Academia is slow, conservative and over-cautious

Being constantly online and at the same time out of academia skewed my perspective, and I kinda expected that most of my old profs would not be so hot about publishing in online open-sorce journals (and even thinking that Science is still a place to go, oy vey!), but this is quite disheartening, especially for the medical (that woudl include biology, I presume) field:

Scientists Are Wary Of Online Journals

Scientists and researchers appreciate the speed by which online journals can distribute new findings to their colleagues and the academic world, but they fear non-traditional publication can affect their chances of promotion and tenure, according to new study released by professors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the University of Munich.

Tags

More like this

I'm doing a presentation at this week's Ontario Library Association Super Conference on a case study of my Canadian War on Science work from an altmetrics perspective. In other words, looking at non-traditional ways of evaluating the scholarly and "real world" impact of a piece of research. Of…
Economic recovery has not yet made its presence felt at public universities in California. (Indeed, at least in the California State University system, all things budgetary are going to be significantly worse in the next academic year, not better.) This means it's not a great time for purveyors of…
Yesterday PLoS and Google unveiled PLoS Currents: Influenza, a Google Knol hosted collection of rapid communications about the swine flu. In his blog post A new website for the rapid sharing of influenza research (also posted on the official Google blog), Dr.Harold Varmus explains: The key goal of…
Readers may have noticed (or maybe they haven't) that I haven't commented at all on the Guillermo Gonzalez case. As you may recall, Gonzalez is an astronomer at Iowa State University, as well as advocate of "intelligent design" creationism. In May 2007, ISU denied tenure to Gonzalez. Not…

of all the reasons they could give, that one is the rankest bunch of chickenshit. It amounts to saying "yeah my title is professor of biology but if you think i am going to put the advancement of the science I profess ahead of my status and perch in the hierarchy, you have severe idealism"

They might as well have taken MBA's as PhD's.

PLOS does have a stream of papers coming in but now I have to guess whether its total content reflects research of of securely tenured faculty or of mavericks who don't care what the rumors are that get back to the dept. chair.

Spose I oughta RTFA and see what reasons and impacts are reported for this yellow streak.

"Yellow streak" == "want food, rent and clothes for the kids". Unless you're tenured you have no security whatsoever, and your publication record determines whether you still have a lab or office to go to next year.