Thank you for watching. Comments are welcomed and encouraged - what do you think? I heart comments I have seen, and reply to those TH-cam notifies me off. FEEDBACK: - Veritasium is in the title because I used his argument (seen at the end). Yes, it also improves views. My video structure should have been better! - Maybe include more examples of Misconduct relating to Nobel Prize and long-lasting work in published literature. (Planned future video on this) - 7:34 the paper was originally submitted in May 2023 with those numbers, but updated in Oct 2023 to 150,000 rather than 300,000. @EastBurningRed KEY COMMENTS: - Maybe a non-significant result journal - Overemphasis on quantity over quality wrecked US and EU academia. - Have the universities publish the papers @dovilacus - Don't forget arXiv and bioRxiv for publishing @biggie_tea - Have researchers/authors start a TH-cam channel @carpballet @harmonylivingston3460 - Cryptography papers are mostly free. Publishers don't need to get paid. @debasishraychawdhuri
I would love to see a video overviewing the whole system of academia, with notes on some of the places in which this kind of capitalization of research causes problems. I think there's plenty of videos on specific problems within academia, but I haven't seen many that sort of lay out the whole system, from bachelor's programs, to peer review, to international conferences, to tenure, etc etc. Obviously this is a huge topic, but I think a general video could be a great intro to those who didn't spend their whole career in this industry.
The video lacks a proper introduction. It just starts talking about Elsevier, as if everyone knows who they are. If you expect your audience to know who they are, you’re targeting a narrow audience. To be honest, I stopped watching after 1-2 minutes because you failed to communicate what the video is supposed to be about and why I should care about it. Great content immediately engages the audience. This, on the other hand, confuses the audience.
TL;DR Pin this comment, might leave more feedback when not tired. I haven't watched the video yet. Honestly I disliked it and then fucked off to go do whatever else til I felt like I should probably come back and actually make sure you were a dumbass, based on another comment here you aren't and we're in agreement and I judged too quickly, disliked removed and will watch now. Like StripedJacket said in the comment I mentioned the packaging (as you put it) is a bit off. The video "Neurodiversity: "Fancy word for all of humanity"" is what really put me over the edge since I have both Autism and ADHD and it seemed like you were against that model of thinking, but again briefly reading the comments seems like you're in support of it. I'm very tired at the moment and I'd love to give better feedback but I can't form a cohesive statement that makes the point I'm trying without maybe having a double meaning. ANYWAYS, I'd pin this comment man. If you want feedback, pin it so everyone knows. I had to scroll well below the video to see this, but it shows that you're very open to feedback and discussion. In my opinion that makes you a better creator (and person honestly) than most, and if you pinned this comment it would allow you to show that, as well as get more feedback and discussion. The words that I just typed definitely don't make sense.
It could be simpler! Have the universities themselves publish the papers, except they have to publish through other universities to maintain peer review. Instead of private journals we could have institutions that do research themselves publish collections of papers! This type of review already happens at extent of a phd/master thesis, members from other facultys are usually invited to jury and the work is posted to an online repository. Why not extend that to post graduate research with the caviat of the institution not being able to self-publish?
They could even publish everything they want. I have seen many papiers criticised in the comment section on Academia and the more controversial take the more likely somebody is to criticise it. And these kinds of discussions would be quite beneficial - either somebody will see what not to do, or they will come up with idea how to check/write this papier better.
In any field, there will be a certain number of journals with a good reputation. Peer-review isn't perfect, but you can be fairly confident that work published in a high-quality journal will have been through a rigorous peer review process. If publishing is decentralised and devolved to universities, the number of publishers suddenly explodes, and gauging the reputation of a publisher becomes practically impossible. It's very easy to say that we should be judging papers purely on their individual merits, but any professional scientist knows that it's practically impossible to devote the hours required to carefully consider every paper published in a field. This would have been possible several decades ago when the volume of research that was published was manageable, but that isn't the case in 2024. Having reputable academic gatekeepers is a practical necessity in academia (even if we might wish it wasn't), and this would be unmanageable if we got rid of journals because suddenly, rather than tracking the reputation of 10-20 journals, we have to track the reputation of hundreds or thousands of university publishers. Additionally, if, as you suggest, universities become general-purpose academic publishers, each university would need sufficient editorial expertise to gauge the quality of research across all research disciplines. This is unrealistic. An alternative would be pooling resources (e.g. rather than all universities publishing research in field X, 10-20 universities agree to do this)... but now you're in the exact position you started with, you've just shifted who owns the journal. Journals are necessary for modern science to work. Rather than trying to get rid of journals or peer-review, we need to promote non-profit journals owned and run by academic societies.
I sort of agree with you, but this sounds like a temporary solution, eventually this will give power to universities, and like academic journals, they will exploit it, especially since I imagine only top universities would have good reliability, like would you trust something published by some random university from a tiny island in the pacific? of by Harvard or the like? you'll create the same issue, just that now it won't be publishers per say, but universities
As someone who has worked in publishing this would be a stop-gap measure. The bit people often miss about publishing is that it's not "just" publishing, but administration, as well as legal, work that needs to be done. For every paper we would handle, at least three admin were needed, plus legal if anything happened to challenge the paper. The amount of time publishers have to spend defending papers they have published, just because someone makes a claim that then turns out to be false, is staggering. There are instances, albeit rarely, where people challenge papers as a means of stopping that paper from getting published only to then publish a paper in that same topic themselves, essentially using the case as a means of stopping rivals publishing ahead of them. Of course, for paper mills etc. that is a different kettle of fish and they take that very seriously. If universities wanted to publish, they would need more admin and legal staff to take the brunt of the work, and then also that leads to pay, HR etc. If they are not charging people for viewing papers they publish (ie. Subscription model) or the academics that publish with them (ie. OA model) then they are also not making any money to cover the additional costs of these teams. This increased cost is one of the reasons publishers need money, and why they collapse very quickly if they simply don't get enough papers through the door.
There are some efforts to create new, independent journals. I am so happy this is finally happening, like when the editors of Neuroimage stepped down in protest and started a new journal. There are also more and more journals in other fields that have very low or no fees but have been started by up-and-coming-prominent-enough-to-matter figures in the field. And I am so, so deeply grateful to every single one of them and will take on as much reviewing as I can afford to do for their journals! When I was doing my PhD and got that first shock looking at article processing costs and open access fees, a professor told me "well, we cannot do anything either, it is what it is." He was at the very top of his career and one of the most influential researchers in the field. Nobody looks at his grant applications and sees a lack of Elsevier journals and thinks "my, my, no grant for you this year." That's just not something he needs to be concerned about, yet this weird need to publish in "prestigious" journals and get interviewed a couple of times more on TV (to then loudly complain about lack of time due to all the interviews) is still there. But if none of the people who already have all the power and recognition do anything, who will?
As a materials science PhD student, I've realised how much of a racket many aspects of institutional science are, with publishers at its centre. Honestly, I live for the day when science is more decentralised and is contributed to by professionals, amateurs and lay communicators alike.
I'd argue it's happening right now, and that it's not a good thing at all. So many clickbaity articles come from half-assed studies that haven't been peer-reviewed but are already available on the web.
I'm not in the scientific community and this is a genuine question. Why can you and your colleagues not create a web site where anyone can publish or read any paper with a comments section as peer review? It seems simple enough. I don't understand.
@@benchapple1583 Bc they would loose the boogeyman to blame instead of addressing the primary factors at the heart of the issue.... Government monopolization of the academic marketplace via... 1) the treasury's tit 2) legal codes that favor big firms that can leverage size and access to litigious services to lobby and bully lesser competition out of bissiness, while also strictly enforcing patent and copyright codes that highly restrict competitive and marketplace access to innovation, not just on an overly broad basis, but also for inordinate periods of time into the future.
The state of Academia broadly truly terrifies me. I dropped out of my science degree for a number of reasons, mostly personal but even as a drop-out the level of corruption is obvious. The worst outcome is that charlatans and cranks can point out this obvious problem and use it as a way to discredit legitimate science. You see this increasingly having a toxic impact on discourse and politics.
