I've noticed a significant increase in submissions here from Substack recently; it seems to be supplanting Medium as a preferred platform for independent long form articles.
Medium started off with seeming decent quality and goodwill but a lot of that has been jettisoned with walling off content and barrel-scraping in "expert" contributions.
I hope Substack will avoid some of those mistakes; it will need to if the sub-platform described in the article here (or others like it) is to succeed.
Founders need to avoid the VC trap. Stop raising money from investors that demand hockey stick growth. Find investors that expect reasonable growth and returns. If an investor encourages every single one of their investments to be a 1000x return, expecting only 1 in 100 to be so, and kills any company the moment they realize they won’t fulfill the investment thesis, many companies do nothing but pivot until they run out of capital. Very few companies can accomplish such a high level of growth and most only do so through gray means (regulatory violations of UBER and Airbnb).
I don't see how they can avoid going down the same path as Quora, Medium, and others. At the end of the day, they are for-profit entities, and not only that, but they are startups which means they are after growth and need to eventually N-fold their profits year-after-year in some future. They need to grow faster than the S&P index plus a healthy premium for risk, in order for investments to make sense.
I don't think anyone at Medium thought their service was better for their users by putting up paywalls, requiring accounts, and broadening their SEO by soliciting contributions. But they need to grow either in users or in profits, and there's only a certain number of ways you can squeeze money from internet readers.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but how does Substack have increased rigor over a personal blog or Twitter?
Not meant as a criticism, but asked in earnest.
Substack allows writers to create their own paid newsletters and blogs without the hassle of setting up payments or worrying about gmail's spam filters; it also gives writers more control over their relationships with subscribers, since they can export the mailing list. That's the gist.
It’s also worth noting that the Substack founder donates content to alt-right media outlets. It’s one of several reasons why I advise people to avoid their platform.
The model proposed in this post is similar to that of RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)[1] and arXiv[2].
I've only used arXiv via their search but the NEP service[3] within RePEc offers curated mailing lists of recent economics working papers by specialty area.
> NEP is an announcement service which filters information on new additions to RePEc into edited reports. The goal is to provide subscribers with up-to-date information about the research literature. Our success in achieving this goal has been substantial. Today, there are 80541 subscriptions from 34926 unique addresses distributed throughout the world. The reports are generated by subject-specific editors. They are available by email and RSS feeds.
The author of this post raises valid points about some avenues for publishing scientific results. Journals have high barriers, rigid formats, paywall, and sometimes exclusionary reviewers. Twitter and blogs are fringe because they are not formal, but increasingly where the conversation is happening. He advocates for a model like Substack for scientific publishing. Which I don't see how it is different from blogs.
However to me the real problem is that he completely ignores the existence of preprint servers. This started with the arXiv in the 1990s for physics, math and computer science, but finally the model has begun to catch up with other fields. In biology the bioRxiv is well established and I'd say more than half of the papers I see do have a preprint deposited there. For medicine, which has a notoriously protective culture, the medRxiv was launched last year and got a gigantic boost due to the pandemic.
Other fields also have their own preferred preprint repositories. To me preprints solve the gatekeeping and cost barriers very well. I only wish they were a little more tied to comments from the readers (in depth comments of the kind you get during peer review, not the knee jerk ones we're used to seeing on the internet).
I say this because there is almost and "adversarial" relationship between the readers, who just want the bottom line in two sentences, and the authors would like their work to be perceived as a big important and novel contribution. Because of this often papers are written with more flourish language than actually necessary to make a point, and so it is really a hard to parse articles and tell good from bad. Often the "summaries" that peer reviewers wrote before making the comments are better than the official abstract of an article, but readers don't get to see and benefit from them. Each person that reads an article has to redo all that work of judging it for themselves, and with the deluge of articles we have it is simply impossible to keep up.
Initiatives such as openreviews.net are already a big step in the right direction. I think in the next 10-20 years this is where the bulk of scientific publishing is headed. A mix of preprint server coupled with curated community reviews that makes papers much easier to gauge and also incentivizes authors to write better and not bullshit, or risk getting wrecked publicly with the public reviews.
> This medium is freely available - costing nothing and placing no barriers to access beyond basic Internet access
This is true for now, but many startups end up charging for stuff that was free in the beginning. I'd feel better on Posthaven, which promises not to pull the rug out and is financially sustainable.
the author is rationalizing their choice. nonsense.
> Access to journals is prohibitively expensive and therefore practically unavailable to independent researchers ...
and
> Apart from the financial walls that academic publishers encourage, there are frequently de facto barriers to participation as a contributor, ...
the Cornell Arxiv approach to free publishing is already spreading into other fields like Bio Arxiv. The substack culture isn't actually free.
> Finally, the review process itself may be subject to intellectual protectionism and even unintentional gatekeeping that prevents research from reaching a broader audience that can help the ideas grow ...
Without review process the volume of papers that get produced and published freely online will be so much that people will feel the pain. This is already happening in ML community because everyone dumps a slightly different but not so diff paper on Arxiv.
> Without review process the volume of papers that get produced and published freely online will be so much that people will feel the pain. This is already happening in ML community because everyone dumps a slightly different but not so diff paper on Arxiv.
I wish someone would make a technological solution to this. One way is an aggregator of scores which weights exponentially big for known subject experts. This is basically review but all experts are allowed to weigh in, not just the chosen reviewers which are either random or sometimes even biased.
Another far fetched dream solution would be to come up algorithm to review the paper, or at least find if its similar to some other paper. The way papers are currently written it would have to be some sort of natural language processing AI, something like GPT-3 maybe.
