michael_nielsen

UCLA's budget is several orders of magnitude larger, so let me turn that around: what can UCLA do on that timescale?

Well I think this elsevier move is a good start and totally agree with your diagnosis. I think the big thing is around promotion and incentives and it’s hard for UCLA to do unilaterally in the current academic environment.

I’m hopeful places like YCR and CZI might be less encumbered and come up with more creative solutions. I’m hopeful that Octant will be able to push some of those things forward as well.

You think I could successfully apply for a UCLA professorship if I had enough sufficiently awesome papers on GitHub?

I would hope so, but I’m guessing no. That said in certain fields like math, physics and increasingly biology, preprints are fine (with the idea that they will be published eventually). People want to have courage, but worry about study sections and grants.

So it sounds like grant decision makers are the high-leverage positions for fixing the broken status quo? Are any UC professors in such positions?

One other group with a lot of leverage: people willing to just say "screw it" & go for it. I often hear people say they "can't" do something because it's "not incentivized" in academia. But it's really, really sobering to talk with soldiers, fire fighters, and police officers.

They're risking their life. And it put in perspective for me worries like "I won't get my grant / tenure" etc. It's made me more inclined to say to people: do you really believe in this idea you're worried your system won't support? If you do, then figure out how to do it anyway