@judoisoww said "charlatans and cranks can point out this obvious problem and use it as a way to discredit legitimate science" You see GENERALIZED CORRUPTION but you worry about discredit of legitimate science It's like catholics watching their church rotting everywhere but worried about what the atheists will say That's why scientism is catholicism of science
I'm always a bit confused when there's videos about scientific publishing that don't mention places like arXiv and bioRxiv, where researches publish pre-print versions of their articles, freely accessible to anyone, and are expected to update them after every step of the review process. I can't speak for bioRxiv, but I know that in the fields of phyics and mathematics, it is standard practice to upload to arXiv and it is almost frowned upon when this doesn't happen. The articles of course also go through the peer review process before they can be reliably cited, keeping the role of publishers, and so I think it forms a great 'middle ground' option
Yeah, but the problem is that to get funding or because university or institute you are working require you to publish in a peer reviewed journal to prove you are "working"
@@Max-nr1xf If a university or institute needs external validation for an application to fund some research, why does that institution exist and who runs it? Moreover, it seems to me that the widespread use of some synthetic index is sufficient proof that science as a profession is drastically overpopulated.
I'm a biology student. While many bigger labs/publications tend to go on bioRxiv before review, it's not frowned upon to skip it. The impression I get (having also put a few papers on there) is that it's a good way to get your data out there as early as possible. It's very common to reanalyze or combine large molecular datasets, so the sooner you get your data publicly available, the sooner you'll have citations rolling in (sometimes even before it's published). Plus, it helps to not get scooped... One interesting thing I've found is that some people never actually publish their papers; they'll just keep them on the archive. Seems especially common with bioinformatic tools. The code is available for anyone to view and scrutinize, so it's not super necessary to have peer review on it, unless you're including newly generated data.
@@tolep 'the widespread use of some synthetic index is sufficient proof that science as a profession is drastically overpopulated' or that we spend far too little money for scientist to work in peace.
@@adapienkowska2605 To work in peace? Work in peace at the expense of the taxpayer who is not supposed to ask any questions? The system is corrupt, generates low returns and has no meaningful quality control, and your proposal is to throw even more money into it? Did I understand correctly?
One major problem is that retractions are treated like failings as a scientists, not as part of the process. You can’t be right with your hypothesis, and you can have one experiment find wrong results because that’s how probability works. Retraction isn’t failure, it’s completion of the scientific method. The other problem is that for major topics, many people will never see a retraction if one happens. Imagine if someone discovered life on mars via telescope. Then when we get a rover there weeks later and find it was actually just some rocks that looked like aliens, everyone is already convinced the first article was right, so don’t ever check if a retraction happened.
I obviously could be wrong, but I thought that retractions were reserved for genuine failings of the scientist, like data manipulation or incorrect analysis. I am under the impression that if you correctly do a study and analysis, and it supports your hypothesis, but then it turns out that hypothesis is untrue, that won’t result in a retraction, because it is part of the process, as you said. Your second point I do agree with, especially with so much misinformation and disinformation around, we gotta stay up to date 😅
yeah i work at a journal, retractions are specifically for scientific misconduct/bad research, so it would constitute a failing as a scientist. it's not considered a normal part of the scientific process
@@fredgoodyer4907-- but the idea, though, is important enough, right? OctagonalSquare used the word "retraction", but OS was probably pointing to the lack of balance in science publishing: only hypothesis confirmations are given any attention, whereas most scientific results, still valuable evidence, reject their corresponding hypotheses. Negative results (or OS's so-called "retractions") and sensational headline-grabbing results should be treated much more similarly than they are.
I'm living in the uni, and proud my professors said all this. It deeply saddens me because they are ubiquotus, and so can't just disappear because of the important metric based upon them, something better needs to take all of it, and people need to be willing to publish in whatever that is
There is no 'solution' due to the complexity of the issue in my view. There are things we can do but it requires a collective effort - hence culture shift. Unless you disagree?
@@Danny.Hatcher Definitely agree, but as research culture is heavily biased towards high rank researchers, their action that will actually change the status quo
Universities around the world should fund a non-profit publication that has independent reviewers and editors to remove the middle man in research publication. Institutions no longer needs to pay for the profit of the publication, they just need to pay the cost. The new entity benefits from reputation of the supporting universities and gain momentum to move forward with the operation.
I thought this was going to be a pseudoscience or BS video attacking people to get views (Tbf your channel has a lot of video titles and thumbnails that point to a sort of drama-driven style) But when I watched and figured out you’re talking about how unethical and profit driven scientific journals are I was already on board this train for a while now. This is a kind of conversation that falls on deaf ears and I support you bringing awareness to this
Yes, the 'packaging' of videos is something I am working on. Brining attention to topics that tend to fall on deaf ears has been a challenge, sometimes at the cost of topic clarity.
Good work! And good luck continuing it. Part of this is the tragedy of government support. Post WWII support for students has enabled many many students to get post high school educations -- and America's miracle economy, like Japan's is probably more a result of the high level of literacy and numeracy in the population than it is of supposed "free" enterprise. The down side is that massive injections of government money, Fulbright Scholarships and a thousand other assists to higher education, lead to huge increases of prices. The Elementary and Secondary Education Acts, for instance, made possible the infestation of the land with teachers' assistants; this may be nice for the egos of teachers but there is no evidence that it leads t any long-term improvement in students' outcomes. America's land grant colleges, state universities, and perhaps its top fifty or eighty private uiversities are among the world's best educational institutions. Sadly, though, government assistnace makes possible the proliferation of hundreds of worthless colleges. Scientific publishing? Pari passu.
These problems led me to believe that probably I'm better publish my work on youtube as "researcher content creator" to gain recognition. Its free for everyone and also everyone can scrutinize my methodology and result, and have more fast paced, more flexible discussion.
What would be the best way to value "good researcher" and "good research" properly, and how to define them? I think NSF and NIH should work about this really fast. Right now, the entire academia only cares about number of papers published. Everyone overestimate research quantities, no one gives a shit about a single high quality paper from rigorous proper scientific approach which may take multiple years. Everyone goes for such research topic that is favorable to increase number of papers within short period of times, because that is only way to get out of postdoc, get a permanent position, and get the tenure. Overpopulation of PhD and postdoc worsens the situation. IMHO, this trend wrecked US and EU academia and entire high education of PhD-postdoc system. Something really needs to be done fast.
need a third party that specializes in weeding out false papers, invalid conclusions, inadequate test controls, etc. and gives stamps of approval to good papers. Costs the scientists nothing. They could start by verifying or refuting the most cited papers first and work down the list. Create a stigma against using papers that do not get teh stamp of approval. problem, is that too will eventually become corrupted.
In my opinion, science has got to results oriented. Good science is just asking questions about the world, testing them, reporting the results, no matter what they are. Who asks the best questions often just comes down to luck. The results should not dictate good science.
@@Myself-xg5fu nope, nobody is forced to use it. Nobody stops you from using a report. you clearly don't understand what I'm suggesting. but if it is objectively found to be false and is detailed why it's false in a report, then you choosing to rely upon a false report at that point is your problem. just don't expect anyone to take seriously a report proven to be false, nor the person who cites it.
And often a publication is silent about the shortcomings of the method discussed. I think a publication system that incentives people to write both good and bad aspects of their work will be helpful for the overall growth and dissemination of science.
In an attempt to make the system fair (as in: "objective metrics") and profitable (as in: "let someone else judge this"), we have ruined it. Let's be real here: even advanced AI will be hard pressed to judge the quality of research, let alone a primitive, dim metric such as "citations". I agree that something needs to be done, and quickly, as the reputation of the concept of doing science at all, is already damaged. I find it ludicrous that even in computer science, it is often considered to be surprising that the results from any specific experiment are reproducible at all. As in, we have collectively grown to expect that most papers are rubbish and take it as expected that the experiments are not reproducible. And in such a case, can it even be called science?
That hasn't been my experience with AI research. Are there notable examples of unreproducible CS papers? Or are you just referring to a perception of such?
@@thebrianbeale CS is math, it's results are always reproducible. They probably are talking about more practical research, like papers you can find on SIGGRAPH and whatnot. But I'm not sure if those are nor peer-reviewed or not. And probably are not trash due to the very fact of them being practical.
@@thebrianbeale oh, man, there is an entire list of them, starting with any paper where they claim performance gains on secret datasets only. And if you try the same method on an open dataset, it turns out that there is no improvement. For a famous example, look at the Microsoft Phi-2 paper. they released model weights which is nice, but not the method of getting such weights, nor the dataset, nor a method of generating the dataset. Hence, the result is not reproducible. This is truly common. Then there are all the papers that claim to come with a github repo, but when you follow the link the repo is empty or says "the code will be released later" and of course, it never gets released. But you will be prevented from trying to reimplement their method because they might just release the code next week.