Of course what I describe is basically youtube for science and there can be a problem because of that. These days creators cater their videos to the algorithm rather than the audience. Since there isn't really a way that the algorithm can capture actual audience demand nuances, videos are being made predominantly for lowest common denominator of a genre. This can manifest very poorly in this papers system and then it would matter so much more.
> If Academic Substack were used across scientific disciplines, the potential for innovative collaboration and robust review would strengthen academic publication in ways difficult to imagine under the present regime.
Does Substack have peer review built in somehow? Would the peer review be in the comments?
Either way, there’s currently a spam comment on this article - can the author moderate comments or is that stuck there until Substack remove it?
[+] [-] mellosouls|5 years ago|reply
I've noticed a significant increase in submissions here from Substack recently; it seems to be supplanting Medium as a preferred platform for independent long form articles.
Medium started off with seeming decent quality and goodwill but a lot of that has been jettisoned with walling off content and barrel-scraping in "expert" contributions.
I hope Substack will avoid some of those mistakes; it will need to if the sub-platform described in the article here (or others like it) is to succeed.
[+] [-] seibelj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asciident|5 years ago|reply
I don't think anyone at Medium thought their service was better for their users by putting up paywalls, requiring accounts, and broadening their SEO by soliciting contributions. But they need to grow either in users or in profits, and there's only a certain number of ways you can squeeze money from internet readers.
[+] [-] colelyman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captn3m0|5 years ago|reply
Do you use newsletters for subscription? Is it paid? Free? How is better than an academic blog?
[+] [-] tdhttt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cblconfederate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bhl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] molsongolden|5 years ago|reply
I've only used arXiv via their search but the NEP service[3] within RePEc offers curated mailing lists of recent economics working papers by specialty area.
> NEP is an announcement service which filters information on new additions to RePEc into edited reports. The goal is to provide subscribers with up-to-date information about the research literature. Our success in achieving this goal has been substantial. Today, there are 80541 subscriptions from 34926 unique addresses distributed throughout the world. The reports are generated by subject-specific editors. They are available by email and RSS feeds.
[1] http://www.repec.org/
[2] https://arxiv.org
[3] http://nep.repec.org/
[+] [-] dash2|5 years ago|reply
What these platforms don’t offer is built-in peer review. Quality control can be an issue.
[+] [-] munfred|5 years ago|reply
However to me the real problem is that he completely ignores the existence of preprint servers. This started with the arXiv in the 1990s for physics, math and computer science, but finally the model has begun to catch up with other fields. In biology the bioRxiv is well established and I'd say more than half of the papers I see do have a preprint deposited there. For medicine, which has a notoriously protective culture, the medRxiv was launched last year and got a gigantic boost due to the pandemic.
Other fields also have their own preferred preprint repositories. To me preprints solve the gatekeeping and cost barriers very well. I only wish they were a little more tied to comments from the readers (in depth comments of the kind you get during peer review, not the knee jerk ones we're used to seeing on the internet).
I say this because there is almost and "adversarial" relationship between the readers, who just want the bottom line in two sentences, and the authors would like their work to be perceived as a big important and novel contribution. Because of this often papers are written with more flourish language than actually necessary to make a point, and so it is really a hard to parse articles and tell good from bad. Often the "summaries" that peer reviewers wrote before making the comments are better than the official abstract of an article, but readers don't get to see and benefit from them. Each person that reads an article has to redo all that work of judging it for themselves, and with the deluge of articles we have it is simply impossible to keep up.
Initiatives such as openreviews.net are already a big step in the right direction. I think in the next 10-20 years this is where the bulk of scientific publishing is headed. A mix of preprint server coupled with curated community reviews that makes papers much easier to gauge and also incentivizes authors to write better and not bullshit, or risk getting wrecked publicly with the public reviews.
[+] [-] gnicholas|5 years ago|reply
This is true for now, but many startups end up charging for stuff that was free in the beginning. I'd feel better on Posthaven, which promises not to pull the rug out and is financially sustainable.
[+] [-] tomcat27|5 years ago|reply
> Access to journals is prohibitively expensive and therefore practically unavailable to independent researchers ...
and
> Apart from the financial walls that academic publishers encourage, there are frequently de facto barriers to participation as a contributor, ...
the Cornell Arxiv approach to free publishing is already spreading into other fields like Bio Arxiv. The substack culture isn't actually free.
> Finally, the review process itself may be subject to intellectual protectionism and even unintentional gatekeeping that prevents research from reaching a broader audience that can help the ideas grow ...
Without review process the volume of papers that get produced and published freely online will be so much that people will feel the pain. This is already happening in ML community because everyone dumps a slightly different but not so diff paper on Arxiv.
[+] [-] newswasboring|5 years ago|reply
I wish someone would make a technological solution to this. One way is an aggregator of scores which weights exponentially big for known subject experts. This is basically review but all experts are allowed to weigh in, not just the chosen reviewers which are either random or sometimes even biased.
Another far fetched dream solution would be to come up algorithm to review the paper, or at least find if its similar to some other paper. The way papers are currently written it would have to be some sort of natural language processing AI, something like GPT-3 maybe.
Of course what I describe is basically youtube for science and there can be a problem because of that. These days creators cater their videos to the algorithm rather than the audience. Since there isn't really a way that the algorithm can capture actual audience demand nuances, videos are being made predominantly for lowest common denominator of a genre. This can manifest very poorly in this papers system and then it would matter so much more.
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|5 years ago|reply
> If Academic Substack were used across scientific disciplines, the potential for innovative collaboration and robust review would strengthen academic publication in ways difficult to imagine under the present regime.
Does Substack have peer review built in somehow? Would the peer review be in the comments?
Either way, there’s currently a spam comment on this article - can the author moderate comments or is that stuck there until Substack remove it?
[+] [-] cma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjbest|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsvclass|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danbmil99|5 years ago|reply