Kaushik Ghose
Wed, 12 Feb 2003 16:57:40 -0800
Hi, some quick comments from an academic 1. As far as I know, in academia, promotions are linked to publications everywhere. In some fields, like engineering, conference proceedings count as pubs, but in others, like biology, not really. This is not a exclusive western phenomenon.
In some places, like Germany, people don't publish so much as in the US, there is more of an informal review of your research abilities via a document you produce (something like a thesis, I think they call it a habilitation). There are merits and demerits to that system too (as in, well if they do so much good reasearch in Germany as they claim when are they gonna share it with the rest of us :) ) The merits and demerits of this method requires its own mailing list (!) but I like the quote "not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted, counts" 2. The core point of the problem is not the software but rather "trust" or "goodwill" in the social sense. If I have 30 publications in some journal that I happen to edit it may not count as much as 2 pubs in Nature (for my field at least) You can distribute a journal online free of cost : The Journal of neuroscience is an example http://www.jneurosci.org/ Look at http://highwire.stanford.edu/ for other free journals. but it takes time to build trust "that is a good journal", "that is not a good journal", often based on citation (cross referencing stats). Again - the merits and demerits of this requires its own list. So one argument is that these publishers are charging money for the "trust" they have tried to build up by managing the journals they publish over 30-40 years. Again, it is possible, as in the journal of neuroscience, to build this trust without charging the public. I'm all for free journals - this is not like literary work where the author get paid for the work - in fact if you write too much (like I'm doing here) you may have to pay page charges ! And the future is headed towards electronic publishing - its quick, you can add effects like hyper linking/animations etc. and distribution is cheaper (in the long run) and it takes up much less space that bulky paper journals. I would like to think the excessive costs of some big pub houses are a last gasp of outdated behemoths :) -kg -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3