An administrative role I've taken on for the last month that will run through September has been eating quite a bit of my time, but I wanted to point out some interesting items:
- The Aspen Center for Physics, as always, is having some excellent summer programs. As a consequence, there are now videos available of some strong talks, like this public lecture about entanglement by Duncan Haldane; this one about quantum materials by Piers Coleman, and this one about correlations in flat bands by Ali Yazdani; this one about material learning by Andrea Liu; etc.
- The CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law this week. This tries to accomplish multiple tasks, particularly boosting US semiconductor manufacturing and authorizing large increases in the budget of the NSF (including the creation of a new more tech transfer focused directorate). The manufacturing piece is a natural reaction to the realization that it's probably not great for national security or the stability of the global economy for every major industry to be dependent on semiconductors fabbed in and shipped from Taiwan. Boosting funding for basic science, including the NSF, is generally great, though I've learned to be cautious in my optimism. The idea of a large increase in NSF funding has been around for many years (see here for a post I made back in the dawn of time about the 2008 version of this), and if there is one thing I learned from watching my former congressperson, it's that there is a world of difference between authorizations (which this is) and appropriations.
- Here is a nice piece of writing about spin-charge separation in 1D materials.
- This is a neat article about an unexpected duality found in a toy particle physics model of gluons.
- It's good to remind people periodically about how screwed up for-profit academic publishing is. That's why I'm sharing this tweet from January.
- I'm almost done reading The Man from the Future, the recent biography of von Neumann. He was an amazing guy, and it's a good read, though I think the author of the biography is a bit too infatuated with his subject.
3 comments:
It seems that everyone knows for-profit publishing is screwed up, but the fundamental systemic problems in the nature of scientific careers result in high inertia to change. As long as hiring, tenure and promotion are based on publishing in these journals, they will not go away or improve.
As department chair, do you have any ideas or experience with strategies for mitigating this problem? How big a role does publication in these journals play in hiring and promotion at your department in Rice? What are the major obstacles to reducing their influence?
PPP, my term as chair wrapped up on June 30, but I can still give the perspective. It's an unfortunate fact that publication in prestige glossy journals is viewed with too much influence, either at the hiring or promotion stages. I think true impact is also greatly appreciated (a first-author PRB that got 400 citations in two years would definitely be taken very positively even though that's not a glossy journal). I think that the most practical way to reduce their influence over time is to raise the issue, repeatedly, that these are not automatically a proxy for quality, and esp at the hiring stage have a great deal to do with the advisor as well as the lead author. I know that is weak sauce, and it feels like trying to hold back the ocean with a teacup sometimes. The fact that funding agencies really love these journals is also hard to fight. I'd appreciate advice from others on this.
How about starting a public boycott of publishing in for-profit journals (Nature etc)? If there's anything the Internet is good at, it's getting everyone behind cancelling something outrageous. No one in a position of power seems to be willing to take the bite though.
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