<story><title>Let’s Publish Everything</title><url>https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/29/lets-publish-everything/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>petschge</author><text>(I agree with the parent poster, but this seems like the right place to add the following.)&lt;p&gt;One thing that people who claim &amp;quot;the scarcity is gone, let&amp;#x27;s just publish everything&amp;quot; do miss is that there still is a scarcity: The time and attention of researchers.&lt;p&gt;Let me expand a bit on that from my own field of studying reconnection in astrophysical plasma. As you can tell from the description it is not a well defined closed topic. Instead there is tons of more or less adjacent fields. The study of solar flares (which might be triggered by reconnection), the study of coronal heating (the heat might be due to magnetic field getting converted to heat by reconnection), astronomical observations of AGN jets (reconnection might be what produces energetic particles there that we see in the SDE of those sources), observations of pulsar wind nebulae (the energetic particles there might have been accelerated at the termination shock. or due to reconnection), observations of giant pulses in (some) pulsars (that might be due to reconnection at the Y point of the current sheet just outside the light cylinder) and so on. On top of the related physical topics I need to keep on top of development methods in the simulation method I use (particle in cell codes) and in several related simulation methods (either because improvements there might make them viable to study reconnection which wasn&amp;#x27;t possible before, or because the neat new trick in method X might also improve the characteristics in PiC codes).&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to I could spend easily 100 hours per week just reading papers. But staying current with the field is just 5 or maybe 10 percent of my job. So what I do is the following: Papers that fall close enough to my special topic I will read. All of them. I will actually print them out, annotate them, go over them with a fine toothed comb. For many other papers I will read the abstracts (10 to 50 each morning) to find the 1 or 2 paper that are worth reading. And this is where selection by the editors and limitations to publications come in. They rank important papers. I am much more likely to read &amp;quot;a novel approach to plasma simulation&amp;quot; if it was accepted into the Astrophysical Journal than if it just appears on ArXiv. Because ApJ does not like pure code papers. So if it made the cut 2 or 3 experts in the field deemed it worth the time of the community.&lt;p&gt;Now that doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that all ArXiv papers are bad, that we should publish less or anything like that. When I talk to a colleague and ask about a technical detail I am SOOOO happy when they say &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s in the Arxiv paper ID 1906.bla&amp;quot;. And on the other hand there is the notion of &amp;quot;it was in Nature but it still might be right&amp;quot;. Bottom line is:&lt;p&gt;Do not discount the sorting by topic (numerical vs observational vs theoretical), impact (&amp;quot;here is one data point&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;here is a completely new approach&amp;quot;) and quality (&amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m not too convinced, but maybe it gives somebody an idea&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;holy smokes how did we all miss that!&amp;quot;) that journals provide. Any better, future alternative needs this sorting and ranking. Just dumping it onto the internet is not the solution.</text></item><item><author>rdiddly</author><text>The same thing is trying to happen in scientific publication that&amp;#x27;s been happening in every other published medium: scarcity is gone. So why not embrace the abundance? Well if there&amp;#x27;s any contrary case to be made, it&amp;#x27;s that the explosion in quantity inevitably reduces the average quality. In the arts, low quality corresponds to that ineffable quality of &lt;i&gt;shittiness&lt;/i&gt;. In news, it&amp;#x27;s fakeness. In science, it&amp;#x27;s irreproducibility. So what do you do? All the former built-in scarcity-based ways of filtering for quality went out the window along with the scarcity itself. You can no longer use the limited space on physical sheets of papyrus (or vinyl LP records, or celluloid) as an excuse to exclude things. So you need new ways of sorting out good quality work from the (suddenly vast) quantities of mediocre work. Seems like you&amp;#x27;re doing pretty well if you&amp;#x27;re lucky enough to have a whole new class of people step in to help with the filtering part. Unless of course you believe a scientific discovery is fundamentally the work of a person, an ego, rather than a fact that existed long before that particular person happened to discover it.&lt;p&gt;Democratization ends elitism; unfortunately elites sometimes really do consist of the best of a given thing. Especially newer elites. Every elite starts out as a meritocracy and ends up some kind of weird legacy-based cabal&amp;#x2F;cartel that deserves to be overthrown (that&amp;#x27;s the one you&amp;#x27;re probably accustomed to thinking of when you hear the term &amp;quot;elitism&amp;quot;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marcus_holmes</author><text>Interesting. This seems to correlate almost exactly with discovery in music streaming too. Given the torrent of new music available, how do you discover the new music that you like?&lt;p&gt;At the moment, AI is doing a pretty bad job of this - my Spotify Discover Weekly is an interesting listen, but I know it&amp;#x27;s not the best selection of new music out there suited to my tastes (to be fair, it&amp;#x27;s not really trying to be that, though). My &amp;quot;recommended&amp;quot; list on Netflix bores me. I get why they&amp;#x27;re recommending them, but it&amp;#x27;s all things that I&amp;#x27;ve seen and rejected from My List, rather than things that I would find genuinely new and interesting.&lt;p&gt;I think this is the next big problem to solve, for everyone. The combination of Discoverability (how do I get my music&amp;#x2F;paper&amp;#x2F;novel&amp;#x2F;art&amp;#x2F;film discovered by the audience of people who will like it?) and Search (how do I find new music&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;novels&amp;#x2F;art&amp;#x2F;film that suit my tastes&amp;#x2F;research subject?).</text></comment>