Tangentially, there is a journal/website "Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis". The latest article there is "The Effect of Owl Feces on Rat Operant Responding: Can Rats Recognize a Conspecific-Eating Predator?" The answer to the question was "no".
O took 2 years developing the work of my life, no AI helping me to write, exhaustive testing. Submitted, got major revision, worked a lot to fulfill the requirements. After 1 and a half year since submission, 2 reviewers accepted, but the third was a new one that rejected with a single sentence. I am tired. Maybe I'll will just give up on journals. Make smaller works, use chatpgt, submit to small conferences.
Always said that universities should publish their own articles themselves. Researchers are employed their university and that university usually also appropriates that research (when it come to patents, for example), so it should be that university's responsibility to disseminate the results, not external publishers. It could also bring in a bit more funds for the university through subscriptions, which then helps with doing more research.
I like this video as it exposes the current "scientific" problem. I work for an non profit organization and all articles are obliged to be in open source (thesis, ph.D etc they have to be in the national repository as open access, with some exception where thesis can have a period of embargo). But the problem of the big companies (Elsevier, etc.) are making great pressure to secure their "importance". For me all University papers must be in the open access status, with cc licensing. When papers are funded by public money they must be in open access... Great Video!!!!
The accepted body of knowledge is what's included in textbooks, and implemented in industry. Falsehoods get that far too, but it's sort of like animation errors, sometimes things are just invisible problems until they're not. For a new system to supersede the incumbent publishing system, certainly it would have to be more effective wouldn't it? I can imagine any number of versions of a better system, but that doesn't mean I, or anyone else, has the capability to implement any of them.
I don't agree that there's a fundamental problem with the journal-driven-publishing model. The problem is with the publishing *industry*, i.e. Elsevier, Springer-Nature, Wiley et al. There are some (usually smaller) journals, often run by academic societies, that are excellent. One of my favourite examples is Copernicus, the publisher for European Geoscience Union journals. Copernicus isn't even non-profit, yet it has an outstanding fully-open peer review system, genuinely high-quality editing, and APCs that are reasonable given the quality of service they provide (I have absolutely no affiliation with them). The sheer quantity of research published in this day and age means that we need academic gatekeepers. The problem isn't the journal model, it's the profit-before-all-else motive that most academic publishers have.
My feeling is there needs to be a language of science that isn't just LaTex and a bunch of citations, hidden behind a wall of whatever language you choose to publish in. Sure, communicating difficult ideas is hard but maybe a formalized structure of "proposition" "experiment, to strengthen or weaken argument x..." could be formalized and take away some of the sensationalization? idk.
I'm not sure what you mean? LaTeX is simply a document preparation system. There needs to be a bunch of citations, since all science builds on the work of research. Finally the "language you publish in" if you are referring to English or other languages, I don't see how that makes a difference. If you are referring to the use of field specific language and terms, then that is also necessary, since having to explain all these terms would take op more space than the actual content.
The fact that researchers are only as good as the number of publications they have is very damaging to science. From the outside, its so hard to understand why ppl would want to rush the scientific process, or only care about publications but once you get into academia you realise that your entire career is dependent on publications. Every aspect of academia seems to be exploiting researchers in the current age and journals are on top, where they make the most money and researchers get none, contrary to popular opinion. Researchers are already overworked but they will still take on reviewing articles in a field that they might know very little about, because it might help them get published easily. This will not result in a quality peer reviewed article. I think if the government created not for profit regulated journals, and actually paid the reviewers it might lead to a better quality of research. I also believe that to make science much more accessible we need to change how we write articles, still writing in a complex manner might sound better to us but it makes it useless to the general public or even physicians at times. A scientific paper does not need to be in a rare language, only understood by a few.
Because academics' entire career is dependent on the amount and quality of publications they have produced. In a perfect world that measurement will be directly tied to the quality and quantity of the research they produce, but in reality this is, as detailed in the video, measured by how many citations they get through the H-index and similar. Publishing in high-impacting journals becomes the most obvious move to gain higher citations, thus keeping journals alive as gate keepers. If we were to get rid of journals as gate keepers, the culture of valuing an academic's worth and ability mainly through the citations their publications get needs to be changed first, or that citations need to somehow be decoupled from the journal they publish in.
I am currently doing a PhD in cryptography, and almost all the papers in my field are free of charge. I rarely need to connect to my University account to download the papers. This proves that the publishers getting paid is not a prerequisite for scientific communication.
Are you sure most are free? My research is in applied cryptography as well but the majority of the research papers from renowned publishing houses ( like the IEEE, and Elsevier) publish peer-reviewed articles with the same written methodology. Most often these algorithms are often duplicated with a minor twist.
Hmmm so let me get this straight.... theres a human activity crucial for our progress up till the present & especially our survival into the future .... but ownership, rent seeking & profit {market forces} are getting in the way, unduely influencing & holding back the "thing" & any change to "Open Commons of Knowledge" has to vetted by established material advantage
As a PhD student, I still don't get the idea of monetisation by publisher; when researchers do the hard work to publish and pay when publish, reviewers often volunteer work and the publisher mines the money
Well, as a PhD student I suffered a few times and I will probably still face this problem. I see this simply as a problem with capitalism. You represented this beautifully at the beginning of the video, it's just a direct transfer of money from the government to a private company, which essentially does nothing, because the real work has already been done by the paper authors and the reviewers and all of those have been paid indirectly or directly by the government. That's why I appreciate the work done by Alexandra Elbakyan and the team of Sci-Hub, they have saved me many times.
@@Danny.Hatcher a tragic example of the chilling effect. I am not a lawyer, so I can’t say anything about possible liability, but I highly doubt you would experience any legal issues (and really hope not).
It’s wild y’all say this when you’re freely commenting on a free website, probably on a device that has chips that are some of the most complex things to ever exist. Capitalism isn’t perfect, but better than the other shit
@@mharley3791 I wonder who developed the key innovations of the worldwide web, social media, and public knowledge bases (like Wikipedia). Maybe if we look into the history, we'll discover whether capitalists did that initial work... Or if they just enclosed the best parts of the internet AFTER all the real work was done. Look into 'digital enclosure', the history of indymedia and twitter, and basically anyone from the early internet. They're still around and giving interviews
Posted this in an answer, but will repost for that bit of hope: There are some efforts to create new, independent journals. I am so happy this is finally happening, like when the editors of Neuroimage stepped down in protest and started a new journal. There are also more and more journals in other fields that have reasonably low or no fees. They have been started by established but not too old or prominent-enough-to-matter-but-up-and-coming figures in the respective fields. And I am so, so deeply grateful to every single one of them and will take on as much reviewing as I can afford to do for their journals because these efforts *matter*! They are people from the community and the papers being published have the same standards because it's the same people reviewing them. I am doing the same work as if I was reviewing a paper for an Elsevier journal for the same pay (nothing but a pat on the back) but I also know that the work I review, if good enough, will be published and accessible without any side having to fork out several thousands of dollars.
Just read through all of your comments across the videos. Thank you and I have made note of each for further thinking on my part. I wish I could spend the time responding to every comment on TH-cam but there isn't the time in the day 😁
The content itself is great and it is true the replication crisis is immense. However, one thing that struck me the most here is not the content but the title and the thumbnails. The usage of Veritasium in the title and Derek in the clip gave me misleading ideas... I thought it was a reupload Veritasium episode by another content creator.... It sure does tempt me to report this content as a veiled plagiarism at the first 30 seconds...
@@Danny.Hatcher It sure worked because I clicked the thumbnail, and it was a great summary about the state of science publishing. My experience was for the first one-two minutes, I just tried to verify whether this is the same content or not with the one from Veritasium. Thankfully it is not. I just hope that all the clips you used is under a fair use agreement. it would be sad if the video is takedown due to copyright violation.
I was a science major in undergrad, a career in academia seemed like a nightmare so I walked away from science after my biology degree was completed and went into architecture instead.
I think the EU and America should get together and pay these publishers to achieve access for all and change the quality of the things published. Both have a combined economic value of 50 trillion, I am sure 19 billion can be found in the budget for education to create access for humanity.
The bit about "get my off your ... mailing list" is referring to a paper in a known/obvious "predatory journal, not an example of what I would classify as fraudulent science. It's a related but distinct problem in academia. The same pressures are at work that give rise to the problem of predatory journals, but the video at that point makes it seem like the presenter is using it as an example of academics (ie the scientists themselves) acting badly. In fact, it's an example of a scientist being fed up with predatory junk email.
