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Christmas books for 2021
This year, my list of Christmas books is very late because there is only one entry (first published in 1950), and I was not sure whether a 2021 Christmas book post was worthwhile.
The book is “Planning in Practice: Essays in Aircraft planning in war-time” by Ely Devons. A very readable, practical discussion, with data, on the issues involved in large scale planning; the discussion is timeless. Check out second-hand book sites for low costs editions.
Why isn’t my list longer?
Part of the reason is me. I have not been motivated to find new topics to explore, via books rather than blog posts. Things are starting to change, and perhaps the list will be longer in 2022.
Another reason is the changing nature of book publishing. There is rarely much money to be made from the sale of non-fiction books, and the desire to write down their thoughts and ideas seems to be the force that drives people to write a book. Sites like substack appear to be doing a good job of diverting those with a desire to write something (perhaps some authors will feel the need to create a book length tomb).
Why does an author need a publisher? The nitty-gritty technical details of putting together a book to self-publish are slowly being simplified by automation, e.g., document formatting and proofreading. It’s a win-win situation to make newly written books freely available, at least if they are any good. The author reaches the largest readership (which helps maximize the impact of their ideas), and readers get a free electronic book. Authors of not very good books want to limit the number of people who find this out for themselves, and so charge money for the electronic copy.
Another reason for the small number of good new, non-introductory, books, is having something new to say. Scientific revolutions, or even minor resets, are rare (i.e., measured in multi-decades). Once several good books are available, and nothing much new has happened, why write a new book on the subject?
The market for introductory books is much larger than that for books covering advanced material. While publishers obviously want to target the largest market, these are not the kind of books I tend to read.
Want to be the coauthor of a prestigious book? Send me your bid
The corruption that pervades the academic publishing system has become more public.
There is now a website that makes use of an ingenious technique for helping people increase their paper count (as might be expected, the competitive China thought of it first). Want to be listed as the first author of a paper? Fees start at $500. The beauty of the scheme is that the papers have already been accepted by a journal for publication, so the buyer knows exactly what they are getting. Paying to be included as an author before the paper is accepted incurs the risk that the paper might not be accepted.
Measurement of academic performance is based on number of papers published, weighted by the impact factor of the journal in which they are published. Individuals seeking promotion and research funding need an appropriately high publication score; the ranking of university departments is based on the publications of its members. The phrase publish or perish aptly describes the process. As expected, with individual careers and departmental funding on the line, the system has become corrupt in all kinds of ways.
There are organizations who will publish your paper for a fee, 100% guaranteed, and you can even attend a scam conference (that’s not how the organizers describe them). Problem is, word gets around and the weighting given to publishing in such journals is very low (or it should be, not all of them get caught).
The horror being expressed at this practice is driven by the fact that money is changing hands. Adding a colleague as an author (on the basis that they will return the favor later) is accepted practice; tacking your supervisors name on to the end of the list of authors is standard practice, irrespective of any contribution that might have made (how else would a professor accumulate 100+ published papers).
I regularly receive emails from academics telling me they would like to work on this or that with me. If they look like proper researchers, I am respectful; if they look like an academic paper mill, my reply points out (subtly or otherwise) that their work is not of high enough standard to be relevant to industry. Perhaps I should send them a quote for having their name appear on a paper written by me (I don’t publish in academic journals, so such a paper is unlikely to have much value in the system they operate within); it sounds worth doing just for the shocked response.
I read lots of papers, and usually ignore the list of authors. If it looks like there is some interesting data associated with the work, I email the first author, and will only include the other authors in the email if I am looking to do a bit of marketing for my book or the paper is many years old (so the first author is less likely to have the data).
I continue to be amazed at the number of people who continue to strive to do proper research in this academic environment.
I wonder how much I might get by auctioning off the coauthoship of my software engineering book?
Dead trees have been replaced by a paywall
Every now and again I see a reference to that looks like an interesting paper that was published before the Internet age (i.e., pre last 90’s and not available for free download). I keep a list of such references and when I am near a university with a good library I stop off to look them up; unless there is an urgent need this is very much a background task and before last week my last such visit was over three years ago.
Last week I dropped by Reading University, where I sourced much of the non-Internet available papers for my last book. The picture below illustrates what I found, periodicals are being removed to make way for desktop space, so students can sit typing away on keyboards.
I imagine the librarian is under pressure to maximise the efficient use of his large building and having row upon row of journals, many older than most of the students, just sitting there waiting for somebody like me wanting to look at perhaps a dozen or so of them cannot be said to be that efficient.
Everything is going digital, the library catalog was full of references to where journals could be found online. The problem is that the digital content is licensed to the University and only available to members of the University (e.g., students and lecturers). Without a logon id the journals are unavailable to non-academic users. Reading are continuing their open policy to external users by offering guest accounts (“where licence conditions permit”, I will find out what is available on my next visit).
Those readers who don’t have much interaction with the academic world may not be aware of the very high rates many publishers charge for access to published papers (that are provided to them free by academics) or the large profits made by these publishers.
Academics are starting to react against the high cost of journal subscription; I’m please to see that a boycott is gathering steam.
Boycotts are very well meaning, but I suspect that most academics will continue to keep their head down and go with existing practice (young academics need to get papers published in established to move up in their world).
We the tax payers are funding the research that discovers the information needed to write a paper and paying the salaries of academics to write the papers. Why are we the tax payers providing money to university libraries to subscribe to journals whose contents we have paid to create? If the research is tax payer funded we should not have to pay to see the results.
How do we remove the paywall that currently surrounds much published research? As I see it the simplest solution is to stop providing the funding that university libraries use to pay for journal subscriptions. Yes this will cause disruption, but the incentives are for most academics to continue with the current system and or course no company is ever willing to give up on a cash cow.
What can you do? If you are in the UK you can write to your MP to make him/her aware of your views. If readers have any other ideas please make use of the comments to tell others.
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