<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div dir="ltr"></div><div dir="ltr">On Jan 16, 2022, at 5:12 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org> wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">Scientific papers are ways for profs to get promotion and tenure, as we all know. What percentage of those are worthless? For some journals, probably 100% (those where you have to pay to get it published). For the very top journals probably 25%. This constitutes an enormous waste of talent. Some, myself for instance, are not so hot at research and much better at teaching. I was able to avoid most research and others should be able to choose this path. This would lighten the worthless load quite a bit. bill w </div></div></div></blockquote><br><div><div dir="ltr">Pay to publish journals are likely garbage, but the problem with scientific papers (and with research in general) is you really can’t judge its worth until afterwards, sometimes long afterwards. The price of progress in science and scholarship seems to paid by going down blind alleys and courting failure. That’s the nature of the beast. If researchers had perfect or near perfect foresight they could avoid much of this waste, but lacking such the effort to avoid waste could result in slower progress. </div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">This isn’t to say no alterations of current practices (including tenure systems) should be considered, but I’d be careful to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Regards,</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Dan</div></div></body></html>