serious question if the product sold by prestige journals is citations -> bibliometrics, why wouldn't I just upload a series of works to the *rxivs that cited everything in crossref enough times such that every paper had exactly the same number of citations?
it's an ~experiment~ and part of the experiment is who would get mad at me
each paper is called "on the bibliometric effect of every paper having at least [n] citations" and it has a legit rationale, which is to see to what degree bibliometrics are policed by the publishers and what effect nulling them has on research, so it *is science*
to what degree would crossref interfere with scholarly work to protect the sanctity of their system? what does that mean for our interpretation of them as a quasi-neutral registrar?
if our indexing and discovery systems are flimsy enough to be vulnerable to easily identified papers citing millions of documents, that's evidence that our discovery systems are already broken, not that I broke them.
need intersection of infosec and publishing ethics ppl please. my primary outstanding question at this point is "why not," and i invite dissuasion
the biggest worry i have is that is would backfire and instead of reading it as "this indicates the limits & mechanism of the ostensibly open but carefully gatekept system that structures credit by citation" ppl would read it as "this is why we need the gatekeepers"
serious answer
@jonny the product being sold (not the only way to frame this but a decent one) is actually the prestige, not citations -> bibliometrics - those are just the means by which prestige are currently channeled. before academics started counting citations the way they do now the journals still served a similar function.
from this perspective, anyone who's done the research should know the system is unfair by design (rather than "broken", in decline from an imaginary ideal past) & the relevant question becomes something more like "which parts of the system will intervene to keep things functioning smoothly & how will they do so?"
serious answer re: biggest worry
@jonny any controversial action is going to get backlash as well as support - there isn't going to be unanimity - so maybe it's better to think of different groups of people, what you could do to shape their reactions, how easy it is for someone "uninvolved" to understand what point you were trying to make, etc.
also the historical record created by an intervention like this is important. for example if a lot of people support the action but after a few months only people who oppose it have created easily accessible media giving their perspectives, that will shape how people look back on it (& look at its ripple effects) to an enormous degree.
@jonny
This is the most likely outcome, tbh
the journals already literally do this to game their own system, so what does it say about the fairness of our systems if my papers with a legitimate research question are removed but theirs aren't?
https://www.cwts.nl/blog?article=n-q2w2b4