How true is it that the modern scientific publishing model was largely “created” (i guess that word is kind of loaded so you could instead say “overseen” or even just “owned/profited from”) Robert Maxwell. I saw an academic say as much in a history of Scientific Publishing piece once and I found it very shocking, mainly bc Robert maxwell is a pretty famous guy for a lot of different reasons yet I have never heard his relationship to the Scientific Publishing industry before or since I had first heard it.
Great video, awesome animations and transitions, but there were quite a few spelling errors I noticed - such as using "a" instead of "an" or spelling consequences as "consquences."
@@davidhoward4715 You keep your job and status as the one who can resolve the problem. If the guys under you know what you know, they don't need you anymore, do they? Some people want to help the world; some people want to help themselves. The world is made up of humans, not saints.
What if a publisher required text written in a certain word processor that you cant use AI in? You could still write down what the AI said, but maybe less likely
That veritasium claim at the end... oof. The fact that so far negative results have been extremely hard to publish, non-replicating studies are the norm. So established results do *not* get questioned as he said. Hopefully, there's some change now that we have actual numbers out there on all the studies that have failed replication studies and more and more journals promise to accept negative results too. fingers crossed.
Before the Digital Era,.. Publication is the only way.. publisher generously want to simplify the access of knowledge.. says library rental of books, with some small amount of membership fees.. in the opposite, digital era that possibility of (copyright) "smuggling" is very high (and without any acknowledgement) or with less protective/benefitial return..? While, on the other hand, the verification of trust-worthy reviewed articles are more and more questionable.. (by volunteers, you said?) Exactly more publications than potentially retractions are basic reallity.. What about debate of "Science over Pseudo-" or unsettled Topic of every here and there.(?) But still most of them' ve already been published.!!
This is an extremely good video that doesn't go around telling nothing but straight to the point. But i genuinely thought this is one of those video that just want to berate veritasium for one of his video because of your thumbnail and title. No human is perfect but i just kinda sad that just because veritasium one of the biggest content creator he easily become punching bag when there's so many blatant pseudo science guru who would just walk away unscathed.
😂 necessity is the greatest pressure there is, and an anarchist is an expert at lying to themselves. In true anarchy, there is no hierarchy to determine legitimate science without confirming it yourself, so there is no body of knowledge you can trust. (Your own experiments are likewise unconfirmed by others)
@@thebrianbeale there is no structural hierarchy in modern science either. Research is certified by peer review. Cooperation still exists -- I'm not an Individualist Anarchist. I'm a social anarchist. Basically a communist. Where people live in communes and take decisions communally. Science would obviously be something done seriously. And in a digital age, multiple communes could add to the same body of work -- precisely how science worked for a long time.
There are so much talk about problems in academia, bad incentives and all, yet there's no action at all. I didn't even come across any systematic research on the issue, despite being discussed by some top tier researchers and quite few very influential social media personalities. What are the hope of any solution when there's no systematic study to guide to a possible action?
Mathematical isn’t always complete. Lightspeed is absolutely 100% 186,000 miles a second in every case in a vacuum and yet it’s also absolutely false since the way to measure lightspeed are time and distance which do change and compound the actual observations of the changes in lightspeed such as in superluminal motion and the faster movements of the outer spiral arms of galaxies and gravitational lensing and probably the anomalies of the Voyager spacecraft that have lost their orientation.
The most bizarre thing to me is that we are dealing supposedly with the brightest minds on this planet and each university has all the talent needed to basically build rome in a day, yet they complain: "What are we suppposed to do?"
Is the paywall used to distort science? For example, plenty of free scientific papers that describe the benefits of taking statins to lower cholesterol are available. However, try finding scientific papers on cholesterol's roles in human physiology; those are behind paywalls. Why isn't science available to all?
It sure makes it harder for people to tell the difference pseudoscience and real science. I wonder if we would have fewer people thinking climate change isn't real, because the science isn't accessible to them.
publishers serve no useful role. Journals are useful and should continue to exist for academics to vet and review their research, but publishers are not needed in the equation.
When AI is able to solve something on its own, it says a lot about necessity of such paper (if AI is like, just compiling what exists, then the paper is just such a compilation, and not something new and useful to publish), and possibly also shows that we should already be using AI more to solve such problems and to predict where research should try to move
You've reminded me that the problem with academic publishing is far worse than just the publishers themselves. Good science should be reproducible, and good published research should be able to instruct the normies exactly how to reproduce it. I've never read a published research paper that could do that, but plenty of TH-cam videos do a great job of it. It's one of the reasons why I hate reading research papers. Even the types of academic misconduct you listed out falls prey to the bias inherent in the academic publishing system. Here you have a set of stated values from the perspective of an academic subject to a system that incentivizes destructive anti-patterns, and the actual needs go unstated.
Instead of publishing fake research papers. we can contribute to science using boinc distributed computing software ♥️ Which is better choice. Many don't know more about this 😢
I'm from Brazil, and the scientific situation here is terrible, basically all research depends one hundred percent on government incentives, it is completely bureaucratized and there is a lot of politicized work. You guys in the USA are lucky to have a private sector.
Just have the researchers/authors start a TH-cam channel. Then they are not beholden to the universities. Better yet, the universities start one and make all the money. Or maybe the venture capitalists start one? What about leaving it alone? Who knows? Let’s talk about it.
![[Bernhard Sabel] Mass Production of Fake Science Publishing: How Big is the Problem and Why?](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/CMxu7ja68vA/mqdefault.jpg)
![[Bernhard Sabel] Mass Production of Fake Science Publishing: How Big is the Problem and Why?](/img/tr.png)
Thank you for watching. Comments are welcomed and encouraged - what do you think?
I heart comments I have seen, and reply to those TH-cam notifies me off.
FEEDBACK:
- Veritasium is in the title because I used his argument (seen at the end). Yes, it also improves views. My video structure should have been better!
- Maybe include more examples of Misconduct relating to Nobel Prize and long-lasting work in published literature. (Planned future video on this)
- 7:34 the paper was originally submitted in May 2023 with those numbers, but updated in Oct 2023 to 150,000 rather than 300,000. @EastBurningRed
KEY COMMENTS:
- Maybe a non-significant result journal
- Overemphasis on quantity over quality wrecked US and EU academia.
- Have the universities publish the papers @dovilacus
- Don't forget arXiv and bioRxiv for publishing @biggie_tea
- Have researchers/authors start a TH-cam channel @carpballet @harmonylivingston3460
- Cryptography papers are mostly free. Publishers don't need to get paid. @debasishraychawdhuri
I would love to see a video overviewing the whole system of academia, with notes on some of the places in which this kind of capitalization of research causes problems.
I think there's plenty of videos on specific problems within academia, but I haven't seen many that sort of lay out the whole system, from bachelor's programs, to peer review, to international conferences, to tenure, etc etc. Obviously this is a huge topic, but I think a general video could be a great intro to those who didn't spend their whole career in this industry.
Have you seen good criticism of Veritasium?
His name is a little ironic given how much capital he has.
@@coboroughVeritasium, i.e., “element of truth”. I’m missing the irony.
The video lacks a proper introduction. It just starts talking about Elsevier, as if everyone knows who they are. If you expect your audience to know who they are, you’re targeting a narrow audience.
To be honest, I stopped watching after 1-2 minutes because you failed to communicate what the video is supposed to be about and why I should care about it. Great content immediately engages the audience. This, on the other hand, confuses the audience.
TL;DR Pin this comment, might leave more feedback when not tired.
I haven't watched the video yet. Honestly I disliked it and then fucked off to go do whatever else til I felt like I should probably come back and actually make sure you were a dumbass, based on another comment here you aren't and we're in agreement and I judged too quickly, disliked removed and will watch now. Like StripedJacket said in the comment I mentioned the packaging (as you put it) is a bit off. The video "Neurodiversity: "Fancy word for all of humanity"" is what really put me over the edge since I have both Autism and ADHD and it seemed like you were against that model of thinking, but again briefly reading the comments seems like you're in support of it. I'm very tired at the moment and I'd love to give better feedback but I can't form a cohesive statement that makes the point I'm trying without maybe having a double meaning.
