I do see people mentioning other people's newsletters, so the discovery is there, but barriers are higher.

Barriers to discussion are higher, but to what extent this improves quality enough to make it worth it is unclear. I like interlinking, trackbacks, and comments, but maybe annotation is better? I wonder how Hypothesis works on Substack posts?

Ways will also be found to legibilize the deliberately inscrutable. With biomed funding so centralized, forces can be applied to increase the adoption of practices like data sharing and open science.

Which is the opposite of the vision Xi Jinpeng has for science

so the weights in the reputation graph are personal knowledge, not citations or whatever.

The solution to any sort of global leaderboard thing - like Mendeley most read or most cited - is to break it up into local communities - most read among your friends or most cited within only the outer leaves of the topic tree.

Which is why Total Factor Productivity is not a good measure.

Just wait until you see what publishers have planned for India and China

Going local, again. Need a solution for scaling the commons.

Notable that much of this section is taken directly from https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-bulletins/ib_crowdfunding-.html

So how would one know that the piece of the company they get from any investment on Republic is market price? If it can't be resold AND other offerings might get better terms (more company/dollar? but other offerings aren't visible) there's really no way to form an expectation of what you'd get as a return. A company you invested in could be wildly successful but you'd still get potentially nothing.

It may be that some of this information is disclosed at the point of investment.

Why would a company use Republic if they could get traditional VC financing? Are the terms worse? Is adverse selection an issue for investing in companies that raise through Republic?

What we really want to know is how much equity we get per dollar and if we invest $X and the company gets acquired or IPOs for $Y, how much our investment will yield.

I can't believe that this paper got the reception it did and no one said, "Congrats, you just re-discovered the reproducibility crisis."

I would suggest that if you subtracted out the amount of R&D spending wasted on irreproducible ideas, much of this analysis would collapse. If they're going to assume that economic progress is driven by new technologies, they have to consider how much is spent following research dead ends. It is possible that the number of irreproducible yet seductive research findings has led to an increase in R&D spending tar pits, but that's entirely decoupled from new idea discovery. Number of new ideas is as distinct from number of researchers employed in R&D as it is from number of commercially-useful ideas.

Could it be that these economists see "more expensive to find" and "harder to find" as the same thing? Given that their model seems to suggest that 100 average researchers could do what 1 brilliant one could, it seems reasonable they would imagine a linear relationship between difficulty and expense, but as you argued above re: TFP, there are hard things that are done without showing up in measures of expenses and also much growing expense incurred to manage solved problems (I'm invoking Moloch here, not inflation).

Richard Klavans and Kevin Boyack have made their careers out of studying new field creation. https://www.scitech-strategies.com/ They found that new fields are created when citation patterns between two adjacent fields become more dense. Seems like any discussion of new field creation should cite this prior work.

They don't seem to have a framework for where they looked. Couldn't the examples just have been cherry-picked?

It's reasonable to imagine some correlation between R&D spending and number of employees in R&D, but not reasonable at all to assume talent is directly proportional to compensation. It could be proportional to the political savvy of the department head or the sociopathy (in the Gervais Principle sense) of the employee, and there's a huge amount of luck involved, not to mention any gender wage discrimination.

You might want to consider starting with this section and making the above sections criticizing the changing definition of idea as shorter paragraphs within this section. I feel like the question you end this section with will occur in the reader's mind early on, so you want to get to your answer to it quickly.

It's true that they don't define "idea" rigorously, and are somewhat inconsistent, but doesn't seem to warrant the amount of attention it gets here, given that they say it's not intended to be rigorous, and this seems to distract from your other good points.

Basically, the guy wants to teach kids but also be a professional academic researcher. While it's probably true that teaching kids philosophy is a good thing, I don't know why that has to be considered an academic practice. Maybe he should just start his own nonprofit for that stuff?

True for advanced study of any kind. [[complexity]]

The deal with pharma, in theory, is that they're given market exclusivity for a limited time to recoup their investment in R&D. With startups, they give us free or subsidized service for a limited time and recoup by exploiting their scale afterwards. Whereas with pharma, their upside is capped, with startups, society's upside is capped.

Grey lit is also generally less consistently structured than academic papers.

That .ris remains a thing shows how slow data formats evolve when they're integrated into tools.

Tools used in evidence synthesis for policy

This is the psychopathic mode that seems to be Trump's way

Not sure this is that strong of an argument, because UBI may create new forms of production and consumption, which are less economic and more social

Relationships aren't just one to one, or one to many, but many to many.

