From time to time I find a dive into the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy useful for refreshing my memory on some ideas and concepts.
Also the MDN Learning Area is really useful for getting a handle on some web development details.
What others are you fond of, whether esoteric or exoteric*?
*
one of my other favorites is any sort of thesaurus that provides antonyms, 'cause some antonyms just aren’t as commonly used!
🤞 this federates properly this time (sorry if the old post eventually emerges, I initially posted this shortly after the Lemmy update kinda threw a wrench in things across instances)
Let’s trace it back. Why do academics need to get published in order for their career to succeed? Why wouldn’t a paper published in a no-name journal carry any weight?
Does it boil down to whoever would be hiring them not having the time to read their research, so they rely on someone else’s judgment?
Start here for more reputable commentary -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish
One problem is that one wants an objective way to judge someone’s productivity. You cannot truly judge the quality of a paper unless you are an expert in that same field. Your institution may not have such an expert. Besides, in science you really don’t want to rely on personal judgment, if possible. Maybe there’s also marketing efforts going on that encourage doing things in away that allows extracting monopoly rents but I don’t have evidence.
IMHO the overarching problem is that the whole of academic publishing has not arrived in the internet age. You have all the usual problems with reforming social systems and, on top of that, there’s a lot of money at stake for some people.