started grad school studying "the brain" but science is so distractingly broken I've been studying its infrastructure almost the whole time, and just found myself writing about "the evolution of pluralistic expression on parallel namespaces in wikilike communities."
I wish ppl started seeing this^ - getting derailed from whatever anyone "wanted" to study by the ethical immediacy of scientific infrastructural deficits - as a cost of being deinfrastructured. maybe one step towards framing the journal system et al as everyone's responsibility
constantly asking the question "why is it like this" and then fishtailing around an ever-elusive conclusion that makes you believe it is impossible to fix, rather than making cumulative progress on a communications problem is -- precisely -- an infrastructural problem
I think we can fix it, but I think we have to start thinking of scientific infrastructure as something to be immediately invested in because it impacts the lives of all the people that do science with us, something that we invest resources in & organize with our colleagues about.
instead of rushing in with some improvised proposal that flames out in the span of 12 hours, we can also engage with the people whose literal entire discipline is to study sociotechnological system. mebs we can also engage literally millions of digital folk knowledge communities
I mean everyone knows it's deeper, like how this system turns public scientific funding into a set of interlocking money pumps that only go up, exacerbating all the granting & employment problems, but it's always *just a little* too depressing to articulate all in the same breath
show me any interesting conversation about the journal system that doesn't start and end with "abolish it"
will love to see more senior scientists move from "what the heck is the deal with journals/employment/junk science/etc." to "committing material resources and risking status to build a better future for science and maybe even people at large"
@jonny @ aeryn_thrace on twitter is putting together a project they call the 'heliocentric model of science' trying to integrate the journal article as just one piece of a larger landscape of inter-related academic labors. I think you two would have a lot to discuss.
@feonixrift
taking a brief look, I think so too. ty for the connection bc looks like complementary foci. I'm a little close to max words for the night but will return in AM
time spent plinkoing a paper down a journal hierarchy is an infrastructural cost.
reinventing rigs is an infrastructural cost.
asking questions into the Twitter void is an infrastructural cost.
losing data is an infrastructural cost.
etc.