Makes me think of all the startups that essentially do what the community used to do - loan things, do odd jobs, etc.

but there's no way any analysis restricted to the article text will ID this, because you have to resolve the RRID to figure that out, right?

Why would papers have a higher percentage of SCR RRIDs? Where are the other RRIDs found?

the conclusion is in the paragraphs above titled comparison. Perhaps this para should be titled "future directions" or something?

This section seems like it should be in the introduction.

correct plural is corpora

Ok so Scibot is identifying digital resources from a list & flagging when there's no RRID but there probably should be?

There are 190000 RRIDs in 13000 articles. RDW found RRIDs (doesn't say how many) in 701110/(2341133+738910+72493+151784=3304320) articles. So there are resources mentioned in about 21% of articles, based on extraction, but presuming all of the 13000 RRID containing articles were included in the 3 million, the RRID prevalence is closer to 6%, but RRIDs mentioning digital resources are 26748 or .8%. So 4/5 of articles don't mention digital resources at all?

I should look at this for the Bay Area

The "it's all complexity" take would be that we aren't even really looking for solutions, but rather decision-makers are all advocates (because it takes so much effort to have an informed opinion, effort which is uncompensated unless you're a professional advocate) who use evidence of problems to burnish their personal reputations.

How legible is risk prevention? Might this just be complexity again?

Same thing in publishing, too. Lots of people say journal costs are inflated & they can run one cheaper. They're right, but there are two considerations: a) in a market economy prices reflect more than just costs. They reflect the economic value, which includes things like brand value, prestige and also, as this & the other posts argue, an inflation due to productivity rising in adjacent market sectors. So the market failures seem to come from a) the difficulty knowing how much something should cost (having comparables and not having too much complexity to understand) and b) too high value ascribed to the status or prestige (which, if understood as a social consensus proxy that reduces the complexity of actually understanding the business & what it's value to the consumer should be, collapses b into a).

Support for socialism is rising among young people in the US. Is the support rising because people are looking at the data themselves and coming to the conclusion that socialism is better, or that there's more this kind of information available for use by advocates to make the case for socialism? If you look at the data yourself, you don't necessarily go to socialism as the solution, as PG's and Tyler's posts make clear.

See also: http://paulgraham.com/re.html

So basically Kegan is talking about emotions, not understanding, when he's talking about the process being the fundamental thing.

Definitions: The right thing is that which leads to the right consequences. The right thing is that which is arrived at by following the right rules. The right thing is that which is done by a good person.

Philosophers who have something to say about attention.

So academic tribes would be an example of the federated type, but they find it as hard to collaborate on ideas as nations do on emissions.

This and other writings about tribalism seem to be arguing for a global approach, but I wonder if that's just fighting our biology. If we accept tribalism as part of who we are, does this instead argue for a greater focus on the establishment of a commons in the Ostrom sense, where boundaries are clear & control is local. These are by definition small, so they'd have to be federated, and I wonder to what extent federated commons export their problems? They obviously can't handle global issues like emissions leading to climate change, so what do we do about our genetic legacy? If only a superintelligence could grasp everything needed to understand global issues, does that mean AI and all its attendant risks is the only way?

I wonder if this is what drove @TheAnnaGat to create @whatstheii?

This is what @vgr would call an "escaped reality" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/01/16/on-the-design-of-escaped-realities/ Here's you're not doing something, but refraining from doing something. When you crash out, you'll crash out to a local reality - your town & your local sphere of influence.

Great goal, but I'm still not clear how to use ET on an ongoing basis.

Relevant to @whatistheii and emergentism and all that.

This is his proof point for how the younger generation will deal with traditional sources of truth losing their authority.

Going local is probably the one thing that we all can do. Reminds me of "keep your identity/ego small"

People like to believe transgressive lies. It feels good to support an overturning of an oppressive system, whether that's doctors or school administrators or the government.

There's a whole citizen science movement & biohacker spaces all over the world.

Optimistic, but on what basis?

@sarahdoingthing gave a great presentation at Refactor Camp on "how to see voids". No link, but maybe video will show up here at some point: https://www.refactorcamp.com/

Inter-mingle #3: Post-truth reading 1/2

I heard from a rabbi, who was teaching us about kosher preparation in culinary school, that the reason was that pork tended to harbor more parasites.

Out into the world is into the public, where things become a thing, or to the frontier, where you may find a there. I reckon people born at the frontier nexus would have to head public, despite hating it, because there no such thing as home for them.

