my field, I am an editor of one of their journals and I like it, etc. One interesting opinion is that although it is a problem, it will soon be fixed by advances in technology. I wish I could be confident of that.

In any case Elsevier has made some grudging concessions, so I guess that this will mean fewer people feel pressure to sign up. However, researchers shouldn’t have to waste their time to get such small concessions. The current system is clearly unsustainable and it seems almost impossible to imagine the commercial incentives of a company such as Elsevier ever allowing them to do what is right for society, or science/scholarship as a whole. Thus alternatives must be explored, and now is an important time for discussion. One forum for such discussions is Math2.0, which I read often and recommend highly.

Separating out the many related issues takes time and I will write several posts. For now, I have some concrete recommendations for mathematical researchers, none of them original to me. Many take very little effort.

  • Sign the boycott petition, or at least don’t work for journals that are exploiting free labour to make large profits.
  • Practice self-archiving rigorously. Use the arXiv and update your paper to the final accepted version. List all your papers on your own webpage. Encourage all colleagues to do the same – if you want to read their paper and can’t find it on their website, ask them to put it there.
  • Familiarize yourself with the policies of the publisher on author self-archiving. Stand up for your rights as an author (see this important article by Kristine Fowler in Notices of the American Mathematical Society).
  • When citing a journal publication, also give the arXiv version of the paper (if they are essentially the same).
  • Encourage those involved in hiring and evaluation at your institution to ignore journal impact factors and use article-level metrics and other more nuanced measures.
  • Encourage granting agencies you deal with to require open access to all publications associated with grants they award.
  • If you are on an editorial board of a journal run by Elsevier or the like, talk to your co-editors about moving to another publisher with better practices, or at least registering your displeasure to the current publisher and tell them they need to change if they want to keep you. Discuss with other editors of other journals, and share approaches that work.
  • Find out what your professional society (AMS, IMU, …)  is doing about these issues, and whether its publishing arm is helping the cause of open access, or harming it. Get involved on committees in the organization where possible.
  • Talk to your institution’s librarians. Find out what they can offer in terms of institutional repositories, hosting journals, etc.

 

 

 

The Elsevier boycott

There is a lot of information available about this, including the petition page, the official statement explaining the petition,  the PolyMath journal publishing reform page. I won’t repeat that here. This is just a note to say that after an internal struggle, I have signed the petition. Some of the details of this publisher’s bad behaviour were new and rather shocking to me. It is clear that a new system for dissemination, archiving, and evaluation of research is needed, and this boycott looks like a necessary, though not sufficient, step.

 

A downside to double blind review

A discussion started by Daniel Lemire reminded me of this issue. I recently participated in refereeing for a CS conference using double-blind review. I noticed an issue that I have not seen mentioned before (for example in the IMS Ad Hoc committee report). Several papers were not accepted, but they had some good ideas. If I now write a paper building on these ideas, I have no idea whom to cite or credit. I suppose I could ask the programme chair to put us in contact, but of course that may not occur for a long time (especially given the speed at which I can write papers these days). Still, this seems an obvious drawback not shared by single-blind review.