“congratulations, your article is published!” Ummm . . .

The following came in the email under the heading, “congratulations, your article is published!”:

I don’t know that I should be congratulated on correcting an error, but sure, whatever.

P.S. The above cat is adorably looking out and will notice all of your errors.

7 thoughts on ““congratulations, your article is published!” Ummm . . .

    • I won’t review or publish in closed-access or pay-to-publish-open journals. I arrived at that policy when working in industry and being asked to review for journals where I couldn’t legally read the paper I reviewed without ponying up US$25 or more.

      Sadly, that rules out almost all of the stats journals that Andrew won’t call “low_grade”. Hence I’m not on most of the Stan-related papers going out. JStatSoft is open source, but it falls in Andrew’s low grade category (despite its high rank in citation-based metrics); I don’t think we’d ever consider them again anyway given their slow process.

      In my previous life in natural language processing, the only two dedicated journals anyone cares about are open, as is the major machine-learning journal. Linguistics, like statistics, is more “traditional”. A lot of computer science stuff is in a grey area where you can’t distribute the final version of your paper legally, but you can distribute unedited preprints. I think the publishers arrived at this strategy partly in a standoff with funding agencies like NIH in the U.S. and others in the E.U. who started to require all the work they funded to be distributed open access.

      • “… funding agencies like NIH in the U.S. and others in the E.U. who started to require all the work they funded to be distributed open access.”

        The NIH does not require publications based on work they funded to be “distributed open access.” For a bunch of people who bash sketchy research, you don’t pay much attention to other facts.

        The NIH requires deposition of a peer-reviewed accepted manuscript with PubMed. This is before editing/typesetting and the paper may still contain factual errors, misspellings, wild claims, and other mistakes (such as incorrect references).

        Don’t discount the work of fact checkers like editorial staff. Authors and researchers are not omniscient beings who publish alone. Many of them can’t write worth sh*t (let’s all nod at Andrew Gelman who begins sentences with numerals) and many manuscripts won’t even be peer reviewed without a professional edit first.

        Clear communication is a very large part of science. If you can’t get your point across to a peer reviewer, nobody is going to get the chance to read it.

        As for the original post, error correction is part of editorial transparency (was it an erratum or a corrigendum?). You got a form letter that goes to everyone who published anything in that particular issue. Congratulations on getting up on your hind legs .. for what? Would you rather not know when something you wrote was published?

        • Anon:

          You write, “Clear communication is a very large part of science. If you can’t get your point across to a peer reviewer, nobody is going to get the chance to read it.” Not always true. Peer reviewed journals are not the only mode of science communication. There are blogs, there are books, there are all sorts of outlets. Nassim Taleb, Nate Silver, and Bill James have all done just fine without going through peer review and having their writing pasteurized and homogenized.

          P.S. I have no idea what you’re talking about regarding “Andrew Gelman who begins sentences with numerals.”

  1. “I don’t know that I should be congratulated on correcting an error”

    Well, in doing so, you’re being the change you want to see in the world, so I think that still deserves some sort of positive response. Although I suspect there aren’t too many greeting cards with the message, “Congratulations on not being a hypocrite!”

  2. I would have gone to the American Statistical Societyconference but for the fact that as a non-statistician, the registration fee $600 was steep. And I’m not a researcher in a field where I will need apply advanced statistics necessarily. Sander Greenland presented via skype who made me aware of the conference. Otherwise your presentation I’m sure was interesting.

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