Academic Travesties – Open Access Publishing

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I got ANOTHER invitation to publish an article the other day – this time it was a call for book chapters. I get quite a few of these, as I’m sure others do too.

Personalized invitations are always flattering, but of course, with the advance of automated mailers and data mining, there is no real reason to believe that an actual human had anything to do with my invitation at all. The invitation mentioned one of my papers, but they had obviously not read the paper. The paper they mentioned talks about a technique I developed for analysing educational approaches in video games using reverse engineering and while the book for which I got the chapter invitation is about reverse engineering, it is very definitely aimed at engineers and computer scientists, while my work is informed BY these fields, not FOR them.

I didn’t think much about it. I was going to politely decline, but I’ve been quite busy lately and it slipped my mind. This morning I got another invitation from the same group about the same book. SO, I checked it out. Something in the email caught my eye that I had previously missed – this is an OPEN ACCESS publication.

The punchline? It will cost me 590 EUR to have my chapter published.

In the 21st century, if you have money, you can publish. It won’t matter if your work, or even your writing for that matter is any good, just so long as you have money. Commercial publishing doesn’t even do this. I am currently writing a book for a major publisher (Wiley). They pay me. They pay me an advance, which is effectively their gamble that the book is worthy. When it hits the shelves, I get royalties. If my book isn’t any good, or if it isn’t something people are interested in, I don’t get paid. That’s how capitalistic publishing is supposed to work. Academic publishing is supposed to be based on MERIT. Period. It should not be based on money, nor should it be based on what’s popular.

Some say they don’t see open access publishing as a big deal. I know plenty of well-known researchers who have had big grants for so long they probably don’t even remember what it’s like to have to think about what things cost, if in fact they ever did. Often all you need to get that next big grant is to have had a big grant before (but that’s for another rant). I spent most of my academic career as an instructor – I was ineligible for grants. At least that is what the people who had to sign off on my applications told me when they laughed at me for asking. (That’s another rant too – that people up the ladder can poison or even outright block your attempts to get funding. Many of these people are administrators because they aren’t much good at anything else so they see you as a threat if you are better than them.)

Now, the original idea of open access, namely that readers will get to access the publications for free, is a worthy and laudable one. It also fits in nicely with what education should be – accessible. However, the Academy and capitalism do not mesh well (ever) and what we have ended up with is a system whereby academics (I’m starting to hesitate to even call them that) PAY to have their stuff published. Here are just a few of the reasons why this is so very wrong:

  1. Publications get accepted on the basis of ability to pay (i.e. selecting for the wealthy and/or well-funded) rather than on merit (i.e. what the Academy is SUPPOSED to stand for). Researchers with money have an advantage.
  2. An individual with no money can not get published, REGARDLESS OF HOW GOOD OR IMPORTANT their work is. Researchers with unpopular ideas (politically or institutionally) are discriminated against.
  3. Publishers, no matter what they claim, will accept low-quality work to fill their publications as they have realized that it is actually pretty easy to fill a publication this way. Often those with the least to say push their stuff the hardest.
  4. Scholarship becomes about doing what will pay rather than doing something that might advance human knowledge or help the world.

This really is despicable and any academic who supports or publishes in such a venue should be ashamed of themselves. Yes I know the old adage, “Publish or Perish”. I also know that this is the reality for the most part. But here’s the kicker: universities are run by academics. SO, ultimately, THEY are the ones who encourage this kind of perversion.

As far as I’m concerned, a publication in an open access venue has questionable merit -right up there with someone who never publishes alone (and someone who ONLY publishes alone). The academy doesn’t seem to care, but every self-respecting academic should.

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On Peter Lawrence’s Article, The Heart of Research is Sick

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Boy does he have it right on the nose.

lawrence-the-heart-of-research-is-sick-2011.pdf (application/pdf Object).

I know people who insist on putting their names on things their grad students did. There are others who do it more subtly. They are just as despicable.

I am proud to say that I had significant input on everything ever published with my name on it. I’ve had one or two co-authors who have said they felt bad because they didn’t feel they pulled their weight. In those cases, I was the one who insisted their name stay on the paper – they did have significant input, even if they didn’t do the actual writing. I’ve also had a few that were supposed to be joint efforts but the other author ended up contributing virtually nothing. Those STILL leave a bad taste in my mouth – AND make me forever wonder how much they actually contributed to any of their other co-authored efforts.

The basic rule is that credit always flows upwards. If you’re a student, your supervisor will get the credit. If you’re a group leader, your department head might get credit, for example, in the research assessment  exercise for rating UK universities. You don’t get rewarded for having discovered something
yourself. I think that has a poisonous effect. It encourages too many scientists to steal credit, to annex the discoveries of the young. To keep on top of the young people working for them, so that they can claim to have been involved and garner the credit for it. It’s become so built-in that people think that if somebody does something on their own, there’s something slightly suspicious about it.

The single, simplest thing that the granting agencies could do is to look backwards, when possible, rather than forwards. The system we have now is counter- productive, wasteful of time and energy. We get people to write a piece of fiction about what they’re planning to do. It’s a kind of intellectual  exercise – sometimes it relates to what they actually do, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a sort of game we have to play to get a grant.

