Academic publishing is in deep crisis. It didn't start with AI, and it probably wouldn't end with it. The crisis came from trying to turn academia into a factory of some sort.
I coauthored 4 papers this Summer. All bona fide: no AI slop, no fake data, all genuine research papers. But the substance of each is barely enough for a paragraph in a paper I would have gladly written instead.
But I have KPIs. And KPIs don't care about quality, quality is unaccountable. So it is in my best interest to publish a lot of "barely science" instead of spending a year or two writing a good paper that will take another year to publish, and by then my contract will end, and I'll have no numbers to show.
My professor thought that there could be paper in my thesis. Thankfully they did not insist. Work was pretty crap and useless(mostly due to happening in between versions of project/idea they were working on). But well I did graduate so that is fine for me.
I can't even imagine the horrors what papers on some Master thesis would look like. Often as there is so many graduates they are not that novel topics anyway.
And if you play by the spirit and not by the rules, you're fucked. Because, with masters, it takes about a year to get to the first publishable result, and about a year to publish it in a respected journal. And that's the happy pass. You might get an extra rejection, or fall into the back of the publishing queue. This could cost you three or six month easily.
From the other side of the coin, refereeing papers, if we were still doing this stuff via dead trees I'd get a stamp made up "this is a mailing list post, not a conference paper". Or possibly "this is a blog post, ...".
Comments
Academic publishing is in deep crisis. It didn't start with AI, and it probably wouldn't end with it. The crisis came from trying to turn academia into a factory of some sort.
I coauthored 4 papers this Summer. All bona fide: no AI slop, no fake data, all genuine research papers. But the substance of each is barely enough for a paragraph in a paper I would have gladly written instead.
But I have KPIs. And KPIs don't care about quality, quality is unaccountable. So it is in my best interest to publish a lot of "barely science" instead of spending a year or two writing a good paper that will take another year to publish, and by then my contract will end, and I'll have no numbers to show.
Then you have schools demanding a published paper as part of their masters degree. This gave rise to many conferences that are just publishing mills.
My professor thought that there could be paper in my thesis. Thankfully they did not insist. Work was pretty crap and useless(mostly due to happening in between versions of project/idea they were working on). But well I did graduate so that is fine for me.
I can't even imagine the horrors what papers on some Master thesis would look like. Often as there is so many graduates they are not that novel topics anyway.
Exactly.
And if you play by the spirit and not by the rules, you're fucked. Because, with masters, it takes about a year to get to the first publishable result, and about a year to publish it in a respected journal. And that's the happy pass. You might get an extra rejection, or fall into the back of the publishing queue. This could cost you three or six month easily.
The masters program in our uni is 1.5 years long.
From the other side of the coin, refereeing papers, if we were still doing this stuff via dead trees I'd get a stamp made up "this is a mailing list post, not a conference paper". Or possibly "this is a blog post, ...".
Publishers have their KPIs too.