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Thread for discussing matters of policy

Knowing nothing about scientific papers...good source? Seems like it could easily be reproduced in other states that have been legal for a little while.

Hopefully it’s just the swishers tho
 
Interesting read about the concept of "deserving" or "deserts" and how it applies to the criminal justice system. Basically, we keep people locked up for years based on either punishment for what they did in the past or fear about future bad behavior, but we rarely take into account the possibility that release will lead to future good behavior. Thus as a nation we focus on the fear of failure rather than the opportunity costs of keeping people incarcerated. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-decide-which-prisoners-deserve-second-chance/606121/
 
This season of the Good Place was basically a clarion call for prison reform.
 
This season of the Good Place was basically a clarion call for prison reform.

That's a cool reading of the season. The whole show actually fits that interpretation, especially with the reveal that The Good Place is basically empty.
 
Knowing nothing about scientific papers...good source? Seems like it could easily be reproduced in other states that have been legal for a little while.

Hopefully it’s just the swishers tho

SSRN appears to be a pre-print open access “journal.” That is, it is a service for publicly posting scientific research before the work has been peer reviewed and accepted by a thorough academic journal, as long as the paper meets some minimum quality standards like formatting and language. These services are increasingly popular among academics because it gets the work out there more quickly and it opens the work up to broader review more quickly, however it is posible to publish absolute crap without significant review and claim it is published science.
 
SSRN appears to be a pre-print open access “journal.” That is, it is a service for publicly posting scientific research before the work has been peer reviewed and accepted by a thorough academic journal, as long as the paper meets some minimum quality standards like formatting and language. These services are increasingly popular among academics because it gets the work out there more quickly and it opens the work up to broader review more quickly, however it is posible to publish absolute crap without significant review and claim it is published science.

yeah, SSRN is a 'legit' site but not necessary well-vetted papers, as it's free/open source and pre-print
 
yeah, SSRN is a 'legit' site but not necessary well-vetted papers, as it's free/open source and pre-print

The pre-print part of it is the problem because as you say there is minimal vetting. My institution has a state policy discouraging us from publishing in these types of outlets and stating that they will not count toward promotion/tenure or annual evaluation until they are fully peer-reviewed. Open access on the other hand is a great thing for knowledge and society.
 
The pre-print part of it is the problem because as you say there is minimal vetting. My institution has a state policy discouraging us from publishing in these types of outlets and stating that they will not count toward promotion/tenure or annual evaluation until they are fully peer-reviewed. Open access on the other hand is a great thing for knowledge and society.

I think that's a pretty bad policy. Of course ultimate publication in a peer reviewed journal is the goal, but pre-prints are great for science for lots of reasons, imo. Discouraging them is silly.
 
It’s not good to discourage publishing them but it is good to make sure they don’t count.

I can think of a few articles I first round on SSRN as working papers that ended up getting published later.
 
It’s not good to discourage publishing them but it is good to make sure they don’t count.

I can think of a few articles I first round on SSRN as working papers that ended up getting published later.

The discouragement is not counting them until they are fully peer reviewed. University and academic communities on the whole need to update their world view and accept that preprints are actually a way to get better peer review that the old journal based approaches.
 
I think that's a pretty bad policy. Of course ultimate publication in a peer reviewed journal is the goal, but pre-prints are great for science for lots of reasons, imo. Discouraging them is silly.

Agree. Bogus science put out as a preprint will get exposed as bogus much faster than the old peer review system. Papers will get a broader and more thorough peer review through a preprint than a journal desperately trying to find two unpaid volunteers to put hours into reviewing a paper.
 
I wouldn’t preprint a single thing if it’s actually groundbreaking. Sure something that’s based off a very specific cohort that would take years to form or develop may be safe but there’s too many people working on similar things that could easily scoop your findings after you preprint into an actual impactful journal.
 
I wouldn’t preprint a single thing if it’s actually groundbreaking. Sure something that’s based off a very specific cohort that would take years to form or develop may be safe but there’s too many people working on similar things that could easily scoop your findings after you preprint into an actual impactful journal.

this is my perspective, too

LGJ - do you publish at all?
 
seems to me that the strength of SSRN is more for theory papers and less for hard science
 
The discouragement is not counting them until they are fully peer reviewed. University and academic communities on the whole need to update their world view and accept that preprints are actually a way to get better peer review that the old journal based approaches.

Definitely. The journal system is horribly flawed. I’m leaning towards just doing books. I’ve been working on a book for a year and it’s a freeing process not worrying about the constraints of articles.

I’m trying to get a few old papers out to journals and it’s annoying. I got a desk reject* yesterday from a journal who said the paper wasn’t a good fit for their journal. Ok, that’s fine. But one of their reasons was that I didn’t cite articles from their journal that cited my most cited article from 2007. The article I submitted had nothing to do with my 2007 article. Completely different topic.

I think an open review system could work to the favor of academic journals. Right now, we submit an article to one journal and hope for things to work out. That journal editor scraps to find 2-5 people willing to read it for free and write a review of it and recommend it for a journal they may or may not be familiar with. In this system, the journal has an editorial board that basically just (in my experience in my field) just agrees to say yes when asked to review and review more articles than usual.

I would set up a system in which people upload their papers to a common site like SSRN and attach some keywords. Journals staff editorial boards who agree to basically be talent scouts who agree to bring papers to the editor and recommend them for further scrutiny and a chance to get in the journal.



*A desk reject is when the editors reject an article days after submission instead of sending it out to reviewers. It sucks but it’s better than getting rejected 3-6 months later.
 
Here's a good piece summarizing the "Great Affordability Crisis" with lots and lots of supporting links. The overall point is that America offers hardly any support to young families as a public good, especially compared to other wealthy nations with government child care, health care, higher education, and better housing policies. So Americans, especially young Americans, are drowning in high living costs and debt and our political leadership has no plan to fix it. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/great-affordability-crisis-breaking-america/606046/
 
I wouldn’t preprint a single thing if it’s actually groundbreaking. Sure something that’s based off a very specific cohort that would take years to form or develop may be safe but there’s too many people working on similar things that could easily scoop your findings after you preprint into an actual impactful journal.

Not sure I really follow this reasoning...if it is out there on the Web for all to see with your name on it, then some steals your idea and publishes it more quickly than you, it will be pretty obvious that you had the idea and the data first. Having said that, I definitely wouldn't put something out in pre-print that wasn't also simultaneously submitted to a formal peer review journal.
 
Gonna take a guess that TWMD works for pharma and not academia?
 
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