<story><title>Let’s Publish Everything</title><url>https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/29/lets-publish-everything/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>petschge</author><text>(I agree with the parent poster, but this seems like the right place to add the following.)&lt;p&gt;One thing that people who claim &amp;quot;the scarcity is gone, let&amp;#x27;s just publish everything&amp;quot; do miss is that there still is a scarcity: The time and attention of researchers.&lt;p&gt;Let me expand a bit on that from my own field of studying reconnection in astrophysical plasma. As you can tell from the description it is not a well defined closed topic. Instead there is tons of more or less adjacent fields. The study of solar flares (which might be triggered by reconnection), the study of coronal heating (the heat might be due to magnetic field getting converted to heat by reconnection), astronomical observations of AGN jets (reconnection might be what produces energetic particles there that we see in the SDE of those sources), observations of pulsar wind nebulae (the energetic particles there might have been accelerated at the termination shock. or due to reconnection), observations of giant pulses in (some) pulsars (that might be due to reconnection at the Y point of the current sheet just outside the light cylinder) and so on. On top of the related physical topics I need to keep on top of development methods in the simulation method I use (particle in cell codes) and in several related simulation methods (either because improvements there might make them viable to study reconnection which wasn&amp;#x27;t possible before, or because the neat new trick in method X might also improve the characteristics in PiC codes).&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to I could spend easily 100 hours per week just reading papers. But staying current with the field is just 5 or maybe 10 percent of my job. So what I do is the following: Papers that fall close enough to my special topic I will read. All of them. I will actually print them out, annotate them, go over them with a fine toothed comb. For many other papers I will read the abstracts (10 to 50 each morning) to find the 1 or 2 paper that are worth reading. And this is where selection by the editors and limitations to publications come in. They rank important papers. I am much more likely to read &amp;quot;a novel approach to plasma simulation&amp;quot; if it was accepted into the Astrophysical Journal than if it just appears on ArXiv. Because ApJ does not like pure code papers. So if it made the cut 2 or 3 experts in the field deemed it worth the time of the community.&lt;p&gt;Now that doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that all ArXiv papers are bad, that we should publish less or anything like that. When I talk to a colleague and ask about a technical detail I am SOOOO happy when they say &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s in the Arxiv paper ID 1906.bla&amp;quot;. And on the other hand there is the notion of &amp;quot;it was in Nature but it still might be right&amp;quot;. Bottom line is:&lt;p&gt;Do not discount the sorting by topic (numerical vs observational vs theoretical), impact (&amp;quot;here is one data point&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;here is a completely new approach&amp;quot;) and quality (&amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m not too convinced, but maybe it gives somebody an idea&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;holy smokes how did we all miss that!&amp;quot;) that journals provide. Any better, future alternative needs this sorting and ranking. Just dumping it onto the internet is not the solution.</text></item><item><author>rdiddly</author><text>The same thing is trying to happen in scientific publication that&amp;#x27;s been happening in every other published medium: scarcity is gone. So why not embrace the abundance? Well if there&amp;#x27;s any contrary case to be made, it&amp;#x27;s that the explosion in quantity inevitably reduces the average quality. In the arts, low quality corresponds to that ineffable quality of &lt;i&gt;shittiness&lt;/i&gt;. In news, it&amp;#x27;s fakeness. In science, it&amp;#x27;s irreproducibility. So what do you do? All the former built-in scarcity-based ways of filtering for quality went out the window along with the scarcity itself. You can no longer use the limited space on physical sheets of papyrus (or vinyl LP records, or celluloid) as an excuse to exclude things. So you need new ways of sorting out good quality work from the (suddenly vast) quantities of mediocre work. Seems like you&amp;#x27;re doing pretty well if you&amp;#x27;re lucky enough to have a whole new class of people step in to help with the filtering part. Unless of course you believe a scientific discovery is fundamentally the work of a person, an ego, rather than a fact that existed long before that particular person happened to discover it.&lt;p&gt;Democratization ends elitism; unfortunately elites sometimes really do consist of the best of a given thing. Especially newer elites. Every elite starts out as a meritocracy and ends up some kind of weird legacy-based cabal&amp;#x2F;cartel that deserves to be overthrown (that&amp;#x27;s the one you&amp;#x27;re probably accustomed to thinking of when you hear the term &amp;quot;elitism&amp;quot;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>isodude</author><text>The same is true within IT, you need to read a lot to make sure you&amp;#x27;re in the loop.&lt;p&gt;I think it correlates to map structures, if every point in a map is connected to every other point there will be a large surface for each point in the beginning but as the amount of points grow the surface (of possible attention in this case) will shrink.&lt;p&gt;How much area of attention is needed to perform the best in a creative research, to produce the best work in a given time? Maybe the answer to that question will yield more papers with better quality.&lt;p&gt;My personal belief is that we need to dream more and do less work to make sure the work that is done is of more quality such that no filtration is needed and we can truly publish everything.</text></comment>