Hacker News Reader

Comment by mic47 | Hacker News Reader

> "problem of academics being incentivized to publish in the most prestigious journal possible."

Is this a problem? If you have interesting, ground-breaking, or just really surprising results, what is wrong with trying more prestigious journal? Problem is not that there are journals that take only "interesting" results, but that a lot of research is not published at all, just because results are as expected. And this journal fixes that.

> It would be far better if the most prestigious journals pre-committed to publishing studies based on their methodology and hypothesis, before seeing their results. This is quite interesting proposal, could work well for experimental sciences, but worse for stuff like math / computer science, theoretical physics.

View on HN

The problem isn't where it is published but of institution and incentives and their impact upon career and their works. If looking for spurious correlations to get sexy results is the way to get tenure you are going to see a lot more sloppy science regardless of how harshly you punish it.

We don't (or shouldn't) trust in cases of major conflicts of interest. Being caught taking bribes to influence results would be a black list worthy move but institutions of all sorts effectively do the same thing with more indirection accidentally or otherwise.

Regardless of aims pushes can create bad science. Behind many private testing scandal was a blind push to improve throughput and expenses with no regards to accuracy.

I definitely don't have an answer to how to restructure it better - much less a way that is practical or able to get any political acceptance.

> Problem is not that there are journals that take only "interesting" results, but that a lot of research is not published at all, just because results are as expected. And this journal fixes that.

It does not fix that because, as GP mentioned, researchers are incentivised to publish in prestigious journals, which this journal won't become. Thus, negative results still won't get published.

I've always thought academics need volume as well as quality publications for tenure, this looks like a landing spot for cutting-room-floor CV filler papers that would normally get ignored. Still helpful for career progression @ good universities.

If there’s journals that only publish interesting results, these get more attention.

Researchers trying to score points aim to be published by these.

This gives them incentives to try new stuff, disregard boring results (like negative results) and for those inclined, to cheat.

These tend to push the journal profile, at least until something like the replication crisis.

It’s a positive feedback loop in all it’s glory

Reply on news.ycombinator.com