adminprof

I think you're missing two fatal problems in this "publish all raw data and code" mindset. I don't think the desire of commercialization is high on the list of fatal problems preventing people from publishing data+software.

1) How do you handle research in domains where the data is about people, so that releasing it harms their privacy? Healthcare, web activity, finances. Sure you can try to anonymize it, anonymization is imperfect, and even fully anonymized data can be joined to other data sources to de-identify people; k-anonymity only works in a closed ecosystem. If we live in a world where search engine companies don't publish their research because of this constraint, that seems worse than the current system.

2) How does one define "re-runnable processing"? Software rots, dependencies disappear, operating systems become incompatible with software, permission models change. Does every researcher now need a docker expert to publish? Who verifies that something is re-runnable, and how are they paid for it?

It seems like it's just that the goals are different. Computer science researchers could also make the opposite case, "The underwhelming impact of software development on producing state-of-the-art computer science discoveries."

I think your comment is pretty spot on. Just three things I'd add to, are that 1) the advisor is not intentionally downgrading your letter to "just good", but it's that they're obligated to write a better than "just good" letter for someone who has been more productive both in terms of research and in being a leader in the community (these two things go hand in hand). Writing the same letter for two students regardless of what they accomplish would be unfair.

And 2) sometimes getting more funding is simply not possible, as in the advisor has basically reached the limit of what they can do. There's a limit to the number of proposals that one can submit and the number of calls that fit their research agenda. So what I think you're missing is that if an advisor has less funding, there's going to be more pressure to finish sooner and less freedom to explore ideas beyond what's written in a previous grant proposal.

3) I've never heard of a tenured professor that concerned about their publication rate. In fact, most of them don't even update their CVs or websites with the last few years of papers. It's always the student who is trying to get more papers.

Students are users of a class, as much as a dentist is a user of a dental software application. Neither were involved in the making of the class or software. Both were delivered the experience as designed by the course staff (instructor and/or TAs), or software team. Both only see the final product after months or years of development, done by specialists trained for many years even before that.

The error you're making is stating that "students are involved in the entire process" which is laughable. Many classes have gone through years of iteration, and even new courses take many months to develop before students set foot in the classroom, not to mention the years of experience and education needed to get the instructor to the point that they can even make a class in several months.

I'd like to see in a forum for dentists a thread where they offer clever suggestions for how to change software development. Clearly, all these dentists have used plenty of software before.

They would have seemingly great ideas like "programmers should get 10% of their pay docked each time I encounter a bug in a program" or "the real solution is to hire someone to test the program from start to finish before releasing it".

I bet programmers on Hacker News would be livid upon hearing these suggestions, but seem to have no problem announcing their clever solutions about other disciplines (not excluding myself).

Simply, because using absolute points would lead to debate over every single decimal of a point. A student with 89.95% would be determined to fight to get 90.05% and then continue to fight to get 90.15% so it only makes the problem worse.

This doesn't work when I've tried it. How many students or times have you implemented this policy? First, it doesn't make sense when the regrade is most objective (like points were calculated wrong, or the grader didn't see something that the student wrote). And if you say that it doesn't apply for straightforward grading mistakes, then you get emails asking you whether something is a grading mistake or has the chance of lowering a grade.

And I've tried this policy before, and got students who wrote in my course evals something like "the professor intentionally tries to scare students from asking for regrades by threatening to lower their grade even more." And then what about when you are still asked for a regrade (which in my experience was not zero, but maybe about a third or half as much as without this policy). In those cases, you end up doing way way more, so the level of effort actually increases.

He seems to have good intentions, but does not seem to have knowledge of IRB which may make this situation worse.

Specifically, he confuses "does not constitute human subjects research" with "exemption" which is a pretty big difference and anyone who works with human subjects should know this.

From his Twitter thread, "Update: They are now saying they have an exemption. They have not made any forms available or explained the lack of informed consent."

Exemptions are protocols that have been reviewed, and deemed exempt based on one of 8 very specific criteria. Studies deemed not constituting human subjects research are returned by the IRB, and not considered reviewed.

Given that the authors actually said "...to the Princeton University Institutional Review Board, which determined that our study does not constitute human subjects research" this is clearly NOT an exemption, and informed consent is not a consideration as far as the IRB is concerned.

Sure, as someone who has also been on both sides, that's not what I was describing at all though. None of the examples I gave are handled by an editor, except maybe "managing issues dealing with misconduct" depending on the situation, but maybe by the publisher's legal team. But the other issues are not handled by an editor in my experience.

So I think your assumption that academic publishing is "a website hosting up PDFs" is the source of confusion for "what justifies this much money." Just like AirBnB isn't just a website hosting JPEGs, while being worth 129 billion dollars. Hosting PDFs can already be done by arXiv or Google Drive or Github as you said.

Customer support is for peer reviewers who can't log into their account, for managing issues dealing with misconduct, for handling issues with payments, for post-publishing corrections and errata, for passing accounts from editors who become non-responsive to other editors, etc. Not just dealing with readers or subscribers.

This comes up every time there's an article about academic publishing. Yes peer reviewers do the reviewing, but it's the long-term infrastructure and coordination that the journal provides.

AirBnB's content is generated by users, but AirBnB itself requires software development, legal, customer support, HR, program managers, quality control, etc. Same with publishers.

Note that this journal now has a publishing fee for authors to cover these costs, rather than a fee for the reader as before. The 2022 fee for each author is $1,705 according to the FAQ. So moving to open access it not about removing the costs (which many people on Hacker News seems to always assume), but changing who pays for it.