Why I'm reading this: because I'm going to Refactor Camp & I figured I should be up on Ribbonfarm stuff.

Central point

When I visit that link, the install button says install for Desktop, and it doesn't show up in Brave for Android.

these seem to be the central points

China ain't gonna work with us, and if we hobble FB and Twitter while Weibo/WeChat keep growing.

I think she means state-sovereignty here, which probably works against disciplinary community self-regulation.

She expressed a general sentiment that platforms will need more regulation to address the places where the reality turned out darker than the vision

So the answer to "how to incentivize the adoption of open tools" is... to focus on small groups, self-regulating commons, and not try to do anything in a centralized way. It's self-regulating that's the hard part, because almost all research assessment uses the same structure, which means they're not really self-regulating. They're affected by the broader research assessment norms - https://hyp.is/v1Q2bIY8EemOKE-i0Z8M7g/otter.ai/note/22D2N3FNIVAHRFSC?f=/folder/18838&h=Conferences

So it's a social problem, not a technology problem, which means it's not surprising that social science and psychology are leading the way here

It's hard to understand even in the audio, but the question was basically about incentives. How did you manage to build this and make it work? His answer is basically that they had everybody together under one roof initially, which kinda points away from decentralization and towards a knowledge commons in the Ostrom sense - one with barriers and sanctions for participants which break rules.

Decentralization was a major theme of the conference.

All these things are still called journals, because they want researchers to actually use them.

frames Zenodo as the public version of the internal tools - the open data portal, the analysis preservation platform, the reusable analysis platform

now we turn data tables into charts and graphs, and you often can't get the data back out. Atypon showed a neat system, based on some Authorea work, on making interactive figures where the mouse position showed the data points at that position, even in 3D.

prevents people from building monolithic things that are open, but not reusable in practice

basically a sort of ELN, still no capturing data directly from instruments, because in particle physics, they have a few big instruments, not the many small instruments we deal with in biomed.

The idea of knowledge chains ties in nicely with my idea of provenance chains - capturing data at the source.

The CERN open data portal took huge amounts of effort to make useful.

Sets up the rationale for something like Zenodo

The real Article of the Future isn't an article at all.

I think it's rather that there's an anti-authoritarian streak to people these days, for good and for bad. They won't take an authority's word for it & insist on making up their own minds, but unfortunately one heuristic some people have landed on is "what the recognized authority figure says is probably biased, so discount that" and that's how the fall into misinformation traps. Respect for authority isn't likely to come back into fashion, so what now?

Tim Smith of CERN recounting the formation of the Web and how the mission of sharing research data inspired its design.

Collegiate head coaches are among the most highly compensated public employees. They often make much more than the university president.

What about a Princeton network without a diploma? Education + network is the main value. A network is exactly what Coursera et al failed to deliver.

The fact that it costs a lot in time and money is what makes it such an effective signal! New forms of accreditation do exist, but the strength of the signal is proportional to the time & cost. You don't get 20000 points on Stack Overflow or a serious Github contribution graph overnight.

He was just arguing above that college served a primarily signaling role, de-risking hiring for companies, so the correct view seems to be that they've always been about signaling.

Obligatory note that information isn't knowledge. A proper measure would be how much people know relative to how much they need to know, or perhaps the knowledge distribution, which will of course be more skewed in a fragmented society.

He seems to be confusing academic and public libraries here.

Citation needed! I don't think this happened much except in technical fields like chemistry & software engineering, physics. Maybe it's more common in business?

Yes, network effects are important for knowledge, but the presidential alumni is a different kind of network.

We could record & distribute things before the Internet. It was more expensive, but there would have been a market for Ivy League lectures. The overall point about scarcity holds, but it wasn't the medium, it was the university, enforcing it.

Definitely a good thing

Interesting that there's no mention of quality or trustworthiness, especially given the brand discussion above.

It's not daily, it's minutely.

Dan Rather on the evening news, the distance between political parties, and social cohesion

If I'm buying a cheap functional item, I definitely look for something with good reviews, but if I'm buying a power tool, for example, I do still tend to look for a trusted brand.

Except that there's a hesitation among tech firms to enter heavily regulated industries.

Interesting that a trader, the person who'd most likely be on the winning side of inexperienced people playing with algorithmic finance, would be hesitant to release it on the world at large.

