Comments on: Living on the edge of academia

By: Robert Daland

Robert Daland — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:48:52 +0000

I second the comment about an electronic subscription to a university library.
Through Northwestern University’s library I can get electronic access to almost everything that has published since 1996 which is worth reading. A subscription costs something on the order of 120 USD/year.

Also, about publishing code, consider the incentive structure.
The citation distribution follows a power law, meaning that a few papers get many citations but most papers get few citations or none at all. In other words, the probability is high that no one will care about your code. Since academics are often ashamed to release an inferior product, they feel they must make a cleaned-up version for public release. And the expected return on this is negative, since the probability is so low that anyone actually cares.
Academics would publish their code much more freely if they were rewarded for it, and those rewards were clear and tangible. For example, if released code factored into tenure decisions, you would see a quantal change in how much open-sourcing goes on.

By: David R. MacIver » Blog Archive » Computational linguistics and Me

David R. MacIver » Blog Archive » Computational linguistics and Me — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 17:54:41 +0000

[...] Apparently I’m a computational linguistics blogger. This is sortof news to me. The closest I’ve come to blogging about computational linguistics is in writing a borderline rant about academia. [...]

By: Adrian Kuhn

Adrian Kuhn — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:20:24 +0000

David, I can only agree with you. Even though I am in academia, I suffer from the same problems. In particular the lack of reference implementations and thus reproducible results(!!!) is very annoying. This is, among others, one of the reasons why we required that any submission for the WASDeTT journal issue must consist of both papers and tool with sources! (The issue is still in the reviewing process, for the moment refer to http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2009.25)

My personal experience wrt asking for papers and code is as follows: Papers good, code bad. For papers beyond my research area (ie LNCS Springer) I am without free access either. My solution: ask other researchers for an ssh account within their LAN and download the papers via VPN tunnel. Regarding references implementations I have very bad experience asking for non-open-sourced code. If researchers dont open-source their code, they still give it to you but will become very possessive about all what you do afterwards, however unrelated it might be.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 06:34:41 +0000

I’ve returned to academia after 30 years of professional experience. Having spent time on both sides of the great divide, my suggestion is that you identify those academics who are active in your area of interest and invite them to actively consult and/or perform sponsored research. That way you’ll end up with the advances that you seek and the academic community ends up with practical application and case study. Such a win-win may even have R&D concessions and other government support. (In Australia, your company would access 125% tax concession plus assistance via additional grants.) All universities that I’m acquainted with have commercial research/consulting arms.

By: Hadley Wickham

Hadley Wickham — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 03:24:51 +0000

Have you thought about joining a university library? It’s usually possible to gain access to the electronic resources of a university library just by paying a fairly reasonable access fee (I just looked at the City University of London and it’s only 100 pounds / year)