ANYWAYS, I'd pin this comment man. If you want feedback, pin it so everyone knows. I had to scroll well below the video to see this, but it shows that you're very open to feedback and discussion. In my opinion that makes you a better creator (and person honestly) than most, and if you pinned this comment it would allow you to show that, as well as get more feedback and discussion. The words that I just typed definitely don't make sense.
It could be simpler! Have the universities themselves publish the papers, except they have to publish through other universities to maintain peer review. Instead of private journals we could have institutions that do research themselves publish collections of papers!
This type of review already happens at extent of a phd/master thesis, members from other facultys are usually invited to jury and the work is posted to an online repository. Why not extend that to post graduate research with the caviat of the institution not being able to self-publish?
They could even publish everything they want. I have seen many papiers criticised in the comment section on Academia and the more controversial take the more likely somebody is to criticise it. And these kinds of discussions would be quite beneficial - either somebody will see what not to do, or they will come up with idea how to check/write this papier better.
In any field, there will be a certain number of journals with a good reputation. Peer-review isn't perfect, but you can be fairly confident that work published in a high-quality journal will have been through a rigorous peer review process. If publishing is decentralised and devolved to universities, the number of publishers suddenly explodes, and gauging the reputation of a publisher becomes practically impossible. It's very easy to say that we should be judging papers purely on their individual merits, but any professional scientist knows that it's practically impossible to devote the hours required to carefully consider every paper published in a field. This would have been possible several decades ago when the volume of research that was published was manageable, but that isn't the case in 2024. Having reputable academic gatekeepers is a practical necessity in academia (even if we might wish it wasn't), and this would be unmanageable if we got rid of journals because suddenly, rather than tracking the reputation of 10-20 journals, we have to track the reputation of hundreds or thousands of university publishers.
Additionally, if, as you suggest, universities become general-purpose academic publishers, each university would need sufficient editorial expertise to gauge the quality of research across all research disciplines. This is unrealistic. An alternative would be pooling resources (e.g. rather than all universities publishing research in field X, 10-20 universities agree to do this)... but now you're in the exact position you started with, you've just shifted who owns the journal.
Journals are necessary for modern science to work. Rather than trying to get rid of journals or peer-review, we need to promote non-profit journals owned and run by academic societies.
I sort of agree with you, but this sounds like a temporary solution, eventually this will give power to universities, and like academic journals, they will exploit it, especially since I imagine only top universities would have good reliability, like would you trust something published by some random university from a tiny island in the pacific? of by Harvard or the like? you'll create the same issue, just that now it won't be publishers per say, but universities
As someone who has worked in publishing this would be a stop-gap measure. The bit people often miss about publishing is that it's not "just" publishing, but administration, as well as legal, work that needs to be done. For every paper we would handle, at least three admin were needed, plus legal if anything happened to challenge the paper. The amount of time publishers have to spend defending papers they have published, just because someone makes a claim that then turns out to be false, is staggering. There are instances, albeit rarely, where people challenge papers as a means of stopping that paper from getting published only to then publish a paper in that same topic themselves, essentially using the case as a means of stopping rivals publishing ahead of them. Of course, for paper mills etc. that is a different kettle of fish and they take that very seriously. If universities wanted to publish, they would need more admin and legal staff to take the brunt of the work, and then also that leads to pay, HR etc. If they are not charging people for viewing papers they publish (ie. Subscription model) or the academics that publish with them (ie. OA model) then they are also not making any money to cover the additional costs of these teams. This increased cost is one of the reasons publishers need money, and why they collapse very quickly if they simply don't get enough papers through the door.
There are some efforts to create new, independent journals. I am so happy this is finally happening, like when the editors of Neuroimage stepped down in protest and started a new journal. There are also more and more journals in other fields that have very low or no fees but have been started by up-and-coming-prominent-enough-to-matter figures in the field. And I am so, so deeply grateful to every single one of them and will take on as much reviewing as I can afford to do for their journals!
When I was doing my PhD and got that first shock looking at article processing costs and open access fees, a professor told me "well, we cannot do anything either, it is what it is." He was at the very top of his career and one of the most influential researchers in the field. Nobody looks at his grant applications and sees a lack of Elsevier journals and thinks "my, my, no grant for you this year."
That's just not something he needs to be concerned about, yet this weird need to publish in "prestigious" journals and get interviewed a couple of times more on TV (to then loudly complain about lack of time due to all the interviews) is still there.
But if none of the people who already have all the power and recognition do anything, who will?
As a materials science PhD student, I've realised how much of a racket many aspects of institutional science are, with publishers at its centre. Honestly, I live for the day when science is more decentralised and is contributed to by professionals, amateurs and lay communicators alike.
Don't hold your breath.
I'd argue it's happening right now, and that it's not a good thing at all. So many clickbaity articles come from half-assed studies that haven't been peer-reviewed but are already available on the web.
I'm not in the scientific community and this is a genuine question.
Why can you and your colleagues not create a web site where anyone can publish or read any paper with a comments section as peer review?
It seems simple enough. I don't understand.
TH-cam for science or science TH-cam... SciTube. Yeah
@@benchapple1583 Bc they would loose the boogeyman to blame instead of addressing the primary factors at the heart of the issue.... Government monopolization of the academic marketplace via...
1) the treasury's tit
2) legal codes that favor big firms that can leverage size and access to litigious services to lobby and bully lesser competition out of bissiness, while also strictly enforcing patent and copyright codes that highly restrict competitive and marketplace access to innovation, not just on an overly broad basis, but also for inordinate periods of time into the future.
The state of Academia broadly truly terrifies me. I dropped out of my science degree for a number of reasons, mostly personal but even as a drop-out the level of corruption is obvious. The worst outcome is that charlatans and cranks can point out this obvious problem and use it as a way to discredit legitimate science. You see this increasingly having a toxic impact on discourse and politics.
What exactly scares you and why?
What corruption can you see at an undergraduate level lol
@@Pomegrante460-- maybe judoisoww meant by "science degree" something other than an American bachelor's degree.
@@declup possibly
@judoisoww said "charlatans and cranks can point out this obvious problem and use it as a way to discredit legitimate science"
You see GENERALIZED CORRUPTION but you worry about discredit of legitimate science
It's like catholics watching their church rotting everywhere but worried about what the atheists will say
That's why scientism is catholicism of science
Goodhart's law: _When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure._
That's a great quote! thanks!
I'm always a bit confused when there's videos about scientific publishing that don't mention places like arXiv and bioRxiv, where researches publish pre-print versions of their articles, freely accessible to anyone, and are expected to update them after every step of the review process. I can't speak for bioRxiv, but I know that in the fields of phyics and mathematics, it is standard practice to upload to arXiv and it is almost frowned upon when this doesn't happen. The articles of course also go through the peer review process before they can be reliably cited, keeping the role of publishers, and so I think it forms a great 'middle ground' option
Yeah, but the problem is that to get funding or because university or institute you are working require you to publish in a peer reviewed journal to prove you are "working"
@@Max-nr1xf If a university or institute needs external validation for an application to fund some research, why does that institution exist and who runs it?
Moreover, it seems to me that the widespread use of some synthetic index is sufficient proof that science as a profession is drastically overpopulated.
I'm a biology student. While many bigger labs/publications tend to go on bioRxiv before review, it's not frowned upon to skip it. The impression I get (having also put a few papers on there) is that it's a good way to get your data out there as early as possible. It's very common to reanalyze or combine large molecular datasets, so the sooner you get your data publicly available, the sooner you'll have citations rolling in (sometimes even before it's published). Plus, it helps to not get scooped...
One interesting thing I've found is that some people never actually publish their papers; they'll just keep them on the archive. Seems especially common with bioinformatic tools. The code is available for anyone to view and scrutinize, so it's not super necessary to have peer review on it, unless you're including newly generated data.
@@tolep 'the widespread use of some synthetic index is sufficient proof that science as a profession is drastically overpopulated' or that we spend far too little money for scientist to work in peace.
@@adapienkowska2605 To work in peace? Work in peace at the expense of the taxpayer who is not supposed to ask any questions?
The system is corrupt, generates low returns and has no meaningful quality control, and your proposal is to throw even more money into it? Did I understand correctly?
One major problem is that retractions are treated like failings as a scientists, not as part of the process. You can’t be right with your hypothesis, and you can have one experiment find wrong results because that’s how probability works. Retraction isn’t failure, it’s completion of the scientific method.
The other problem is that for major topics, many people will never see a retraction if one happens.