When, not if

Similar to how some would "fix" economic inefficiencies with a legible imposed system, instead of just letting the market work.

information content

descriptive complexity

Does legibility necessarily imply antifragility?

Both well-meaning populist states and right-wing dictatorships share the same failure mode.

One of Ostrom's insights about common pool resources is that the community regulates themselves better than distant governors, because they have this local knowledge.

Interesting how bioengineering has adopted the language of software development.

Very dated perspective. You mostly get back data & software, only some of which is described in an accompanying narrative aka article.

A key insight which led to the author - centric focus of publishers today.

Researchers write & review the papers, write and review the grants, apply for tenure & sit on tenure assessment committees. They thing they don't do is develop the platforms which facilitate the above. Why shouldn't a company which hires software developers to build the platforms be able to charge a fair price for doing so?

Except journalists are reporting on what other people have done. They're not doing the things upon which they're reporting.

Except researchers have fought for years to get people to understand & value the contributions they make in code & data, not just in publications, so the whole "paying twice" thing just doesn't make sense, because the article isn't the work - it's the report of the work.

According to 2017 annual report, profit is currently 30%

This report is still discussed within Elsevier. It seems to have had a large impact on the company's shift in direction to services.

Except that the effect sizes are too small for them to be credible in the absence of pre-registration of this hypothesis.

Which they clearly are not - there are a researcher at an elite institution will have a citation pattern more like another researcher at an elite institution, not like another researcher in the same field at a non-elite institution.

This is not something I would assume. This needs to be demonstrated.

Seems like a list which is automatically populated and then edited by an researcher would be better than one manually created. I don't think there's any factual basis for this claim.

FWIW, PLOS tried this with PLOS Currents. It didn't get much traction, but I think there were some good use cases around rapid communications for disease outbreaks.

A group of experts got together last year at Daghstuhl and wrote a white paper about this.

Basically the idea is that the data, the code, the protocol/analysis/method, and the narrative should all exist as equal objects on the appropriate platform. Code in a code repository like Github, Data in a data repo that understands data formats, like Mendeley Data (my company) and Figshare, protocols somewhere like protocols.io and the narrative which ties it all together still at the publisher. Discussion and review can take the form of comments, or even better, annotations just like I'm doing now.

Part of this is because the people, besides publishers, most involved in discussions of publishing formats are librarians, who have preservation on their mind. If your job to to curate and preserve the world's knowledge, you have to think very carefully about what needs to be kept. Preservation is a surprisingly tricky subject when you get into the details of what constitutes a new version, at what level you do preservation - bit level, file level, text level, etc.

Yes, copyediting and managing review and such are valuable, and to some extent either already outsourced or replaceable by technology. However, getting your paper in front of the right people who need to read it still both requires a talented human in the loop and command of a large audience, which no one but the publishers can yet match.

Of course, as the author returns to below, publishing is much more than just hosting a PDF online somewhere. Knowing that the right people will read what you publish is still worth quite a bit, and publishers command the largest audience. That's hard to replicate!

Fair point, but this is changing. Have you checked out the submission flow at Heliyon?

So the forces which keep this from being actually a market are in part due to the ability of publishers to charge monopoly rent for their unique content. That's an intrinsic part of the content business, though, and not unique to academic publishing. Take a look at the monopolistic practices engaged in by the must-have producers in the wine industry, for example. Prices are absolutely not just a multiple of costs there!

However, we're rapidly approaching a place where just plain old access and branding isn't good enough of a differentiator anymore. Even the big guys are re-branding as information service providers and services are by nature more competitive than unique content. This is where market dynamics will come into play. OLH providing a publishing service is a welcome part of this, but if OLH chains itself to consortia, they're going to introduce longer development times, be forced to have smaller teams and pay lower salaries, and will be hard pressed to compete against the companies that engage their users in a rapid iterative product-market fit cycle.

Doesn't this just change who has the monopoly, rather than actively stimulate a market? What company would want to enter a market where they couldn't set their prices according to the value they think they can provide, but rather had to negotiate with various consortia for what they'd be allowed to charge?

Specifically, you have a price/value ratio, not just a price.

Maybe I misunderstand, but I think there's something fundamentally wrong with the economic situation proposed here. I think the price should be proportional to the value delivered to the end consumer.

There are two fundamental ways the price can be set:

• The publishers tell the consortium that their costs are X and the consortium pays that.
• The publishers tell their many customers what they would like to be paid for their product and some customers pay that and some don't.

