An Ergodic Walk

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Via Inside Higher Ed I learned about a case in which university presses brought a suit against Georgia State over fair use for excerpts in course readers and online course materials:

Her challenge, she writes, is to determine what size excerpts are “small enough” to justify fair use. Here, after reviewing a range of decisions, Evans settles on 10 percent of a book (or one chapter of a book) as an appropriate measure, allowing professors enough substance to offer students, while not effectively making a large portion of the book available.

I guess this is how sausage is made — 10 percent seems like a nice round number, let’s go with that one. By the way, that’s 10 percent including front and back matter, not 10 percent of the text.

It’s a 300+ page decision, but there has been some analysis already.

I got an email today from Elsevier:

It is our pleasure to inform you that your publication has been cited in a journal published by Elsevier.

Through this unique service we hope we can offer you valuable information, and make you aware of publications in your research area.

The service is called CiteAlert. It sends you an email every time you’re cited!

Clearly, it’s little touches like this that justify the price gouging and subscription bundling. Kind of like the little chocolate on your pillow at the expensive hotel.

I heard recently of a case where someone got a paper back with revisions requested, and a deadline for said revisions. They ended up asking for a week extension, but then the journal said they would have to do a fresh submission and redo the whole review cycle. I found this baffling — but then that person pointed out that the journal has built a reputation on fast turnaround times, and so to keep their “sub-to-pub” numbers low, they don’t want to give any extensions to the authors. It’s better to do a resubmission than to continue with the same “paper ID” in the system.

This is a classic example of juking the stats:

I just got a rejection from KDD 2012 which smacks of the same ominous reasoning:

We try to notify authors once a decision on a submission is concretely made, and hope that the early notifications can reduce the average review turn-over time.

But the real kicker is that “due to technical constraints” they can’t give us the reviews until May 4th. So I’m not really sure what I am supposed to do with this information — I can’t really start on revisions without the reviews, so this “early notification” thing is really just to make them feel better about themselves, it seems. Or perhaps they can then report that the reviewing was “more efficient.”

In any case, no harm is done, per se. But optimizing metrics like “sub-to-pub” seems to be as misguided as teaching to the test. What do we really want out of our peer review process? Or should we abandon it?

The IEEE Transactions on Information Theory recently transitioned to using Manuscript Central from the old Pareja system, so now all of the IEEE journals for which I review seem to be managed by the same external management system. As a reviewer/author, I have a lot of complaints (small and large) about Manuscript Central:

• Why oh why do I need to disable my popup blocker for your site to work?
• Why can login information not be shared across different IEEE publications? I have a separate account for each journal, with a separate password. Thank goodness I have LastPass, but even that program gets confused sometimes.
• What is the deal with the mandatory subject classifications for papers? One of the “topics” I could pick was “IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.” Really? That’s a topic?
• Why must papers for review be emblazoned with that stupid pale blue “For Peer Review Only” running diagonally across each page? This causes PDF annotations such as highlighting to barf, making paperless reviewing of papers significantly more annoying than it needs to be.

The worst part is that I am sure IEEE could implement a significantly cheaper and just-as-effective system itself, but now each Society is forking over money to Manuscript Central, which as far as I can tell, offers significantly more annoyances for authors and reviewers and is a shoddy product. Perhaps as an editor it’s significantly better (I imagine it is), but it seems like a bad deal overall.

Of course, now I sound curmudgeonly. Get off my lawn!

Do other people like MC? Or do you have other pet peeves?

It’s the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing and the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. Although you can easily be off-topic, don’t make the mistake of being on topics.