Imagine if someone discovered life on mars via telescope. Then when we get a rover there weeks later and find it was actually just some rocks that looked like aliens, everyone is already convinced the first article was right, so don’t ever check if a retraction happened.
I obviously could be wrong, but I thought that retractions were reserved for genuine failings of the scientist, like data manipulation or incorrect analysis. I am under the impression that if you correctly do a study and analysis, and it supports your hypothesis, but then it turns out that hypothesis is untrue, that won’t result in a retraction, because it is part of the process, as you said.
Your second point I do agree with, especially with so much misinformation and disinformation around, we gotta stay up to date 😅
yeah i work at a journal, retractions are specifically for scientific misconduct/bad research, so it would constitute a failing as a scientist. it's not considered a normal part of the scientific process
@@fredgoodyer4907-- but the idea, though, is important enough, right? OctagonalSquare used the word "retraction", but OS was probably pointing to the lack of balance in science publishing: only hypothesis confirmations are given any attention, whereas most scientific results, still valuable evidence, reject their corresponding hypotheses. Negative results (or OS's so-called "retractions") and sensational headline-grabbing results should be treated much more similarly than they are.
I'm living in the uni, and proud my professors said all this. It deeply saddens me because they are ubiquotus, and so can't just disappear because of the important metric based upon them, something better needs to take all of it, and people need to be willing to publish in whatever that is
You said this at the end of the video, seems great that the thinking is clear, but the solution isn't
There is no 'solution' due to the complexity of the issue in my view. There are things we can do but it requires a collective effort - hence culture shift. Unless you disagree?
@@Danny.Hatcher Definitely agree, but as research culture is heavily biased towards high rank researchers, their action that will actually change the status quo
The Earth is not a globe. It's a shame that peasants are much smarter than "intellectuals".
Universities around the world should fund a non-profit publication that has independent reviewers and editors to remove the middle man in research publication. Institutions no longer needs to pay for the profit of the publication, they just need to pay the cost. The new entity benefits from reputation of the supporting universities and gain momentum to move forward with the operation.
I was expecting this was a bigger channel. Nice work
Wow, thanks!
I thought this was going to be a pseudoscience or BS video attacking people to get views (Tbf your channel has a lot of video titles and thumbnails that point to a sort of drama-driven style)
But when I watched and figured out you’re talking about how unethical and profit driven scientific journals are I was already on board this train for a while now.
This is a kind of conversation that falls on deaf ears and I support you bringing awareness to this
Yes, the 'packaging' of videos is something I am working on. Brining attention to topics that tend to fall on deaf ears has been a challenge, sometimes at the cost of topic clarity.
Good work! And good luck continuing it.
Part of this is the tragedy of government support. Post WWII support for students has enabled many many students to get post high school educations -- and America's miracle economy, like Japan's is probably more a result of the high level of literacy and numeracy in the population than it is of supposed "free" enterprise.
The down side is that massive injections of government money, Fulbright Scholarships and a thousand other assists to higher education, lead to huge increases of prices. The Elementary and Secondary Education Acts, for instance, made possible the infestation of the land with teachers' assistants; this may be nice for the egos of teachers but there is no evidence that it leads t any long-term improvement in students' outcomes.
America's land grant colleges, state universities, and perhaps its top fifty or eighty private uiversities are among the world's best educational institutions. Sadly, though, government assistnace makes possible the proliferation of hundreds of worthless colleges.
Scientific publishing? Pari passu.
These problems led me to believe that probably I'm better publish my work on youtube as "researcher content creator" to gain recognition. Its free for everyone and also everyone can scrutinize my methodology and result, and have more fast paced, more flexible discussion.
That is my thinking 😁
You can submit it to a pre-print server if there is one for your field of study. Then you can communicate your research through TH-cam.
What would be the best way to value "good researcher" and "good research" properly, and how to define them? I think NSF and NIH should work about this really fast.
Right now, the entire academia only cares about number of papers published. Everyone overestimate research quantities, no one gives a shit about a single high quality paper from rigorous proper scientific approach which may take multiple years. Everyone goes for such research topic that is favorable to increase number of papers within short period of times, because that is only way to get out of postdoc, get a permanent position, and get the tenure. Overpopulation of PhD and postdoc worsens the situation.
IMHO, this trend wrecked US and EU academia and entire high education of PhD-postdoc system. Something really needs to be done fast.
need a third party that specializes in weeding out false papers, invalid conclusions, inadequate test controls, etc. and gives stamps of approval to good papers. Costs the scientists nothing. They could start by verifying or refuting the most cited papers first and work down the list. Create a stigma against using papers that do not get teh stamp of approval.
problem, is that too will eventually become corrupted.
In my opinion, science has got to results oriented. Good science is just asking questions about the world, testing them, reporting the results, no matter what they are. Who asks the best questions often just comes down to luck. The results should not dictate good science.
@@Myself-xg5fu nope, nobody is forced to use it. Nobody stops you from using a report. you clearly don't understand what I'm suggesting.
but if it is objectively found to be false and is detailed why it's false in a report, then you choosing to rely upon a false report at that point is your problem. just don't expect anyone to take seriously a report proven to be false, nor the person who cites it.
And often a publication is silent about the shortcomings of the method discussed. I think a publication system that incentives people to write both good and bad aspects of their work will be helpful for the overall growth and dissemination of science.
It is impossible to leave the mailing list of some publishers! That person may be doing academic misconduct but god they are right!
As a former academic many of these points hit too close to home! Excellent video! So glad the algorithm recommended this!
This is very well done. Thank you for publishing your sources and bringing more awareness to this topic.
In an attempt to make the system fair (as in: "objective metrics") and profitable (as in: "let someone else judge this"), we have ruined it.
Let's be real here: even advanced AI will be hard pressed to judge the quality of research, let alone a primitive, dim metric such as "citations".
I agree that something needs to be done, and quickly, as the reputation of the concept of doing science at all, is already damaged.
I find it ludicrous that even in computer science, it is often considered to be surprising that the results from any specific experiment are reproducible at all. As in, we have collectively grown to expect that most papers are rubbish and take it as expected that the experiments are not reproducible. And in such a case, can it even be called science?
Yeah , like i'm pretty sure one of the pillars of Science is the scientific method , which is based in replicability
That hasn't been my experience with AI research. Are there notable examples of unreproducible CS papers? Or are you just referring to a perception of such?
@@thebrianbeale CS is math, it's results are always reproducible. They probably are talking about more practical research, like papers you can find on SIGGRAPH and whatnot. But I'm not sure if those are nor peer-reviewed or not. And probably are not trash due to the very fact of them being practical.
@@thebrianbeale oh, man, there is an entire list of them, starting with any paper where they claim performance gains on secret datasets only. And if you try the same method on an open dataset, it turns out that there is no improvement. For a famous example, look at the Microsoft Phi-2 paper. they released model weights which is nice, but not the method of getting such weights, nor the dataset, nor a method of generating the dataset. Hence, the result is not reproducible. This is truly common. Then there are all the papers that claim to come with a github repo, but when you follow the link the repo is empty or says "the code will be released later" and of course, it never gets released. But you will be prevented from trying to reimplement their method because they might just release the code next week.
To test if the results are reproducible is its own challenge
Tangentially, there is a journal/website "Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis". The latest article there is "The Effect of Owl Feces on Rat Operant Responding: Can Rats Recognize a Conspecific-Eating Predator?" The answer to the question was "no".
O took 2 years developing the work of my life, no AI helping me to write, exhaustive testing. Submitted, got major revision, worked a lot to fulfill the requirements. After 1 and a half year since submission, 2 reviewers accepted, but the third was a new one that rejected with a single sentence.
I am tired.
Maybe I'll will just give up on journals. Make smaller works, use chatpgt, submit to small conferences.
Always said that universities should publish their own articles themselves. Researchers are employed their university and that university usually also appropriates that research (when it come to patents, for example), so it should be that university's responsibility to disseminate the results, not external publishers. It could also bring in a bit more funds for the university through subscriptions, which then helps with doing more research.
I like this video as it exposes the current "scientific" problem. I work for an non profit organization and all articles are obliged to be in open source (thesis, ph.D etc they have to be in the national repository as open access, with some exception where thesis can have a period of embargo). But the problem of the big companies (Elsevier, etc.) are making great pressure to secure their "importance". For me all University papers must be in the open access status, with cc licensing. When papers are funded by public money they must be in open access... Great Video!!!!
