Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

Which is not to say that there is no better solution, I just haven't seen evidence of good solutions lurking around the corner (unlike online conferences which have obvious advantages to a wide range of problems)

Journal publishing, in-person conferences both benefit industries that have excluded academics esp ECRs from discourse & slowed research, taken power away from researchers.OPR & virtual conf will return power to researchers. JIFs & GRCs & their prestige system are the same thing.

I do not buy the pessimism on working on & improving OPR & virtual conferences. Academia as a whole can improve & continuous discourse with all demographics involved is the way forward. Many in all incremental achievements & I favor the long term perspective on development.

I'm not saying that we shouldnt work on it, I just don't see how OPR solves the problems. But then again I also wasn't very optimistic about virtual conferences until we were forced to have them

We discussed this before, but to me the problems with the current system are so egregious that we have to experiment with alternatives. I'm really happy about eLife experiment for that alone (and I'm now a reviewing editor there btw). It's not enough, but let's see how it goes.

Experiments are worth trying. I think this one naïve. I've seen enough pressure on the scales at eLife — with best-intentioned referees and editors — to think that this initiative does little or nothing to address the serious underlying issues. Which are, to be fair, intractable.

The fundamental flaw is that, exactly as in the legacy system, it depends wholly on the judgement of editors (and their personal courage and diligence), while doing little to address their underlying biases.

And it's made worse by the fact that biased or inaccurate comments that will /inevitably/ make it through are now not appended to the end of the paper, or a supp. file, but directly attached to every copy of the paper, like post-its epoxied to the pages of a paper journal.