Universities have disinvested from their presses just as much as their libraries

Re:Universities have disinvested from their presses just as ... by robertlagrant on Thursday September 28, 2023 @02:35PM (#37693749)

This sounds like an incredibly easy problem to solve if some people felt like solving it. I imagine that it's some administrators near the top that would block anyone from saying "let's have no-one publish to Elsevier any more" because John from Elsevier takes them on such lovely days out in bespoke locations, staying in boutique hotels.

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Re:Universities have disinvested from their presses just as ... by andrewxdiamond on Thursday September 28, 2023 @03:36PM (#37694645)

> This sounds like an incredibly easy problem to solve if some people felt like solving it

If you ignore the hardest part of the problem; getting everyone to agree and coordinate, then yes it’s a simple problem to solve! You can simplify any problem like this, just ignore the hard part!

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Re:Universities have disinvested from their presses just as ... by deepsun on Thursday September 28, 2023 @03:37PM (#37694652)

What if a paper was a collaboration between 3 universities across the world?

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Re:Universities have disinvested from their presses just as ... by harimau777 on Thursday September 28, 2023 @03:41PM (#37694709)

Publishing in high impact factor journals is a big deal. At the very least, I think that the powers that be would have to implement guarantees that publishing in a lower impact factor campus publication wouldn't hurt a researcher's chances of receiving tenure.

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Re:Universities have disinvested from their presses just as ... by aleph_minus_one on Thursday September 28, 2023 @05:21PM (#37696050)

> At the very least, I think that the powers that be would have to implement guarantees that publishing in a lower impact factor campus publication wouldn't hurt a researcher's chances of receiving tenure.

This honestly sounds like something that should be doable by the university.

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Re:Universities have disinvested from their presses just as ... by jasonfarnon on Thursday September 28, 2023 @06:04PM (#37696479)

Remember that many of the decision-makers are academics with great publishing records. They succeeded at the game and don't want to rules to be changed.

Also, just practically, the journals help a lot in assessing candidates. Even in fields just adjacent to mine, I might trust an endorsement by a good journal over my own judgments. Often I know the work of the editors there and value their judgment. Chasing after highest impact factor journal publications has its problems, but I haven't seen better proposals.

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Re:Universities have disinvested from their presses just as ... by _jal on Thursday September 28, 2023 @03:47PM (#37694800)

Some people seem to believe that all the world's problems are easily solvable if only someone would yell at a lot of other people.

To bring this back to HN topics, anyone have tips on trying to suss out that trait in hiring managers during interviews?

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Re:Universities have disinvested from their presses just as ... by robertlagrant on Thursday September 28, 2023 @03:51PM (#37694857)

I don't know why you mentioned yelling. No one is yelling. Undesirable hiring managers are easy to spot: they have poor reading comprehension.

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Re:Universities have disinvested from their presses just as ... by DiggyJohnson on Thursday September 28, 2023 @09:16PM (#37698160)

That’s…actually hilarious advise that I think probably has quite a bit of merit to it.

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Re:Universities have disinvested from their presses just as ... by UncleMeat on Thursday September 28, 2023 @04:55PM (#37695700)

"If you don't let our faculty publish in these journals, their publication stats will suffer (fewer citations, lower impact factor) and that will translate into lower rankings for our university."

Bigwigs at universities care about rankings, even if they are basically garbage.

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Re:Universities have disinvested from their presses just as ... by robotresearcher on Thursday September 28, 2023 @05:02PM (#37695788)

Telling tenured professors where to publish is not going to happen. You might entice them with good contracts, but the revenue from most books and articles is very small. The satisfaction and credibility of an Oxford or MIT Press book is worth more than a few thousand bucks to many people.

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