Category: 3. Academia
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Free reviews for commercial publishers?!
So I had a little spat with an Elsevier editor who argued that reviewing for Elsevier journals should be performed for free, because Elsevier is part of the scientific community. Maybe they are part of the scientific community, but primarily they are a commercial enterprise which turns academic labor into profits for their shareholders, like…
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Comments on How to build a vibrant technology industry
Yann LeCun of AI / Meta fame put out a short piece on “how to build a vibrant technology industry” (local copy) focusing on the significance of basic research and the opportunities afforded to other countries than the U.S. right now. It is mostly about academia, how the U.S. system (still) is better than others,…
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Unethical research, beneficence, and smart experimentation
An unnamed research group at University of Zurich is in the news for unethical research: According to this article by Science and the corresponding Reddit report, a research group experimented with the use of LLMs posing as humans on a subreddit (forum). The research question was to see if and how LLMs were more successful…
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Not a fan of the title “professor of empirical software engineering”
At TU Berlin, until recently, there was a “professor of parser construction” (official title). What was a hot topic 30 years ago, maybe, was not so hot thereafter. Today I see a fair bit of “professor of empirical software engineering” or “empirical software engineering research groups”. I wonder what everyone else in the department is…
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No.
Unbelievable. Well, whoever sent this is at least smart enough not to provide their real name; at least I couldn’t figure out who that is.
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Reviewing inappropriate submissions never was that easy
I got another random request to review a paper outside my domain of expertise. A quick search revealed that the publisher asking for the review is a predatory one, giving me no sympathy for the authors who did not do their homework when submitting to this publisher. You don’t just pay money to get your…