Very well said - I find the current state of publishing in academia appalling. Don't forget that most research is behind a pay wall just for the damn PDF! I think you nailed it with "insecure". The little PhDs need to know their work isn't designed to just get them tenure...
This is an incredibly ignorant and insulting comment. Nobody goes into science to get rich. And job security at 40 is hardly the primary goal either.
The majority of scientists go into science to add to the common pool of knowledge. For many, seeing their work being used in a positive way is extremely gratifying.
The pay walls are not the choice of most scientists. There is a push towards open-access, but it's not easy. To publish a single open-access article a scientist must pay thousands of dollars. For example, a single article in BMC bioinformatics costs US$1805. This must come out of already hard fought for and limited grant money, money that must also pay the salaries of many younger scientists still in training.
Good intensions doesn't counteract the outcome of bad incentives. Obviously tenure isn't about being rich - but it is about being independent in your work. The system produces behaviors in its "publish or perish" style that are centered on building your metrics for getting tenure / status recognition.
How many conference intros have we all heard that say, "X person has been published X times and in Y journals". Are you saying you've never heard advisors talk about splitting articles up and the like? How about the decline of repeating published experiments?
These aren't isolated incidents at all. Status seeking is in all of us, and I don't consider it a bad thing. The metrics just need to be aligned with the goals of the endeavor - furthering knowledge.
Currently, we have a system where most grad students are chattel slaves seeking PhDs for a tenure track positions that 95% won't be able to get. So competitive is the tenure system that people are doing the above things to have a chance.
It's like the idealist-activist who becomes a pragmatic-politician and learns along the way the cruel facts of life and the system. If that's an ignorant or insulting point of view, then welcome to humanity... ;-)
Like we choose to have our PDF's under pay walls. I don't even have printed copies of my paper, because the publisher does not want to make the expenditure. And if I were to lose my password, I would have no access to my own paper for download (and I don't have access to the rest of papers in the same issue, of course).
So you're saying that you can't release due to some licensing / copyright issue, or that it's just something that takes extra time? I definitely understand the former - not that I like it, but the latter is inexcusable.
It depends heavily on the journal. Most journals have a "final draft policy": What they print is only theirs to publish. But you can self-post whatever previous versions you have. In my case, I think there are one or two minor spelling mistakes in the versions I have posted in ArXiV and my homepage. It does not take extra time (at least not a lot) to self-post it or publish on ArXiV (just a little hassle with image conversion problems, YMMV)
Would you say that you're the exception in posting them for the public? If so, would it be worth while for someone to try to get at these non-final but still perfectly useful papers?
I really can't tell. As far as I know, all people in my department publish freely his documents: either in ArXiV or in the department page for submitted papers. Also, ArXiV has a huge numnber of articles in Mathematics, the growing trend is to submit it there. I guess that most mathematicians (or at least, young ones) at least provide some draft version of their published manuscripts online, freely available.
Yea, ArXiV is a great resource, and I actually hadn't seen that it's grown this much. Your department is one of the good ones - I salute you! Here's to more doing the same.
I also hope everyone starts doing it. There is no point in making research unavailable to the public just for the sake of keeping the journal's "level". The future is open content, but most publishers are still blind to it
I hope you are joking. What I mean is that access to the journal pdf is blocked. I have of course the sources, several copies and pdf's hanging around, as does my co-author.
