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I love O'Neill's work on PCG, and loved the talks by her I watched online. As a tenured professor I want to say two things about this piece: 1. I think academic publishing will be forced to change. I'm not sure what it's going to look like in the end, but traditional journals are starting to seem really quaint and outdated now. 2. As far as I can tell from what she's written on the PCG page, the submission to TOMS is a poor example, because no one I know expects to be done with one submission. That is, no one I know submits a paper to one journal, even one reputable journal, and is done. They submit and it gets rejected and revise it and resubmit it, maybe three or even four times. After the fourth or fifth time, you might give up, but not necessarily even then. I have mixed feelings about the PCG paper as an example, because in some ways it's great: an example of how something very influential has superceded traditional academic publishing. In other ways, though, it's horrible, because it's misleading about the typical academic publishing experience. Yes, academic publishing is full of random nonsense, and corruption, but yes, you can also get past it (usually) with just a little persistence. In still other ways, it's a good example of what we might see increasingly, which is a researcher having a lower threshold for the typical bullshit out there. |