Category: 3. Academia
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Academic publications and what is wrong with them
The most basic academic currency are your publications. While you can’t (or shouldn’t) trade them, they are the way of how other researchers keep track of you and keep score. The higher your score, the higher you are in the pecking order, of course. A publication has two aspects to it that determine its value:…
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I hope the authors ignored the bogus review
Dear editor: We previously had submitted an article to your journal, and it got rejected. One of the two reviews we received was bland and the other one apparently had been copied over from another review and had nothing to do with our submission:
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Abolishing tenure and academic competitive strategy
The U.S. state of Texas is trying to abolish tenure for public university professors. If this comes to pass, it would be a highly interesting natural field experiment on academic competitive strategy. From an academic perspective, I’m quite curious about this. Tenure means job security: Tenured professors can’t (easily) be fired, ensuring freedom of research…
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Rage against required templates for paper submissions
Anyone who wants to submit a paper to a computer science conference usually faces two options: Use a TeX template or use a Word template. I haven’t written TeX in thirty years as a first author (I do edit and contribute as a coauthor because it can’t be avoided) and I use Linux and hence…
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To review or not to review
I previously reported about a bogus review for a journal submission of ours. The submission had been rejected partly or fully based on a review that obviously had nothing to do with our paper but must have been reused from before. I had complained to the editor, but I had not got any answers for…
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Using open source to align academic client-supplier relationships
Open source is a boon for academic project collaboration. As long as the collaboration is not only voluntary, but also on equal footing, everyone can contribute and benefit under the guidance of an open source license and processes. However, as soon as money flows between the partners, the lawyers will want to have their say,…