The accepted body of knowledge is what's included in textbooks, and implemented in industry. Falsehoods get that far too, but it's sort of like animation errors, sometimes things are just invisible problems until they're not. For a new system to supersede the incumbent publishing system, certainly it would have to be more effective wouldn't it? I can imagine any number of versions of a better system, but that doesn't mean I, or anyone else, has the capability to implement any of them.
I don't agree that there's a fundamental problem with the journal-driven-publishing model. The problem is with the publishing *industry*, i.e. Elsevier, Springer-Nature, Wiley et al. There are some (usually smaller) journals, often run by academic societies, that are excellent. One of my favourite examples is Copernicus, the publisher for European Geoscience Union journals. Copernicus isn't even non-profit, yet it has an outstanding fully-open peer review system, genuinely high-quality editing, and APCs that are reasonable given the quality of service they provide (I have absolutely no affiliation with them).
The sheer quantity of research published in this day and age means that we need academic gatekeepers. The problem isn't the journal model, it's the profit-before-all-else motive that most academic publishers have.
My feeling is there needs to be a language of science that isn't just LaTex and a bunch of citations, hidden behind a wall of whatever language you choose to publish in. Sure, communicating difficult ideas is hard but maybe a formalized structure of "proposition" "experiment, to strengthen or weaken argument x..." could be formalized and take away some of the sensationalization? idk.
I'm not sure what you mean? LaTeX is simply a document preparation system. There needs to be a bunch of citations, since all science builds on the work of research. Finally the "language you publish in" if you are referring to English or other languages, I don't see how that makes a difference. If you are referring to the use of field specific language and terms, then that is also necessary, since having to explain all these terms would take op more space than the actual content.
The system is broken. But this is already clear for the last decades.
The fact that researchers are only as good as the number of publications they have is very damaging to science. From the outside, its so hard to understand why ppl would want to rush the scientific process, or only care about publications but once you get into academia you realise that your entire career is dependent on publications. Every aspect of academia seems to be exploiting researchers in the current age and journals are on top, where they make the most money and researchers get none, contrary to popular opinion. Researchers are already overworked but they will still take on reviewing articles in a field that they might know very little about, because it might help them get published easily. This will not result in a quality peer reviewed article.
I think if the government created not for profit regulated journals, and actually paid the reviewers it might lead to a better quality of research.
I also believe that to make science much more accessible we need to change how we write articles, still writing in a complex manner might sound better to us but it makes it useless to the general public or even physicians at times. A scientific paper does not need to be in a rare language, only understood by a few.
needlessly cryptic language is more often than not sign that the author is a charlatan
This is why I support library economy
Why they dont just publish that stuff for free on the internet is beyond me.
So stupid having some journals as gatekeepers.
Because academics' entire career is dependent on the amount and quality of publications they have produced. In a perfect world that measurement will be directly tied to the quality and quantity of the research they produce, but in reality this is, as detailed in the video, measured by how many citations they get through the H-index and similar. Publishing in high-impacting journals becomes the most obvious move to gain higher citations, thus keeping journals alive as gate keepers.
If we were to get rid of journals as gate keepers, the culture of valuing an academic's worth and ability mainly through the citations their publications get needs to be changed first, or that citations need to somehow be decoupled from the journal they publish in.
This is such an important topic. I hope more people see this.
Thank you. A share is always appreciated 😉
I am currently doing a PhD in cryptography, and almost all the papers in my field are free of charge. I rarely need to connect to my University account to download the papers. This proves that the publishers getting paid is not a prerequisite for scientific communication.
Are you sure most are free? My research is in applied cryptography as well but the majority of the research papers from renowned publishing houses ( like the IEEE, and Elsevier) publish peer-reviewed articles with the same written methodology. Most often these algorithms are often duplicated with a minor twist.
Hmmm so let me get this straight.... theres a human activity crucial for our progress up till the present & especially our survival into the future .... but ownership, rent seeking & profit {market forces} are getting in the way, unduely influencing & holding back the "thing" & any change to "Open Commons of Knowledge" has to vetted by established material advantage
7:34 the paper was originally submitted in May 2023 with those numbers, but updated in Oct 2023 to 150,000 rather than 300,000.
As a PhD student, I still don't get the idea of monetisation by publisher; when researchers do the hard work to publish and pay when publish, reviewers often volunteer work and the publisher mines the money
Well, as a PhD student I suffered a few times and I will probably still face this problem. I see this simply as a problem with capitalism. You represented this beautifully at the beginning of the video, it's just a direct transfer of money from the government to a private company, which essentially does nothing, because the real work has already been done by the paper authors and the reviewers and all of those have been paid indirectly or directly by the government. That's why I appreciate the work done by Alexandra Elbakyan and the team of Sci-Hub, they have saved me many times.
Why did you censor the name of Alexandra Elbakyan’s shadow library at 12:11?
To try and avoid any legal situation by 'spreading' it's use.
@@Danny.Hatcher a tragic example of the chilling effect. I am not a lawyer, so I can’t say anything about possible liability, but I highly doubt you would experience any legal issues (and really hope not).
If I put "Veritasium" in my title I should get more views!
Yup...
@@Danny.Hatcher Disgusting
"capitalism breeds inovation" 😂
Innovation at fucking over the rest of us
@@MagDrag123 - Thats the rich peoples favorite tool. They are buying the f*king machine and enjoying the show.
like kids playing GTA V
It’s wild y’all say this when you’re freely commenting on a free website, probably on a device that has chips that are some of the most complex things to ever exist. Capitalism isn’t perfect, but better than the other shit
@@mharley3791 I wonder who developed the key innovations of the worldwide web, social media, and public knowledge bases (like Wikipedia). Maybe if we look into the history, we'll discover whether capitalists did that initial work... Or if they just enclosed the best parts of the internet AFTER all the real work was done.
Look into 'digital enclosure', the history of indymedia and twitter, and basically anyone from the early internet. They're still around and giving interviews
@@mharley3791cope
Posted this in an answer, but will repost for that bit of hope:
There are some efforts to create new, independent journals. I am so happy this is finally happening, like when the editors of Neuroimage stepped down in protest and started a new journal.
There are also more and more journals in other fields that have reasonably low or no fees. They have been started by established but not too old or prominent-enough-to-matter-but-up-and-coming figures in the respective fields.
And I am so, so deeply grateful to every single one of them and will take on as much reviewing as I can afford to do for their journals because these efforts *matter*!
They are people from the community and the papers being published have the same standards because it's the same people reviewing them. I am doing the same work as if I was reviewing a paper for an Elsevier journal for the same pay (nothing but a pat on the back) but I also know that the work I review, if good enough, will be published and accessible without any side having to fork out several thousands of dollars.
Just read through all of your comments across the videos.
Thank you and I have made note of each for further thinking on my part. I wish I could spend the time responding to every comment on TH-cam but there isn't the time in the day 😁
The content itself is great and it is true the replication crisis is immense.
However, one thing that struck me the most here is not the content but the title and the thumbnails. The usage of Veritasium in the title and Derek in the clip gave me misleading ideas... I thought it was a reupload Veritasium episode by another content creator.... It sure does tempt me to report this content as a veiled plagiarism at the first 30 seconds...
Thanks for the feedback. How would you package the video?
Derek's video on 'good' clickbait comes to mind...
@@Danny.Hatcher It sure worked because I clicked the thumbnail, and it was a great summary about the state of science publishing.
My experience was for the first one-two minutes, I just tried to verify whether this is the same content or not with the one from Veritasium. Thankfully it is not.
I just hope that all the clips you used is under a fair use agreement. it would be sad if the video is takedown due to copyright violation.
I was a science major in undergrad, a career in academia seemed like a nightmare so I walked away from science after my biology degree was completed and went into architecture instead.
I think the EU and America should get together and pay these publishers to achieve access for all and change the quality of the things published. Both have a combined economic value of 50 trillion, I am sure 19 billion can be found in the budget for education to create access for humanity.
The bit about "get my off your ... mailing list" is referring to a paper in a known/obvious "predatory journal, not an example of what I would classify as fraudulent science. It's a related but distinct problem in academia. The same pressures are at work that give rise to the problem of predatory journals, but the video at that point makes it seem like the presenter is using it as an example of academics (ie the scientists themselves) acting badly. In fact, it's an example of a scientist being fed up with predatory junk email.