In the "single payer"-ish scenario, different publishers will have different costs. The consortium will negotiate with each publisher and may decide that some higher costs are OK for one publisher but not another. In order to raise salaries, do capital investment in new technology, or just about any other significant increase in cost, the publisher has to get approval from the consortium for this. There will undoubtedly be some cases where a publisher wants to do something for one community but the consortium doesn't want to pay for it because it doesn't help enough people. Researchers are forced to lobby the consortium to allow publishers to do what they want. Since the only way more money gets into a publisher's hands is via the consortium, they're in a position to make deals with publishers along the lines of "If you want to increase your salaries this year, we'll allow your costs to increase, but only if you do X." New publishers that want to do things a different way are at a disadvantage because everyone who wants to get paid has to do what the consortia wants. Not exactly a recipe for innovation!

In the other scenario, publishers are free to make their own decisions about how to run their businesses and which new products to launch, etc. They listen to what the end users wants and profit to the degree that their product is something the end users value. Existing large organizations do have the power to buy out or suppress new companies, so the market isn't perfectly functional here, but surely it's better than having no market at all?

A profit margin for a commercial company is essentially the same thing as a operational surplus for a non-profit, right?

So they are going to periodically ask the consortia members to just give them a little more for nothing in the name of operational safety? Seems politically fraught!

I think you may be trying to make too fine a point here. Pretty much everyone understands Gold OA, insofar as they understand a difference at all, to be the kind of OA where you pay a APC and get a immediately shareable and open article.

You see no place for commercial interests in publishing, at all, or just in publishing of content in your field?

This doesn't sound like a problem to me. Individual research communities should be able to adopt an OA style that works for them. I've never thought it realistic that the sciences and humanities will pick the same kind of OA, it's never been clear to me why it even needs to be the same kind, but [deity] do we waste a lot of breath and text talking about this.

because quality has never been measured at any point!

Mendeley readership is valuable in its own right, not only in how closely it correlates to citations.

Knowing a correlation exists is useful for knowing the relationship between the two measures. Neither reflect something so abstract and variable as "quality".

Yes, please!

or that the previous metric wasn't capturing that dimension of quality

Everyone will be proven wrong - that's an intrinsic part of science.

The worst thing would be for fraudulent results to be published because you didn't do a good job in your peer review. Less worse, but still bad, would be for irreplicable work to be published.

whether novelty and "bigness" are important for the journal. Many do not have this as a criteria, because need for novelty is a primary driver of the file-drawer effect, where the certainty of knowledge is overestimated because negative or boring results aren't published.

again, whether extra tests are needed. It should not be the default to ask for more work to be done!

If a editor is contacting you as an expert to get a review of a manuscript, they're already mostly past the point of being a dodgy outfit. You should keep a copy of your review in case the paper comes out without addressing your review, though.

I would suggest adding the following questions: "Is the data available in a suitable repository?" "Is the use of statistical methods appropriate?" "Did the authors pre-register their hypothesis, experimental plan, and analysis to prevent multiple testing bias or selective reporting of data?"

or alternatively, suggest claims be scaled back. Too frequently, I see "more work needs to be done" as the default position.

or maybe just assess whether the data support the conclusions and dispense with the whole "novelty and significance" bit?

Calling for more experiments is probably the greatest barrier to speed of publication. Sometimes it makes sense, but sometimes it also makes sense to scale back any claims about generalizability, for example, and publish as is.

I wouldn't call this a "must", given that the most successful category of journal has abandoned importance as a barrier. Requiring originality is what held back replication studies for so long, as we now see to our detriment.

It's true they're not recognized, but in my experience, a high amount of the reviews done by PIs are really done by their grad students.

In the #altmetrics community, we talk a lot about the difference between measures and indicators. Measures imply units and scales, whereas indicators are just possibly relevant bits of data. It's good that policymakers are looking to data as a decision support resource, though we do have to be careful that the data are used with the proper care and attention. So, too early to say misguided, I think.

A meeting to discuss a tender is a normal business practice, so this would appear to be part of the normal sales process, not "high-level lobbying".

Policy makers and administrations have used Scival for years as a decision support resource. As discussed on Twitter, there is an open standard for these metrics: http://www.snowballmetrics.com/

The data are useful to help support decisions about HE policy, though they are more useful in STEM than in the humanities, partly due to the lack of identifiers and comprehensive indexing of outputs in the humanities.

Hopefully that makes it a little less terrifying.

This is a annotation of "Sharing" that that links to the annotation of the annotation.