“The idea that politically correct people have, that all professions will one day have equal numbers
of men and women is not only wrong, it’s silly.”

 

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Pseudoteaching

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[PT] Pseudoteaching: MIT Physics | Action-Reaction.

Here’s a lovely label I’ve been wanting for years.

Pseudoteaching is something you realize you’re doing after you’ve attempted a lesson which from the outset looks like it should result in student learning, but upon further reflection, you realize that the very lesson itself was flawed and involved minimal learning.

I think it doesn’t go far enough. Pseudoteaching is also practiced (sometimes willfully) by people who either can’t teach well or who don’t care. Far too many faculty in “research institutions” fall into the latter category. Most of those never get to the ‘further reflection’ phase of the process, and so they never improve. I’m sure the not caring part is a factor.

The key idea of pseudoteaching is that it looks like good teaching. In class, students feel like they are learning, and any observer who saw a teacher in the middle of pseudoteaching would feel like he’s watching a great lesson. The only problem is, very little learning is taking place.

Here’s the kicker: Some of these pseudoteachers manage to earn teaching awards. Really, all they are doing is merely looking good and making their students feel good.

This is far easier to do than actually teaching well. Sadly, many of the students who have been cheated out of a good education this way don’t even know it.

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think they’ll hate you. ~Don Marquis US humorist (1878 – 1937)

Perhaps the same can be said of teaching.

 

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Screen Time For Kids: Is it Learning or a Brain Drain? | MindShift

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Screen Time For Kids: Is it Learning or a Brain Drain? | MindShift.

For me, it all boils down to just a few things:

1. In all things, moderation. And balance. Technology is great and kids should have access to whatever their parents can offer, but they should also get to go outside and play in the mud. Also: DON’T schedule every minute of their day. Give them time to stare out the window.

2. Talk to your kids. I mean BECOME interested, don’t just say, “How was your day?” or “What’d you do in school today?” and then go back to reading your email while the kid talks to the side of your face or the top of your head. Watch TV together (at least sometimes); look at stuff on youtube – together – and talk about it.

3. Remember Sturgeon’s Law. It holds true for just about EVERYTHING. Games. Webpages. The Internet. Movies. Music. Everything.

4. Remember that only half of the people will be above average. Even fewer will be exceptional. That includes teachers.

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The Ludologist » Gamification Backlash Roundup

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Nice summary.

The Ludologist » Gamification Backlash Roundup.

For me the most important comment is this one:

Sebastian Deterding’s Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents:

“Games are not fun because they are games, but when they are well-designed.”

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Having Conviction in Your Thoughts

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Amid the unrelenting march into the digital age, we get this:

The Digital Generation Rediscovers the Magic of Manual Typewriters – NYTimes.com.

My father's Hermes. Bought sometime in the 1950's.

I like it. We have a whole generation of people who have probably never experienced a manual typewriter. I don’t know whether it matters or not, but it DOES reveal a little piece of how we are changing.

“It’s about permanence, not being able to hit delete,” he explained. “You have to have some conviction in your thoughts. And that’s my whole philosophy of typewriters.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we had numerous Selectric typewriters in the department office where I used to teach. It was pretty cool when they came up with typewriters that could ‘erase’ (using a strip of white-out that ran along side the strip of ink).

Mostly, I think it’s a good thing to have a backspace, but now that he mentions it, it probably does affect how we write. After all, you can always delete it if you don’t like it. Perhaps, over time, it also erodes our standards. Little by little, we delete less and less, until eventually, any old crap seems to be OK to publish.

Perhaps, if we knew what we typed was going to be a pain to change, we think a little more before we hit return.

Also, there is something quite satisfying about hearing your words hitting the paper. Feels like you’ve actually done something.

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iPads for College Classrooms? Not So Fast, Some Professors Say. – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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There. It’s been said.

iPads for College Classrooms? Not So Fast, Some Professors Say. – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

early studies indicate that these finger-based tablets are passive devices that have limited use in higher education.

professors cannot use them to mark up material on the fly and show changes to students in response to their questions, a type of interactivity that has been a major thrust in pedagogy.

For their online final exam, 39 of the 40 students put away their iPads in favor a laptop, because of concerns that the Apple tablet might not save their material.

 

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Doing it Right on the Web – NYTimes.com

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I sometimes complain about how poor design is on the web:  like here, and here so I would also like too point out places where they get it right.

Every now and then I come across a site that makes me think, “these guys know how to use this medium.” The New York Times is one that seems to do this well on a regular basis.
Satellite Photos – Japan Before and After Tsunami – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com.

Below are the ‘ordinary’ photos. Go to the article to see what they’ve done with them. Not a big change perhaps, but the effect is big.

Before

 

Here another example:

Forecast for Plume’s Path Is a Function of Wind and Weather – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com.

This time they used a slider to control the animation.

Very nice.  I’d love to know where their people were trained, or, if they are not formally trained, what their background is because they really do seem to understand how to turn a newspaper into something live on the web.

Oh, and just so you know, I am purposefully avoid talking about the disaster. Nothing I could say would be enough and my heart goes out to all people affected by it.


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