1:46 What was that?
How true is it that the modern scientific publishing model was largely “created” (i guess that word is kind of loaded so you could instead say “overseen” or even just “owned/profited from”) Robert Maxwell. I saw an academic say as much in a history of Scientific Publishing piece once and I found it very shocking, mainly bc Robert maxwell is a pretty famous guy for a lot of different reasons yet I have never heard his relationship to the Scientific Publishing industry before or since I had first heard it.
You're channel is on the up and up! I hope to someday also be successful at youtube. All i got queued right now in my editor is a mountain vlog
Great video, awesome animations and transitions, but there were quite a few spelling errors I noticed - such as using "a" instead of "an" or spelling consequences as "consquences."
Thank you. Yes, in 2024 I am putting my face in videos to try and limit those issues 😁
Great video and selection of sources, thank you for your voice in this discussion!
Excellent video. I was especially intrigued as I used to work for a Reed Elsevier sister company.
Twitter and ArXiV is all we need.
Absolutely brilliant video! Subscribed.
Thank you very much!
Wait, what's the difference between HARKing and p-hacking?
Lots of people keep their knowledge to themselves. Often to maintain their 'importance'. Keeps their ego going.
Nonsense. That's not how science works. What's the point of keeping your discoveries secret?
@@davidhoward4715I can think about consulting companies and AI developers as one example.
@@davidhoward4715 You keep your job and status as the one who can resolve the problem. If the guys under you know what you know, they don't need you anymore, do they?
Some people want to help the world; some people want to help themselves.
The world is made up of humans, not saints.
@@davidhoward4715 So nobody knows you're a liar.
They probably mean paywalled articles though.
What if a publisher required text written in a certain word processor that you cant use AI in? You could still write down what the AI said, but maybe less likely
How would it be less likely, I wonder? Do you understand that an effort of typing a copy is not comparable to the effort of doing actual research?
Nicely done.Thanks.
good job! audio mix bit distracting.
That veritasium claim at the end... oof.
The fact that so far negative results have been extremely hard to publish, non-replicating studies are the norm. So established results do *not* get questioned as he said. Hopefully, there's some change now that we have actual numbers out there on all the studies that have failed replication studies and more and more journals promise to accept negative results too. fingers crossed.
I have a novel idea. How's about we get the grubbymint OUT of the business of funding science?
Before the Digital Era,.. Publication is the only way.. publisher generously want to simplify the access of knowledge.. says library rental of books, with some small amount of membership fees.. in the opposite, digital era that possibility of (copyright) "smuggling" is very high (and without any acknowledgement) or with less protective/benefitial return..?
While, on the other hand, the verification of trust-worthy reviewed articles are more and more questionable.. (by volunteers, you said?) Exactly more publications than potentially retractions are basic reallity.. What about debate of "Science over Pseudo-" or unsettled Topic of every here and there.(?) But still most of them' ve already been published.!!
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. (Goodhart's Law)
Are you the Obsidian guy wearing all orange? 🤯
I am yes 😁
Good work!
Is that Veritasium ?
I don't know if you did this intentionally but your "more grants" at 1:46 is spot on funny to me. lol.
You mean their profit was 40%?
Is he talking about sci-hub in the video?
Yes. I didn't want to show it to avoid any legal stuff 😁
This is an extremely good video that doesn't go around telling nothing but straight to the point. But i genuinely thought this is one of those video that just want to berate veritasium for one of his video because of your thumbnail and title.
No human is perfect but i just kinda sad that just because veritasium one of the biggest content creator he easily become punching bag when there's so many blatant pseudo science guru who would just walk away unscathed.
More reason to become an anarchist --- science would be done only where necessary and under no pressure. Where you'd have no reason to lie.
😂 necessity is the greatest pressure there is, and an anarchist is an expert at lying to themselves. In true anarchy, there is no hierarchy to determine legitimate science without confirming it yourself, so there is no body of knowledge you can trust. (Your own experiments are likewise unconfirmed by others)
@@thebrianbeale there is no structural hierarchy in modern science either. Research is certified by peer review. Cooperation still exists -- I'm not an Individualist Anarchist. I'm a social anarchist. Basically a communist. Where people live in communes and take decisions communally. Science would obviously be something done seriously. And in a digital age, multiple communes could add to the same body of work -- precisely how science worked for a long time.
Great video, but thumbs down for the tabloid title
Packaging is part of the process I am trying to figure out....
There are so much talk about problems in academia, bad incentives and all, yet there's no action at all. I didn't even come across any systematic research on the issue, despite being discussed by some top tier researchers and quite few very influential social media personalities. What are the hope of any solution when there's no systematic study to guide to a possible action?
Great point! I am not curious 🤔
Before I watch this and fall for some clickbait, why is Veritasium on the thumbnail?
Why is Derek in the title of this video?
It is his argument that I built the video from.
Mathematical isn’t always complete. Lightspeed is absolutely 100% 186,000 miles a second in every case in a vacuum and yet it’s also absolutely false since the way to measure lightspeed are time and distance which do change and compound the actual observations of the changes in lightspeed such as in superluminal motion and the faster movements of the outer spiral arms of galaxies and gravitational lensing and probably the anomalies of the Voyager spacecraft that have lost their orientation.
The title read to me like there’s a problem with Veritasium’s scientific publications.
Is HARKing that bad?
A good ethical question - it depends 😅
The most bizarre thing to me is that we are dealing supposedly with the brightest minds on this planet and each university has all the talent needed to basically build rome in a day, yet they complain: "What are we suppposed to do?"
Stopped watching @15:00 Other than a quote here or there did this piece have anything to do with Veritasium? Or, is the title just clickbait?
His main claims are at the end of the video. Yes, my packaging is questionable.
Who’s this lady in 4:13?
There should be a source.
Is the paywall used to distort science? For example, plenty of free scientific papers that describe the benefits of taking statins to lower cholesterol are available. However, try finding scientific papers on cholesterol's roles in human physiology; those are behind paywalls. Why isn't science available to all?
It sure makes it harder for people to tell the difference pseudoscience and real science. I wonder if we would have fewer people thinking climate change isn't real, because the science isn't accessible to them.
Great video, thanks for this.
publishers serve no useful role. Journals are useful and should continue to exist for academics to vet and review their research, but publishers are not needed in the equation.
I wish Veritasium hadn't sold out. 🙃
I expected some sort of refutation of Veritasium. No intro? This is confusing
Yes, I have heard that feedback. I used his argument to build the video but didn't express that well.
This is why I always use sci-hub.
A few 'publishers' just want to be gatekeepers. It would be horrible if people were able to think for themselves.
When AI is able to solve something on its own, it says a lot about necessity of such paper (if AI is like, just compiling what exists, then the paper is just such a compilation, and not something new and useful to publish), and possibly also shows that we should already be using AI more to solve such problems and to predict where research should try to move
Remove the profit motive. Simple.
You've reminded me that the problem with academic publishing is far worse than just the publishers themselves. Good science should be reproducible, and good published research should be able to instruct the normies exactly how to reproduce it. I've never read a published research paper that could do that, but plenty of TH-cam videos do a great job of it. It's one of the reasons why I hate reading research papers.
Even the types of academic misconduct you listed out falls prey to the bias inherent in the academic publishing system. Here you have a set of stated values from the perspective of an academic subject to a system that incentivizes destructive anti-patterns, and the actual needs go unstated.
As someone who will soon have to deal with scientific publishers, god help me
Science
Can
Inform
Humanity
Unto
Brilliance
Instead of publishing fake research papers. we can contribute to science using boinc distributed computing software ♥️
Which is better choice. Many don't know more about this 😢
Group think, politics, and money have an outsized influence on "science".
Veritasium: "despite evidence to the contrary, I believe science is great!"
(This is not an anti-science comment.)
Aaron Swartz would be proud of you. ❤
This is an ongoing systemic problem that is getting worse with 'Artificial Intelligence'
clearly the larger, overarching problem here is the profit motive...
I'm from Brazil, and the scientific situation here is terrible, basically all research depends one hundred percent on government incentives, it is completely bureaucratized and there is a lot of politicized work. You guys in the USA are lucky to have a private sector.
Thank God we have sci hub
Just have the researchers/authors start a TH-cam channel. Then they are not beholden to the universities. Better yet, the universities start one and make all the money. Or maybe the venture capitalists start one? What about leaving it alone? Who knows? Let’s talk about it.
very good video