marcela

@marcela@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientific Exposure⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Maxwell insisted on grand titles – “International Journal of” was a favourite prefix. Peter Ashby, a former vice president at Pergamon, described this to me as a “PR trick”, but it also reflected a deep understanding of how science, and society’s attitude to science, had changed. Collaborating and getting your work seen on the international stage was becoming a new form of prestige for researchers, and in many cases Maxwell had the market cornered before anyone else realised it existed.

  If you explain to any outsider that what we call science is a game of collecting and showing off units of prestige, they will be flabbergasted. Maxwell catered to the most superficial and vain aspects of the human psyche, and traded in a measure of righteousness. This is genius, I will grant him that, but opposite to the objectives of science. He made the worst possible metric about which to measure everything, and created a global system of narcissistic organizations selling their souls to publish to these journals.

  And scientists are the least probable to rebel against this status quo. If anything, it will make them appear as big-time asses who are full of themselves. They are bound to project more legitimacy onto the system, similar to doomsday cultists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientific Exposure⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Aspesi was not the first person to incorrectly predict the end of the scientific publishing boom, and he is unlikely to be the last. It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals.

  It is the departments’ choice to cancel subscriptions anytime and start publishing on their own terms. They are equally to blame when they esteem reputation above all, and measure reputation by publishing to these journals. Let’s not pretend that big-shot universities are simply taken hostage by a handful corrupt billionaires. They’re in on it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientific Exposure⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

  Racket.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can you think of any now?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, this is something that felt off indeed. But please explain. So http(s) is the world of http requests, but you can also have other services like ftp, ssh, bittorrent and what not. Is that what you mean? So the WWW is just the global interconnection of web pages strictly, over the Internet? Would this apply to any internet? /genuine

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can you think of any now?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is this …mansplaining?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can you think of any now?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  An internet in theory is a network of other computer networks (not single computers). The Internet is the world wide web.