Academic Research and CS Innovation by
Phil Windley:
We've created an entire ecosystem based not on what is useful and good, but on whether or not we can convince a handful of other people that what we've written is sufficiently sophisticated to publish in their journals.
It's a sound point, and it's something about which I've pondering for a long while. In my student times I liked to read CS papers, and I learned a lot of stuff by studying them. Since leaving school I've lost touch with academia, and became involved with open-source projects. Now when I read academic papers, I find them too much mathemathics, and little practical; open source projects are the opposite, working code but little or no theorethical foundations. It seems that something is missing in both areas. Now, the term 'third way' was somewhat abused, but it seems to be wwhat is missing here.
As for solutions... Google is now very well positioned to do it. They have the brand name recognition, and a strong presence in the academic field (several top universities are internally indexed by Google). Google could deploy a online scientific library of its own, and use it's own page-ranking mechanisms to decide what should be 'published' on its main page. I don't know if they want to step into the editorial world themselves -- the recent launch of Google Books tends to point to another direction -- but it's still an interesting idea.
