Frelsi

01/03/2024

Issue of special issues 🙊 Some publishers leverage the 'numbers game' more than others. Are they wrong to do so?

Academic publishers worldwide are one of the three components of todays’ research ecosystem including funders and researchers. Workload pressure on the individual researchers has been growing…

14/02/2024

🎓Associate Professor Yang_Miao from speaks on her academic career and how exchanges to different institutions change your view on research: frelsi.org/blog/26

In Scholars Share, Frelsi interviews academics and researchers in Electrical Engineering on various research-related topics and their personal motivations, experiences, and views on life at large.…

01/02/2024

🙈 Single blind peer review + 🤡 IF veneration = ⬇ decline of academic publishing culture... What do you mean? How to change it? Read more here

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Research journals using single blind peer review (SBPR) combined with the importance of impact factor (IF) create an environment where reviewers can reject papers almost arbitrarily or provide…

10/01/2024

🎓 Professor from Advanced Science research center on H-index irrelevance in tenure hiring process, where to publish your papers, and more:
https://frelsi.org/blog/24

In Scholars Share, Frelsi interviews academics and researchers in Electrical Engineering on various research-related topics and their personal motivations, experiences, and views on life at large.…

21/12/2023

95% of stress is self induced. Most deadlines are not real. Consider that during the holiday season. Take a break from work now so you're performing better tomorrow.

- We function in cycles, rest is essential to continued and consistent high performance.

- Take time to exercise, your body and mind need it for sustainable work and general functioning.

- Reducing stress is essential for mental and physical health and boosting your creativity - much needed in research

- Avoid burnout by taking a break during Christmas. Your productivity will improve too.

- Spend time with family and friends, because happiness is not just about the next research breakthrough, or paper published in high profile journal.

13/12/2023

The waves of marginally cited papers is not the cause, it's a result of the ecosystem academics work in.

Do you also find it increasingly difficult to find the papers you are interested in and keep up with the vast amount of papers constantly flowing in?

Most of them are not interesting for you, and that is ok. With the skyrocketing growth of academic industry in the past 100 years, this is a natural development as developed and developing countries take on to establish themselves on the world map of research.

Every paper published is a result of work someone has done. An incremental improvement of this or another technology, device, or a part of it. More knowledge is not a bad thing.

The problem is, it becomes harder for everyone in the system to find and keep up with the topics they're interested in.

At the root of the never-ending flow of publications is the set of academic incentive systems around the world. While the publishers often blamed for proliferation of 'useless' papers are in fact only the aftermath of the system.

Many developed countries changed or are in the process of changing the criteria for tenure positions from metrics driven to narrative as a natural result of the easily gamed citation and publication system.

Many other countries still dwell in the old 'more publications, more citations, more funding' circle. How to go about dodging the floodgate of papers you're not interested in? Check the blog in the comments and let us know what you think is the best way to go about this complex issue.

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30/11/2023

🎓 Professor Josep Jornet from the Northeastern University on ❌ not rushing into a Ph.D. topic, ✅ how to get tenured without a postdoc, and more interesting topics.
https://buff.ly/3R0FSgS
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In Scholars Share, Frelsi interviews academics and researchers in Electrical Engineering on various research-related topics and their personal motivations, experiences, and views on life at large.…

16/11/2023

💁‍♂️ ✅ Narrative over 🎱 numerical metrics - this is how academics will be evaluated in the future.

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Talking about shortcomings of impact factor (IF) as a measure of the quality of the work researchers do often dies out at ‘yeah, but what better system should be used’? In a world that…

10/11/2023

👀 Interested in 🚨 research funding from the agencies below? Publish in platforms that comply with ✅ , for example in Frelsi - the future of research publishing is open, and transparent - prepare already now.

https://frelsi.org/blog/19

UK Research and Innovation, Swiss National Science Foundation, Swedish Research Council, Austrian Science Fund, French National Centre for Scientific Research, Science Foundation Ireland, Laboratori Nazionali Del Gran Sasso - INFN, Luxembourg National Research Fund - FNR, Research Council of Norway, Swedish Research Council, Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Fonds de recherche du Québec

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Get ready for the open future, publish in Frelsi now and easily receive funding from Coalition S funding bodies in the future. Researchers should publish to flourish, not ‘or perish’. If…

02/11/2023

🤔 Contrary to today's standards, 🚦 the first research journal ❌ did not have a professor as an editor. Who then?

✅ Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of Royal Society was the first editor of Philosophical Transactions, est. 1665.

✅ Researchers were too busy with research - already in the 17th century. Are they less busy today? No, but being an editor became a community duty, a virtue, or even tenure factor.

✅ Researchers should have more time to focus on what really matters - research. A qualified manager can do as good editorial work as a professor 95% of the time. The remaining 5 % are cases when the paper in review is within their fields.

❌ Professors have too many jobs. Getting funding, teaching, mentorship, faculty administrative, public engagement... Editorial work is a free labor, increasing the profit of big publishers.

✅ At Frelsi we value your time - by letting you focus on research.

Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

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25/10/2023

☝️✅ Indifference towards politics, in general, and disregarding its role in the workplace can be detrimental for you.

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Regardless of one's interest in politics or academic publishing, people sometimes think they simply "live their lives", or "just do their work". They are not interested in the games and Spiel of the…

19/10/2023

😎 👀 Anonymity is always great! ✅ Except.. when it isn't. Being strict and critical during a paper peer review is not a question of anonymity, but logic and physics. Try fair, open peer review, try Frelsi - https://buff.ly/3REkLCW

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11/10/2023

🤨 is an echo chamber academics and funding bodies maintain. It's not by chance. ✅ How to identify an echo chamber, and how to avoid it? Read more now.

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The tides in academic publishing are changing slowly, but surely. In June 2021, Utrecht University removed the journal impact factor (IF) from the promotion and hiring criteria. This bold step…

04/10/2023

😔 ❌ Unfair and frustrating.. having to wait from months to years to have a paper published. ✅ Try publish first, review after. This way, you make sure that your work is published immediately and reviewed at the same time.Try publication in Frelsi now: https://buff.ly/3REkLCW

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28/09/2023

🧐 🤦‍♂️ Extreme example of academic fraud - a leading behavioural Harvard ❗ scientist fell from her prominent position for fake data in many publications.

This is exactly what happens in any closed system that:
❌ Focuses on productivity
❌ Uses narrow performance metrics
❌ Incentivises quantity over quality
❌ Is ruled by internal politics

Obviously, in applied research, the goals are tangible enough so productivity makes reasonable sense as a metric. Same as the performance of the results, being a prototype of a kind.

Still, so much intellectual brilliance in academia and to this day no better incentive system was introduced (with a few bright exceptions), mostly owed to the human tendency to politicise a system once big enough pool of people constitutes it.

A step towards the right direction would be a system that:
✅ Focuses on broader societal benefit
✅ Uses multifaceted evaluation of researchers
✅ Differentiates where quality is more important than quantity
✅ Is driven by ideals

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Community - https://discord.gg/KqMVXkwSfxArticles - https://dannyhatcher.substack.com/Ways to Support:- My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/dannyhatcherWhere...

25/09/2023

🙄❗🧐 Even professors get this wrong.. do you know the difference? Read the latest post and see for your self.
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Is Frelsi one of those publishers you should avoid? On the contrary, read to learn why. A concern with new journals or publishing platforms that are different or not driven by the community core is…

14/09/2023

🤔 🚩 Can IEEE journals + conferences be viewed as ? Check in our latest post.
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Why the line dividing the established and predatory publishing is much thinner than you would expect. , , , , , , …