Science Memes

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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Part 1: https://mander.xyz/post/13579080

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Couldn't science papers be hosted on a git-platform for review? Instead of costly publishing and the reviewers have to buy it then...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Hm, for a good peer-review process you would still need a way to anonymously distribute to experts in the same field and orchestrate the whole review/editing process. You could obviously try to come up with a better review process but I don't know how you would do it on a git-platform. How would you prevent trolling or other forms of destructive comments for example? How would you ensure that other people in the field can comment without having to fear repercussions for an honest and negative review.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

There are open access platform that is more reputable than git, like arxiv or hal.

Plus most conferences, at least in my field, support open access. But unfortunately for some of them, you do need to pay a fee in order to get the article to be open-access.

The prestige of the conference/journal is still the best way to get your article known, so that others can review and built upon your work, as of now.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Science devolved into politics. :-(

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Although I have no doubt that, like every other field, academia is filled with politics; and publishing process probably helps enforce such politics.

However, I would argue that modern academic publishing is absolutely necessary to produce "useful" science. In order for people to build upon others' result, they will need strong guarantee of correctness, which necessitates the review process ; and top conferences can also save researchers a lot of time to find impactful new research, especially new ideas.

That being said, I am absolutely not suggesting the publishing system is not without its problems; but I kind of agree with LeCun here, publishing is a important part of the process, and it is will probably out-last both Tesla and Elon.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I find it especially amusing that in my Lemmy feed the post right before this one is a quote from a book by a Nobel laureate talking about the importance of self-marketing, politicking and ladder climbing in academia. You know, all the stuff that isn't science that plays a part in what Yann LeCun considers to play a vital role in what counts as science.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

ladder climbing in academia is not fun, but I feel like communicating (or marketing) science is a essential part of scientific process, as we are often the only person able to describe our work in great technical detail.

A famous professor once told me "we are all entertainers", which seems absurd from an outside prospective, but is a notion that I and many of my colleagues have now found peace with.

Scrambled and unreadable mathematics should seldom be valued in modern scientific community, IMO; not everyone is Ramanujan after all. Even among geniuses, from Poincaré to Hilbert to Godel to Grothendick and to Tao, most genius are able to communicate their research quite well, and thrive in academia.